COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW TO GROW THE CITY MONEY ON TREES 
“Hedge funds would blush at these returns. What did it cost the city to plant these suckers? $1k at most . . . And they got $50k apiece for them? Now I’m not saying we should celebrate the loss of these trees, but I hope right now some keen eager young city arborist is planning some oak plantings along the most outrage-worthy corridors in Houston, where they will best rankle the franchises of the future. How old does a tree have to be to elicit outrage? Maybe 20 years? At an eye-popping 22% IRR, perhaps some strategic tree-driven investments can make future union pension negotiations a bit easier . . .” [Sebastian Good, commenting on City Nets $300K Settlement for Late-Night Kirby Dr. Wendy’s Oak-Axing Incident] Illustration: Lulu
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THE NEXT BIG EVENT PLANNED FOR THE ASTRODOME WILL BE A WASH 
When was the last time anyone bothered to clean the exterior of the Astrodome? Long enough ago to merit media coverage for word that the Dome’s caretakers have now decided to do something about the building’s growing exterior grunge. The Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation, having presided for 15 years over the former sports stadium’s steady decay, is about to embark on its first notable Dome maintenance operation since firefighters used fans to blow smoke out of the building in the aftermath of a 2011 transformer fire in the vacant facility. With approval from the Texas Historical Commission, reports Fox 26’s Mark Berman, the agency will award local building restoration and pressure-washing practitioners Green Team Services $63,800 to clean the outside of the structure. [My Fox Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Green Team Services
DAYS AFTER $300K TREECUTTING SETTLEMENT, WORKERS ARE BACK ON THE JOB AT THE KIRBY DR. WENDY’S 
The snapper of this story-in-an-image pic taken of the construction site at 5003 Kirby Dr. tells Swamplot that construction crews went back to work on the stalled renovation of the Wendy’s Tuesday morning. Last Friday Mohammed A. Dhanani and HAZA Foods, the franchise owner, agreed to pay the city of Houston $300,000 for the 6 oak trees removed late last month from the city right-of-way in front of the fast-food franchise along Kirby and North Blvd. A permitting logjam had halted work on the ongoing renovations after city officials learned of the street-tree chop-downs. What’s the worker’s gesture in the pic supposed to mean? “I think it was a ‘right on’ fist pump,” reports the photographer. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
SAY SALAAM TO THE SHADY ACRES HOME OF HOUSTON’S FIRST ARABIC IMMERSION SCHOOL 
Here’s where some of Houston’s future bilingual Arabic-English speakers will learn their two alphabets: HISD’s former Holden Elementary and the current home of more recently the Energy Institute High School at 812 W. 28th. St., just across N. Durham St. from a ramshackle flower shop just inside the North Loop. An energy school giving way to Arabic-language instruction? Synergy? Arabic trails only Spanish (and English) among languages HISD students speak at home, according to statistics from the district. Interested parents of rising pre-kindergartners and kindergartners were able to start applying last Friday for the magnet program slated to begin next Fall. Two each of pre-K and kindergarten classes will comprise the school’s first classes next year. If the district’s first Arabic immersion school is to operate the same way the existing Spanish- and Mandarin-English HISD schools do, students will be taught half in English and half in Modern Standard Arabic. [HISD] Photo: Swamplot Inbox
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW REAL ESTATE TRAILBLAZERS REALLY CAN BURN UP THE TRAIL 
“There are very real consequences for having a NIMBY-smashing attitude for developers. Yes, the developers usually get their way, but they often end up ruining it for the next guy. Ashby developers will get to build, but the next guy might not because of the high-rise buffering ordinance that passed in the wake of the Ashby uproar. 380 agreements flowed like a river to Walmart and Kroger, but community uproar has meant that only Costco has since been able to get a similar deal despite some healthy opposition in city council. And there has only been one 380 agreement in 2014 outside of the downtown urban living initiative (which does require first floor space to be retail ready). There are a whole host of development regulations that have their root in NIMBY activism: drainage detention, tree ordinance, and parking minimums, to name a few.” [Old School, commenting on Comment of the Day: Don’t Let the Locals Get in the Way of Your Project] Illustration: Lulu
TILMAN FERTITTA SEES AND SMELLS A NATIONWIDE REAL ESTATE CRASH, STARTING IN HOUSTON 
