13 Comment

• Morton Pestle October 12, 2017 at 9:36 am

  TAMU has had a TMC presence for a long time, the Inst. for Bioscience & Technology near the old Shamrock site. The new program is highly specialized and will not compete with UH’s medical school, which is believed to be aimed at primary care. The UH med school concept likely has support from A&M, mutual back-scratching and so forth.
• Innerlooped October 12, 2017 at 10:21 am

  I’d be steaming mad if I were UT right now. I don’t see how everyone can align with A&M, but UT asks for everyone to come together after they get the land and everyone tells them to leave. Why didn’t the city/UH/politicians suggest a similar model for UT? They should now move forward with their initial plans. It would be great for the city.
• WR October 12, 2017 at 10:40 am

  I have no problem with TAMU expanding in the Med Center area … it isn’t like setting UT’s plan on building out a 300 acre campus with no declared limits on what will be done there. Hell, UT’s plans even had football fields! It was obviously a blatant attempt to establish a 4-year collage after ignoring the metro area for over a century.
• JB October 12, 2017 at 11:35 am

  The article below details the type of innovation that we are missing out on because of UH’s inferiority complex. Meanwhile the City suffers so UH can remain unchallenged in their mediocrity.

  http://www.chron.com/local/education/campus-chronicles/article/Cornell-Tech-campus-once-a-model-for-UT-in-12205042.php
• WR October 12, 2017 at 11:52 am

  @JB …. nice article,but this is NOT was UT had in mind … keep deluding yourself
• Miz Brooke Smith October 12, 2017 at 12:36 pm

  Ever since the Gateway on Cullen apartments opened, the painted bike lane on Cullen between 45 and the railroad tracks has become unusable because of resident parking that extends alongside the entire complex. In fact, that northbound segment of Cullen is now effectively one lane wide for all traffic.
• TheNiche October 12, 2017 at 1:44 pm

  @ JB: UT bought the land for nearly a quarter billion dollars without any firm plans about what might be done with it. It did not confer or coordinate with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. UT did not or perhaps could not credibly articulate a vision for the campus and offered no assurances that UH would not be undercut. McRaven clearly screwed up and caught hell for it. UT then shelved the plans and McRaven began to talk about all the grand things that might have been proposed and might have been done on an uncertain timeline, although no formal proposals were ever rendered and no money was ever allocated.
  .
  If UT were serious about this then they should have approached site selection publicly, more seriously, with professionalism and respect toward their local stakeholders in Houston. Goodness knows there’s an opportunity for a technical university in Houston…but you know, maybe on a slightly less sprawling site, one that carries with it a self-imposed limit on the scale of the project and that contributed to the public realm. I’ll bet that the project would’ve been better received on the municipal courts site (Reisner St.) or the Post Office site or Hardy Yards or the KBR site or one of several other large tracts of land along Buffalo Bayou in the East End. If we’re making comparisons to an Ivy League school’s project on Roosevelt Island in NYC then this nondescript former oilfield, barely on the public’s radar, simply does not fly. Not even a little bit. In fact, it makes me that much more suspicious of McRaven and the UT System. They have no credibility in Houston.
• North Heights October 12, 2017 at 3:56 pm

  About the Heights and alcohol sales — has anyone heard when HEB is going to start building their new store on the old Fiesta lot? I thought it was going to be this August???
• country_leaver October 12, 2017 at 10:33 pm

  Nobody knows what UT had in mind because they didn’t tell anyone until well after the project was shelved. (This also makes UH – in its mediocre, reactionary wisdom – look extremely bad too, in case anyone was wondering.) Cornell Technion will remake NYC into a super hub of tech meanwhile Houston has < $50 oil to look forward to and an abandoned BP supercomputing center right next to the freeway in full view.
• hey guys October 13, 2017 at 9:26 am

  i actually think UH is a better school than these UT opponents are giving it credit for. i think its pretty insulting to say that UH is such a crap school that we can’t allow UT to compete with it. they should give it a chance because UH is better than it used to be, and i dont think they would suffer from having some competition in town.
• Ed October 13, 2017 at 10:29 am

  @Miz Brooke Smith; read on Next Door that the city and Gateway at Cullen have met and that No Parking signs will be placed along the bike lanes on Cullen and parking violation tickets will now be issued to those parking there.
• Woodleigh Living October 13, 2017 at 2:18 pm

  Glad to hear no parking signs are coming for Cullen. Drove by last night and it was a total mess. The bike lane was full of cars and I had to go around another car in the other lane double parked because the bike lane was full. Shame because the CityBikes located in front are blocked. What is needed is an improved bike crossing under the freeway to get to UH. Tons of students in the neighborhood now.
• Morton Pestle October 13, 2017 at 2:32 pm

  UT has access to the Permanent University Fund, and massive legislative support. That makes folks around here wary of its muscle.