THE MAN WHO RESURRECTED THE GRAND PARKWAY 
As recently as the beginning of this year, 2 northwestern segments of the proposed fourth ring road around Houston were considered by many to be stalled projects — remnants, even, of an outdated dream to project sprawling, suburban-style development ever outward from the city. But by September, construction on the 15.2-mile Katy Prairie paving program known as Segment E of the Grand Parkway had magically begun; further north, Grand Parkway’s Segment F — the portion that would connect ExxonMobil’s proposed campus in Spring to western suburbs — now appears inevitable. How’d that happen? Reporter Angie Schmitt looks at the role of developer and TxDOT commissioner Ned Holmes in the startling turnaround, including the former banking executive’s remarkable ability to dig up a previously unnoticed $350 million deep in the books of the otherwise cash-starved state agency he oversees — in order to make the Grand Parkway happen. [StreetsBlog; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Rte. 99 ramp construction: Covering Katy
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Sprawl
COMMENT OF THE DAY RUNNER-UP: SOWING SPRAWL “Then the birds fly over the empty dirt and drop seeds for nail salons, cell phone accessory stores and quickie loan dives. The city would have to plant chinaberry trees to protect it.” [Hellsing, commenting on Mayor Parker Wants To Buy Unused Eastwood Elementary School on Credit]
The tilt walls are already up! Those of you who’ve been eagerly awaiting the strip-center-themed revival of Yale and Heights Blvd. south of I-10: here are your signs of progress, snapped just yesterday by a Swamplot reader. No, this isn’t the new Walmart — or the Washington Heights District strip centers promised to go with them. It’s Orr Commercial‘s Heights Marketplace, a separate development facing Yale St. at Koehler — and the Walmart site across the street — beating everyone to the punch. Opening dates for Lovett Dental, Wahoo Fish Tacos, the Loan Depot, and more: next March.
Tuesday morning, not far from the former grounds of Forbidden Gardens, its now-ransacked replica gravesite of Emperor Qin, and his army of one-third-scale terracotta soldiers at the stub-end of Hwy. 99 and Franz Rd., TxDOT and a contingent of public officials will gather to celebrate the groundbreaking of a notable project for Houston: the paving of a $350 million four-lane toll highway with “intermittent” development-ready access roads across an expanse of largely uninhabited prairie land that stretches between Katy and Cypress. When it’s complete, the 180-mile-long Grand Parkway will be Houston’s fourth ring road, cutting through 7 different counties. But none of the planned segments will forge so dramatic a path through undeveloped land as this particular north-south stretch, called Segment E.
What’s this we’re looking at? New pedestrian-friendly retail going in along Yale St., right across from Ainbinder’s Walmart-anchored center on Yale and Heights Blvd. in the West End? No, silly. That’s a ghost head-in-parked car hidden behind the artfully-placed starburst in the bottom left corner of the rendering. All those figures in front are just walking back and forth between the fish-taco joint at one end and their dentist on the other. Yes, work has already begun on this new strip center at the corner of Yale and Koehler St., called Heights Marketplace. The developer promises it’ll be finished before the end of the year, with the first stores opening next March.
If Ainbinder missed a few strip-center clichés in its Washington Heights District shopping-center plan, this Orr Commercial development, back-to-back with one of Ainbinder’s Heights Blvd.-facing strips, is here to take up the slack:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: YOU GO TO WORK WITH THE SPRAWL YOU HAVE, NOT THE CITY YOU MIGHT WANT OR WISH TO HAVE AT A LATER TIME “. . . The ExxonMobil development is right in between The Woodlands and Spring. Residents of these communities would cut 30-80 minutes off their round trip commute by working at the new facility versus going downtown. That is a very significant reduction in smog forming vehicle emissions. If a business doesn’t need to be in Houston’s central business district, then it is actually better to have them build closer to the work force than to cram more people on the highway for longer commutes. You can’t beat sprawl that is already here. The best you can do is mitigate it by creating smaller city centers in places like The Woodlands, Sugar Land and Clear Lake.” [Old school, commenting on Comment of the Day: ExxonMobil Takes the Forest]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: EXXONMOBIL TAKES THE FOREST “[It’s] awesome, but I thought the era of building suburban office campuses was close to gone. Not anymore, I guess. Just goes to show that there is still plenty a land for Houston to sprawl, and this illustrates no signs of slowing down. God that third outerbelt is just going to catalyze more of this crap (albeit ExxonMobil’s campus is pretty crap). I mean, if ExxonMobil really wanted to, they could’ve revitalized an entire swath of area in one of many industrial parts of Houston. No, but instead of utilizing an area that could be purposeful, they chose to destroy the environment. Yeah, Houston’s forests in the north are what keeps the area looking bad, but just a few more decades of this, and there will be nothing left to conceal this disgusting sprawl.” [Carlos, commenting on Welcome to the Land of ExxonMobil: A Tour of the Company’s New North Houston Campus]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE TRENDSETTING LESS FORTUNATE “I have a few friends moving to Houston who are going to live in the ’burbs – not because they’re into racial purity and strip malls but because that’s where they can actually afford to buy a home. The less fashionable an area becomes, the more affordable it is to people of modest means, which typically means the sneerers look a bit snobbish. Which suddenly turns the formerly unfashionable area fashionable (I believe the vogue term right now is “authenticâ€), and the sneering and budgeting just reverses itself. Laughing at the people who have tight budgets but aren’t poor enough to actually be considered poor is an old means to paint a veneer onto one’s classism, and it’s often couched in the argument over whether surbubanites or midtowners are morally and culturally superior. It’s utterly ridiculous, but it’ll never stop.” [Sihaya, commenting on ExxonMobil Fesses Up to Its Employees About That New North Houston Campus It’s Been Building]
