COMMENT OF THE DAY: LAYING OUT STRATEGIC ANGLES ON THE NEXT HEIGHTS BOOZE BATTLE 
“. . . Flooding? Really? There are no tracts of land any grocer could realistically acquire that are not already paved over for commercial spots. Nobody is going to open a liquor store in the middle of a residential section where there will be no traffic — there’s plenty of storefront space near by. The proposed change won’t impact bars and restaurants. . . . [The backers] are advocating for a policy change with respect to a policy that impacts their business. How else would you propose they do it other than hiring a law firm and PR firm to help them navigate the rather obscure laws that govern this thing?” [Heightsresident, commenting on H-E-B Would Like To Plant a Store in a Wetter Heights Dry Zone] Illustration: Lulu
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As a Millennial homeowner in Timbergrove since 2013 and a resident since 2010, I have to say, some of you people in the Heights have lost your minds. When I first moved in, the Heights was still pretty desolate. The Creeks were about the only place to eat/drink outside of the few older established restaurants. Most of my time was spent in the Montrose/Upper Kirby/River Oaks area because those were the only places to hang out and get a decent meal. The last few years of development have really made the place a lot more livable and traffic has not grown all that much (take a trip to Austin if you want to see that). A decent HEB is really the last piece of the puzzle. Kroger is terrible.
The funniest part of this whole thing is how trashed me and my other Millennial friends get during White Linen Nights and Lights in the Heights. Where was your precious Dry Zone then? Heck, the cops even suspend open container laws! You can legally walk around drinking in public, in a Dry Zone! I am sure you are trying to figure out a way to end that. Wouldn’t want anyone having fun.
Bottom line, get a life. Stop making it difficult for your neighbors to buy booze to drink at home. Because that is really the only thing your “Dry Zone” is currently doing.
@Ahyeadude,
Common misconception: you can have an open container anywhere outside the CBD. You just can’t leave a bar or restaurant with alcohol (except for a partially consumed bottle of wine). As long as you bring your own, drink away. The main benefit of WLN and LITH is to make public drinking socially acceptable.
All of the breathless criticisms of Heights snobs are much more frequent and louder than anything I heave heard from anyone in the Heights. No one who currently lives here made the silly law. We have, however benefited from the fact that bars are much more likely to be 10 blocks away than 1 block away. I love a good bar, but having a bar very close to your house sucks. I live outside the dry area so I don’t really get a say in the matter, but why not hang on to a silly law that people perceive makes their neighborhood a little better?
And the changing the rule about package booze is probably supported more people in the Heights than not, however, as with bars, a nice grocery store is always better when it’s not in your back yard.
If it’s so benign, why are the corporations backing this insisting on total anonymity? Why doesn’t JJ watt show to endorse the petition?
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The reality is that all the companies that are building new commercial properties are elevating them high over residential grade. When elevated properties the size of multiple football fields surround residential properties, the home owners take a bath. The heights got pounded in the tax day flood. You start adding brand new properties everywhere, y’all are going to pay for that.
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On a side note, developers or their pr firms write many of the comments on swamplot. Don’t be fooled by their third rate community outreach.
if the original intent of the “dry” area was to protect home owner property values it worked. Now on to today where we have restaurants and bars working around the dry zone and with no detriment to property values. Property values are too high for someone to open a corner packie store in the non-traditional (we don’t have zoning) commercial areas selling half pints of spirits. This whole dry debate is much ado about nothing.
@ Big Honest Developer: Please provide evidence to support the correctness of your circumstantial ad hominem as well as some sort of justification for why its anything more valid than that. I’m no longer in the development game, but when I was, if the local rules indicated that we had to add extra on-site stormwater detention or some other thing then we looked at the cost of doing so and modified our bid for the land. Everybody else that bothered to do due diligence did the same, and the land price was what it was. A ‘big honest developer’, the sort that has the capability to bother with PR, is just a middleman and doesn’t usually get hurt; the landowner gets hurt. (If your namesake was at all truthful, you’d know that already. But I strongly suspect that you are in fact a ‘Small Dishonest Nobody’.)
@”TheNiche” – I’m pretty sure the niche can write coherent statements in English. Try again.
The government minimums requirements do not protect against flooding. I, the Honest Big Developer, had my lobbyists write those regulations to get away with doing as little as possible.
Surprised no one on Arlington close to 6th/White Oak has chimed in regarding parking and Coltivare. Possibly that situation has been resolved. If I may paraphrase, it’s better to have a nice bar/restaurant 10 blocks away than to have it 1 block away. It gets noisy and crowded 3 blocks north of 19th St. whenever there is an event there.