Landry’s CEO and purported Shiloh Club irregular Tilman Fertitta ladled out a deep bowl of bear stew from the teevee-front kitchen of his restaurant empire Wednesday, telling Bloomberg TV viewers that he smells a national real estate crash on the order of what happened in 1986, and volunteering that he “can see it in Houston right now.” He prefaced these comments to hosts Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle with a survey of the “crazy numbers” he is seeing in real estate valuations and transactions: “You are seeing it in New York probably more than anywhere else; but you are seeing it in Texas; you are seeing it in California. And . . . history always repeats itself as we always know, but I think it’s going to repeat a little sooner this time. You can just see it coming. There are so many cranes everywhere.” What’s the trigger? “If oil stays in the 70-something dollar range — where it is right now — you’re gonna see it in Houston first,” he said, adding that it might take an oil price of $50 a barrel to bring on a “total crash” like the one in the eighties that knocked Houston off its feet for a good decade. Fertitta continued his jeremiad with a few complaints about inflation, which he sees as “huge,” no matter what Ben Bernanke has to say to the contrary. [Bloomberg TV; previously on Swamplot]
ONE MAN’S THRIVING GAYBORHOOD IS ANOTHER’S MONTROSE VALUE-ADD PORTFOLIO 
What is the Montrose Value-Add Portfolio? “48 apartment-units, 13 townhomes, 1 quadraplex and 5 rental homes with 8-units that include 2 garage apartments; for a total of 73 units, 67,960 rentable square feet, with a land tract of 2.09 acres.” Writes a reader who came across the listing: “This is where I live. I love the phrase ‘The Montrose Value Add Portfolio,’ it practically screams ‘knock it down!’ So much for my old gayborhood!” The properties are all within walking distance of the MVAP’s listed address: 409 Stratford St., a stone’s throw from the always-hopping cluster of bars and clubs on Pacific St. to the north and but a little farther from Numbers and Indika to the south. No asking price is indicated in the marketing materials. [Loopnet; brochure (PDF)] Photo: Transwestern.
DON’T Y’ALL GO WORRYING ABOUT THE FALLING PRICE OF OIL NOW 
Houston real estate reporter Ralph Bivins has been watching all those tanking oil prices: “Prices for West Texas Intermediate oil, over $107 per barrel in June, has fallen sharply, dropping below $80 a barrel this fall,” he writes. “WTI closed at $77.18 per barrel Wednesday and dipped even lower on Thursday morning.” But the worst prediction of doom and gloom he’s able to scare up comes from Matthew Deal of commercial real-estate valuation firm Deal Sikes & Associates, who eventually admits that “if oil prices fall precipitously and a significant number of oil rigs are mothballed this winter, Texas real estate markets would be impacted by late 2015.” Otherwise, Houston property prices and demand are supposed to emerge not-so-scathed. And Deal’s partner Mark Sikes says way-out suburbanites have it made: Even though a drop in local job growth is likely to cause demand to dwindle for urban redevelopment sites and land slated for commercial development, he says, “suburban land for new residential communities has plenty of price support because the single-family market has tight inventories. Builders have not yet caught up with the residential boom.” [Realty News Report] Photo of San Jacinto Monument: Andrew Wiseman [license]
LAST CALL FOR THE BONEYARD DRINKERY 
It wasn’t the first Houston ingesting establishment to be permitted by the city to allow canine companions and their owners to co-lounge on its patio (that honor belongs to the now-shuttered Ziggy’s on Fairview) but with its attached 7,000-sq.-ft. dog park, the Boneyard Drinkery lived up to its reputation as the quintessential outdoorish hangout where panters, drinkers, and occasional barkers all could coexist in relative harmony. And now, after 4 years, it’s closing. A note posted to the Boneyard Facebook page indicates the property at 8150 Washington Ave. is being sold, and the bar and park will both close on November 30th. “Due to the size of property needed for this concept,” reads the note, “and the outrageous increase of property value in Houston over the last few years, we will not be relocating.” [Facebook; Photo: Boneyard Drinkery via Facebook]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: DON’T LET THE LOCALS GET IN THE WAY OF YOUR PROJECT 
“Good idea, let the Peasants with Pitchforks have an Illusion of Choice. Let them pretend to participate, let them vent some hot air, and then throw them a bone to the side so while they bark over that, you build what you were going to build in the first place. Don’t forget, they don’t have any legal standing in this matter, they’re merely a construction nuisance like graffiti or defecating raccoons, just to be handled as a normal course of business.” [commonsense, commenting on A New Sign of Future Development Appears on Heights Hike-and-Bike Trail Site] Illustration: Lulu
DEFORESTED KIRBY DR. WENDY’S BRINGS BACK A LITTLE GREENERY 
Passersby hoping to see for themselves precisely what hullabaloo was responsible for the larger-than-normal red tag placed by city officials on the door of the abruptly-paused-during-renovation Kirby Dr. Wendy’s now have an additional obstacle blocking satisfaction of their curiosity. The perimeter construction fencing on the jobsite at 5003 Kirby Dr. — which only went up just as workers were chopping down 6 oak trees on the surrounding public right-of-way late one night last week — has gained a new green-fabric wrapping. “I think it makes the construction look more attractive,” quips the reader who sent in the above photo of the stump-and-fence scene (with the red tag still barely visible through the greenage). That’s nice, the reader notes, since “apparently we are going to be looking at it for a long time.” [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
COULD COYOTES BE KILLING THE KITTIES OF TIMBERGROVE AND LAZYBROOK? 