Upset at New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s oh-so-cruel insinuation that Houston isn’t much of a tourist town, local talk-show host Michael Berry has responded with an ad on this billboard, carefully situated at the scenic crotch between the Southwest Freeway feeder road and the Westpark Tollway near Chimney Rock, surrounded by a number of fine automotive repair establishments. It’s been 13 days since your outrageous insult, Senator. Apologize now or it’s just going to get worse. Sure hope it doesn’t have to come to that, but don’t think we won’t resort to putting a bunch of those inflatable gorillas on top of the Downtown Aquarium to get our point across — if we have to. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
CORNERING THE BURGER MARKET Helping to balance out the intersection of Highway 6 and West Rd. in Copperfield, currently home to a Wendy’s, a Whataburger, a Chick-fil-A, a Shell station, and 2 banks: Houston’s very first Carl’s Jr. Or the first one here, at least, in about 30 years. The company building the franchise plans to blanket Houston with 40 Carl’s Jr. locations by the end of the decade. Next up: Hwy 6 and S. University Blvd. in Missouri City, and just west of 288 on FM 518 in Pearland. [Cheap Eats in Houston; previously on Swamplot]
Late Update, 12/16: The implosions are back on, scheduled for December 19th.
Update, 12/8 3:30 pm: FortBendNow is reporting that this weekend’s implosion has been canceled and will be rescheduled later.
Fort Bend County fans of large building implosions won’t have to drive all the way into Downtown Houston to watch the next big boom. It’s gonna be taking place right in the heart of Sugar Land, this weekend! Johnson Development Corp. will be knocking down an old furnace house and a bin building — 2 metal structures from the former Imperial Sugar Refinery — this Sunday morning at 7. The ongoing demolition project is necessary so the company — part of a public-private partnership with the Texas General Land Office and the City of Sugar Land, run by private equity firm Cherokee — can create a giant historic-themed development on the surrounding industrial acreage, celebrating the area’s rich history of refinement. The Imperial Sugar Company, no stranger to refinery explosions itself, shut down the plant in 2003.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: FREE ENTERPRISE CITY “And can we stop repeating the myth that Houston is some big unzoned city of freedom? Houston has a ton of ordinances regarding building forms and how property is used, from parking requirements that are stricter than most cities, to rules about setbacks, weirdly random designations of areas as ‘suburban’ and ‘urban’ with accompanying rules, rules about the sizes of townhouses, and so on. People love to say that we’re some kind of mecca of affordable housing because we have ‘no zoning.’ It’s nonsense. We have affordable housing because we have no natural boundaries preventing expansion and therefore have spread out more than most cities, and because we subsidize the building of big roads to make it easier to get to remote places. . . .” [John (yet another), commenting on Preservation Ordinance Passes]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: AND WHAT ARE THE STATS ON GALVESTON COUNTY’S STRIP CENTER OUTPUT? “If you look at production data, Galveston County is currently producing around 30000 BOE (barrel of oil equivilent) per month on over 20 wells. One of the fields that is producing is less than 1000ft off 45 just south of [Kemah]. Depth of producing interval is around 4000ft. I have a hard time believing that moving a rig out there for about the 3 weeks it takes to drill a well to 3000ft, set casing, and complete it to a producing well, would be any worse than having some tacky strip mall taking 6 months to construct.” [Mr. Hand, commenting on League City’s Neighborhood Drilling Boom]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: RING ROAD REASONING “And people said there is no need to build the Grand Parkway. If Exxon forces all the people out at the West Houston Location they’ll need [the] parkway to get [to] this site.” [kjb434, commenting on Is Springwoods Village the New Exxon Mobil Eco-City?]
Speaking of Katy schools: The power lines in the photo on the left, a couple miles southwest of Katy Mills mall, flag the dividing line between Jefferson Development’s Firethorne subdivision, zoned to Katy ISD, and the just-announced Firethorne West addition in Fulshear the company just announced — which will be served by the Lamar Consolidated ISD. The new Katy ISD elementary school site waiting for November’s bond vote and proudly featured in the center of Firethorne’s master plan will not be serving the 1,400 planned homes in Firethorne West, even though they’ll be only 2 blocks away. The kids in Firethorne West will likely be attending Huggins Elementary, which is more than five miles to the southwest. And until new roads are built they’d actually get to drive past that “Future Katy ISD†elementary school every school day to get there:
