COMMENT OF THE DAY: NOSTALGIA FOR THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE HISTORICAL HEIGHTS BUILDING GUIDELINES 
“The big problem isn’t just the restriction on the size of the addition, it’s how they will allow you to add the square footage. Instead of allowing you to build out your attic with dormers, or do an addition on top of the back half of the house, they want you to basically build a new historically incompatible structure in your existing back yard and connect it to the house through some little hallway which will look like crap, AND use up your yard/permeable surface, AND create a structure looming over your neighbors’ backyards. The first year or 2 of the historic district, things worked pretty well in regards to stopping teardown and allowing responsible additions. Then it all went off the rails.”
[Arlington Gal, commenting on June Is Your Last Chance To Make Noise In Person About the New Heights Historic District Design Guidelines] Illustrations of Heights houses: Dalia Rihani
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Just move west to Spring Branch. It looks like fighting this thing is going to go nowhere. Homeowners thought they had won but it turns out the last two years were just a delay tactic before they made their victory permanent which has apparently just happened. They aren’t going to rewrite these designs from scratch to make common sense.
so the honeymoon with the historic district is over?
BUNGALOWS ARE NOT MR. POTATO HEAD DOLLS!!!!! No, you cannot stick a bunch of dormers on a bungalow so you can build out the attic. (And you do not need dormers to build out an attic.) That is not historic preservation. That is frankenstein design.
And the humper houses have to go too. They are horrific and should have never been an option.
Nice try with the claim about permeable cover and back yards. People wanting to do humper houses are still filling their backyards full of square footage. Builders just want to fill the lot with sq ft so they can have a seven figure listing. If HAHC blessed dormers and humpers today, you would not see any change in the amount of lot coverage.
I say we push this historical preservation thing even further and do away with the 19th amendment which allows cranky old women like Old School to vote.
Old School thinks anyone who wants to live in the Heights ought to be happy with a 1200 sq ft original house with crappy 100 year old appliances, knob and tube wiring, and some open windows for ventilation. If you have another kid, and need more room, because it’s not really appropriate to have your son and daughter together in the second of two bedrooms once they get past, say, 2 or 3 years old, Old School’s solution is for you to move to Katy, where you belong, rather than polluting his pristine Heights with the kind of house you need to meet your family’s needs.