Houston’s Staggering Land Price Run-Up; A BBQ Joint in the Shadow of Minute Maid Park

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Photo of Discovery Green: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool

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  • I dont know how siginificant a change the Perry Homes Construction will have to the East End and lower 5th Ward but the anchor site for development will really be KBR (Cathexis) lot. From what i read on HAIF, Austrailian and Ecuadorian investors are looking heavily at this area along the bayou. “High End Luxury Mixed Use???” in the 5th ward?

  • Seven hundred and ten percent increase in Phoenix!? That’s pretty whacky, but then they’d fallen a lot further than Houston.
    ….
    With yet another cat mutilation story, please restrain yourselves…….oh never mind.

  • Mr clean: why not? Land prices just miles away(west) have gone through the roof. This is just new buildings stretching just a bit further than current in demand areas. Seems a pretty natural and expected trajectory to me.
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    Land that’s $100/ft+ close by is almost free in these areas. Someone has to be “first”. These investors will be well rewarded.

  • @Cody, dont get me wrong. In houston you cant beat the view you get along the east bayou and the land out there is close to $25/$30 per sq foot. From what i understand everything East of 59 West of Hisch/Waco is either bought or in the process of being closed on. Its a blank slate out there for developers, i just hope they build it up right.

  • @Mr. Clean

    I wouldn’t discount the ability of a big developer to boot strap property values, especially where there is cheap land close to a central business district. The reason why places like the 5th ward are economically depressed is largely the lack of investment and amenities in the area. If you have hundreds of millions of dollars of development cash, you can create that investment and amenities. It worked in South East Washington DC near Nationals Stadium, where a formerly blighted area was replaced with mixed-use mid-rise development populated by upper middle class residents in the span of 10 years.

  • Mr. Clean: I hope they do a good job as well. I have stuff out there chugging along, just waiting for the turn around. It’ll happen :)

  • Re: The Grand Parkway traffic numbers-We spent close to a billion dollars building a road used by 30k vehicles a day? For perspective, 11th Street at Yale Boulevard in the Heights has a traffic count of around 21k vehicles a day. I guess this is a case of “build it and they will come” syndrome, but it’s always seemed to me to be a way for land owners to use the political process to increase the value of their holdings.

  • Shady: You’re right. They buy in the middle of no where, so they can get a house for nothing, then demand better road access to all the stuff they want to go to but didn’t want to pay to be near. Thus everyone subsidize their decision to save money on property.
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    It’s like when people buy in BEF, then complain that a trash dump is going to be built near by. Well obviously. Giant dumps tend to be where land is cheap.