Over the past six years Jennifer Estopinal has recorded the violent demises of about two dozen house cats in Timbergrove and Lazybrook. Their manners of death have typically been grisly — some were beheaded, others bisected, in some cases paws were removed — and on some occasion the cadavers have appeared to have been left on display. It’s all been enough to raise suspicions that a sicko serial kitty killer was at work. There is now a hefty bounty on the alleged predator’s head: four different donors have cobbled together a kitty of almost $25,000 in reward money. But might the killings simply be nature taking its course? Last month a coyote was sighted brazenly attempting to enter the lobby of the Bayou Bend Towers at Memorial and Westcott. More recently, Estopinal and husband Mark saw another of the canine carnivores while out patrolling Timbergrove in search of the culprit. At the corner of Ella and Grovewood (not far from forested W. 11th St. Park), the Estopinals saw and pursued a coyote, watching as it attempted to raid a pet-food bowl on a front porch, then chase a cat, Â then scale a 6-foot privacy fence “with ease.” Mystery solved? Possibly, if only partially, Estopinal believes. “I’d like to believe a coyote is what’s been killing so many cats lately,” she posted in a neighborhood group message board. “I think its possible a few could have been but not all, as there are too many things that have been done that would’ve been impossible for a coyote.” [Houston News; CultureMap] Photo: Mark Estopinal
GOLFERS APPEAR TO HAVE WON GUS WORTHAM 
It might not have sounded quite so explicit to all onlookers, but the Chronicle‘s Mike Morris declares yesterday’s city council vote a death knell for plans to build a botanical garden on the site of the Gus Wortham Golf Course. The vote was taken in support of city efforts to come to an agreement with the Houston Golf Association for a plan to renovate the 106-year-old course at Lawndale and Wayside in the East End, which the nonprofit would then operate. But, writes Morris: “If the city cannot reach terms with HGA, the mayor said, she will seek proposals from private golf operators rather than hand the site to the botanic garden backers, as previously planned.” The HGA will need to meet designated fundraising targets — likely $5 million of a possible total $15 million renovation cost — for its plan to proceed. Mayor Parker and councilmembers appeared eager to steer the group pushing for a city botanical garden 6 miles southeast, to the Glenbrook Park golf course outside the Loop along Sims Bayou, just east of the Gulf Fwy. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: PGA
THE RANSACKING OF IDYLWOOD’S LITTLE FREE LIBRARY 4918 
When Little Free Library 4918 owner Sally Harris returned home “from an incredibly productive morning and midday” Sunday afternoon, she found the door to her festive Mardi Gras-themed Idylwood book repository hanging wide open and more than half of the books “plundered.” (See photo at bottom.)  Her belief that the security precautions she had taken on Halloween night had seen it through pranking season proved sadly mistaken; and oddly, religious tracts and pictures of Jesus were found in the rifled-through library.  Vented Harris on Facebook Sunday afternoon: “When I set out to create a neighborhood library, I always said you can’t steal ‘free’ but this is vandalism and it has me shaking and angry.” Harris posted that she recently had been considering a remodel anyway, and some of her friends have already pledged to help her restock via book donations. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo of Little Free Library 4918, 6644 Lindy Ln.: Sally Harris
THE BARNABY’S IS IN THE HEIGHTS 
Pssst! The Barnaby’s Cafe location taking over the City Oven (and before that, D’Amico’s Italian Cafe) spot at 2802 White Oak Dr. opened late last week. Same menu, same signature sitting-height-level check-em-out wall mirrors as the 5 other locations. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
