- East Part of Downtown, Vast Acreage Near NRG Park Joined in Houston’s Largest TIRZ, Due for $300M of Improvements by 2042 [Houston Chronicle]
- CenterPoint Properties Buys 4 Buildings in Baytown’s Cedar Crossing Industrial Park [Prime Property]
- Energy Inspection Company DNV GL Adding 47,500 SF of Office Space in Katy Expansion [Houston Business Journal]
- Sam’s Club Opening Cinco Ranch Store at 22402 Bellaire Blvd. on November 6 [Prime Property]
- Houston Historical Commission Approves Fisher Homes’ Project for Deteriorating 104-Year-Old Germantown Home [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot]
- Houston Shouldn’t Build More Than the 16M SF of Office Space Currently Under Construction, Says CBRE Exec [Houston Business Journal]
- Real Estate Firm Carnan Properties Splits Up, to Co-Owner’s Surprise [Houston Business Journal]
- Lots of New Jobs and a Low Cost of Living Make Houston a Middle-Class Magnet [City Journal]
- By 2050, The Rest of the U.S. Will Match the Demographic Mix Houston Has Today [Houston Chronicle]
- 3D Printers Now Being Marketed at Some Home Depot Stores [Architect Magazine]
Photo of Saint Arnold Brewing Company at 2000 Lyons Ave.: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Any map on this Super Tirz? the KBR lot has been held hostage by 5th ward and dis-allowed from joining another TIRZ. Wanted to see if they got out of that and into this super TIRZ
Thank you, Mr. Clean19. A map is a glaring omission.
“For now, though, most Houstonians see the city as a place that works—for minorities and immigrants, for suburbanites and city dwellers—and few want to fix what isn’t broken. “The key to Houston’s future is to keep thinking about how to be a greater city,†notes David Wolff as he passes a new set of towers off the Grand Parkway. “This road, it wouldn’t be built in many places. People might talk about these things, but in most places, they don’t get done. In Houston, we don’t just talk about the future—we’re building it.—
This really sums it up….. I wish instead of building a toll road,in the middle of the last remaining bits of the coastal prairie, to encourage development that Houston would repair and fix the roads inside the loop. Or perhaps as some here have pointed out build the Centennial Gate and protect the city from hurricanes. The reason most cites wouldn’t build it is because most cities have plans.. Houston just does whatever the invisible hand tells it to do.
“Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits – a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” (161-162) – J.M.Keynes, General Theory.
I can’t remember who said it on here but I love the suggestion of the Houston motto as “Houston, you’ll get used to it”.
Such a large non-contiguous TIRZ that contains such highly dissimilar economic zones (ranging from downtown to sports district to greenfield) should be raising all sorts of red flags. Is there any sort of an underlying development strategy that is being pushed? Is that strategy, if it exists, in the public interest of constituents outside of the zones? Who would administer this entity and decide where the money gets spent; might those persons be subject to private-sector ‘capture’? Given the timing of the proposal and Judge Eckels’ desire to bring about an Astrodome redevelopment plan, it seems appropriate to ask whether the funding might be used indirectly to incentivize that sort of thing, if not to fund it outright, and whether such language would be included in the entity’s founding documents.
County and municipal finance is a complicated subject matter and entities like these are not very transparent or accountable to constituent voters. I, for one, feel that this was an example of very poor-quality journalism. It would be a rich subject area for a serious paper, but sadly I don’t think that the Chronicle is capable of exploiting it.