- Houston Added More People Last Year Than Any Metropolitan Region in the Country, According to New Census Data [Houston Chronicle]
- Houston Homes Prices Are 43.7% Higher Than the Pre-Recession Peak, According to HSH.com [Culturemap]
- First Residents of Luxury Apartment Complex District at Memorial Near CityCentre To Move in in April [HBJ]
- Houston Among the Top 20 U.S. Cities with the Worst Traffic-Clogged Commutes, According to TomTom Traffic Index 2016 [HBJ]
- What’s the Big Deal About Houston’s New Street Lights? [The Urban Edge]
- Slideshow: The Homes in Next Month’s Houston Heights Association Spring Home & Garden Tour [HBJ]
- Meet 45 Young People Who Want To Make an Impact on Houston [The Urban Edge]
- Demolition Company Tore Down the Wrong Tornado-Damaged Home in Rowlett, Texas [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of Brays Bayou: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
45 young people who want to make an impact with other people’s money.
ROTFLMAO! Two hilariously entertaining piles of rubbish passed off as news. The first story takes 2014 data and tries to spin it as growth in 2015. Loved the hilarious quote from the real estate agent. You might as well be asking Goldman Sachs if they have a conflict of interest on their latest product offering.
Second piece from HSH is total scat. Housing prices are higher, but nowhere near what they are advertising because they don’t accurately adjust for inflation and the artificial suppression of mortgage rates. One of the primary reasons you are seeing new home sales hit a wall is because of the floor in mortgage interest rates. The Fed has reflated the housing bubble, and now that homes are once again too expensive they need another driver for demand that doesn’t exist. It’s really not feasible for the mortgage industry to push rates below 3.5 percent for any meaningful amount of time, and thus housing sales are stalling. I provided a helpful chart to explain for those who don’t understand the game the Fed is playing….
http://aaronlayman.com/2016/03/census-new-home-sales-decline-6-1-yoy-in-february/
There’s always tons if ideas thrown around telling developers ‘if you do this, you’ll make a little less money’, there are never ideas saying ‘developers, if you do this, you’ll make a little more money’. You can only listen to so many ideas like that before you’re no longer in business, that’s why they are ignored right out of hand.
Since everyone was getting all font crazy a few stories ago, I’ll ask…
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What’s the deal with the font on that “Urban Edge” site? It looks like garbage. Like it’s rendering incorrectly or something.
@Cody: You probably mean their use of Titillium Light. It’s a font designed by college students and published for free. See http://www.campivisivi.net/titillium/
Photo caption correction: It’s Brays Bayou, not Braes Bayou.
Thanks, Miz! Fixed now.
It’s really not “45 young people who want to make an impact on Houston.” It’s five people who want to make an impact on Houston. The remaining 40 are in other cities.
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That being said, I would encourage Chrishelle Palay to break with the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service and form her own, Houston based neighborhood and housing advocacy group. The guys running the Texas Housing Information Service in Austin don’t seem to be working towards her goals in Houston. She did a wonderful post on their blog about the lack of investment in Sunnyside’s housing stock. It was wonderful, and absolutely right about the struggles facing disadvantaged neighborhoods in Houston. But rather than pushing hard with a boots on the ground effort to address these real issues, the guys up in Austin just wrote a pie-in-the-sky wish list of things they want the City to do (ignorant of the fact that the City doesn’t have money for those things).
Re: Urban Edge (use of Titillium Light font)
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As a font fancier, I thought it was quite readable and pleasant. I was unaware of this new font, much less its history. Plus, typing out “Titillium” is kind of fun.
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But, this small pleasure is more than offset by my HCAD property valuation notice that just creeped into my mailbox today. Even with tax rates staying the same, the governmental entities rake in more dollars. Where’s the recession to cool off property values?
OMG the whole topic of the new LED lights on Houston city streets is crazy. Here in the Heights, the topic has flipped people out of their gourds. Who would have thought more street lighting would be met with such protest and controversy. It sparked a Nextdoor discussion that likely has broken their single topic reply count records as it teeters around 200. I will never complain about being able to clearly see down 6 blocks. I can see people walking their dogs, jogging or other smaller animals darting across the street several blocks ahead of me. How is that a horrible thing? The there is little to no up-light compared to the orange mercury lights. If anyone suffers from the LED lighting then the likely culprits are constant gazing at LED TVs and Computer screens. The cool blueish light reminds me of nights when the moon is full and bright.
@ Major Market: Your property tax appraisal is for January 1st, 2016, but tax rates aren’t set until after the tax rolls get certified in the fall. That gives taxing entities the ability (usually) to reset the tax rate and maintain stable revenue streams. Although systematic flaws certainly exist, the role of appraisals is only to equitably allocate the total tax burden between all property owners within each separate overlapping jurisdiction.
@ HouCynic: You are talking about the Heights. You ought to be a lot less surprised when people appear to be flipped out of the gourd on the internet. I mean, really…
I’m ecstatic about the new LED streetlights, because I no longer have to submit the same six streetlight numbers to 311 every few months. Seriously, I would walk around the neighborhood and note the numbers of the unlit ones and submit them, and then COH would fix them, and a few months later they’d be dead again. I haven’t had to report a single one since the LEDs went in, which, by the way, happened about a week after the last time I reported them.
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I try to report a bunch of them at a time to make it worth their while to come out, to make it more likely that something will happen.
Major: “As a font fancier, I thought it was quite readable and pleasant.”
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I don’t think the difference of opinion comes from us looking at the same thing. It seems ‘broke’ on my end (dual 28″ Dell 4K, and plenty of power to drive them at full res / 60hz). I’d attach a screen shot but the comments don’t support it.
The LED street lights are certainly brighter, but they seem to cast such a bright light that the dark areas appear much darker. I walk my dog very early in the morning and in the evening and the lamps on the east/west have all been transitioned to LED, while all the north/south seem to be the older lights and it is easy to compare the quality of light. I prefer the older lights to the LED because the light casts a wider glow, albeit not so bright. As for sleep patterns being disrupted, well, that’s what curtains are for.