19 Comment

• Rodrigo July 17, 2014 at 9:20 am

  Is this an old photo, or is Audi Central still making heavy use of neighboring garages for car storage?
• JB3 July 17, 2014 at 9:51 am

  That photo appears to be the top of the Audi dealership recently built in the area. Also, I learned a new term today: environmental racism. How about that.
• ZAW July 17, 2014 at 10:39 am

  I’m still convinced that the One Bin For All idea is being pushed forward because our Mayor likes to say “Dirty MRF”. Personally I would like the idea of keeping our recycling bins, but using the Dirty MRF to help recuperate recyclable items that are wrongly thrown in with the general trash. It would be a win-win for everyone.
  .
  And why not set strict rules, like crazy strict, on trash sorting facilities used by the City? Quarter mile buffers between the edge of property and the nearest house. 24/7 air and water quality monitoring. Defined haul routes that trucks must adhere to or be fined. This would be just for facilities used by the City for its trash pick up. Current state regulations would still be in place for private facilities – so nobody but the garbage collecting companies should complain about it. This would at least help avoid he environmental racism thing.
• Dana-X July 17, 2014 at 10:41 am

  So they’re going to pay people to sort through trash and separate it for recycling? Eewww….What happened to the new machine that was supposed to do this? And no surprise these places are located in black or brown communities; land’s cheap there and the people are less likely to protest. How would this program be cost effective if it were on expensive land?
  The best way to shrink the landfills is to buy less crap . Break from the belief system matrix that says you need any of it. Grow food, share and barter with friends and neighobors and buy and keep only necessary quality products that don’t force you to fill your house and garage with unnecessary foreign factory flotsam that’ll designed to look slick and shiny then break in a few years and force feed you back into the consumer economy.
• Old School July 17, 2014 at 11:09 am

  That is not the top of the Audi dealership. The dealership leases parking space in the parking garage next to the Crown Plaza Hotel to hold inventory. And the term “environmental racism” has been around for decades.
• DNaguy July 17, 2014 at 12:18 pm

  Someone please explain to me why we need the northeast part of the grandparkway built right now. The excuses from the GP director are completely lame and are disingenuous at the very best. It’s almost as if they decided to build the road and just had a brainstorming session b/f the interview on what the possible benefits would be after coming to that decision.
  The segments between 59 and I10 are going to cost 888 million ( http://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/sla/projects/grand-parkway-h-i1-i2.pdf ) . So we’re going to pay almost A BILLION dollars for a 2 lane tollway to bisect a rural area for the off chance we get hit by another massive hurricane that requires us all to leave the area. The Centennial Gate project that would block the ship channel from storm surge and therefore make evacuating unnecessary is only estimated to cost 1.5 billion ( http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Gate-proposed-to-protect-Houston-s-industrial-base-4840939.php ). So why don’t we kill this project, use the $, and pony up the extra 600 billion so that we ALL don’t have to evacuate. Or not.
  This has to be the section of LEAST priority for a toll road that should be of the LEAST priority for the region.
  It will however, connect the Exxon campus to its (and the US for that matter) largest refinery.
  Can we change the name of section H and I1 of the Grandparkway to Exxon Avenue?
  For those of you who’d like to see where it actually would be, here’s a google map:
  http://www.grandpky.com/segments/h/GrandPkwySegHI1.html
• Gisgo July 17, 2014 at 12:34 pm

  Single-stream recycling works fine, why screw with it? Sure it’s not perfect, but the price of introducing OBFA is going to be very high, not only in dollars but in political fires. This is a clear-cut case of the ideal being the enemy of good enough. And to use another bromide, the law of diminishing returns apply, as further huge investment begins to yield smaller and smaller increments of improvement.
• commonsense July 17, 2014 at 12:42 pm

  Environmental Racism is a made up thing, it’s a simple function of economics, of course land is cheaper in the hood, that’s why certain things get built there.
  What about the fact that residents in Bellaire get shafted by having to spend extra 50k on raised foundations (new construction) in order to reduce impermeable surface to spare the said hoods from flooding in East Houston? Would that be Reverse Environmental Racism?
• Triton July 17, 2014 at 1:00 pm

  Photographer here. Based on what Google Maps says, I took this photo at 2600 Southwest Fwy. It was taken recently and the Audis are still there. I was actually surprised to see them… I just wanted a photo of the entire Galleria/Highland Village/Greenway Plaza area.
• Personman July 17, 2014 at 2:09 pm

  That’s 2600 SW Freeway alright. I used to work in that dump. I’d recognize 2600 anywhere. They might as well let the Audi folks use it since no company wants to lease in such a poorly maintained building.
• Superdave July 17, 2014 at 2:19 pm

  Oh. My. Gawd.

  I actually agree with commonsense.
• Superdave July 17, 2014 at 2:31 pm

  Oh yeah and my two cents on the “environmental racism” thing…

  Minority political leaders love to cry “racism” every time something goes the wrong way for them. Recent examples include the closing of the Southmore Post Office and Riverside General Hospital. The former is closing because of organization insolvency and cost consolidation, and the latter because of federal corruption charges of the entire management team.

  In the real world, when waste sites are selected, it’s not done by a council of WASPS sitting around in a corporate board room mulling over how to stick it to minorities. It’s done based on economic considerations, which not surprisingly, include low-priced available land, minimal expected political opposition, and proximity to other industrial areas. All of these factors coincide with low income areas, which coincide with land areas predominated by minority residents, who tend to be poorer.

  For these reasons, River Oaks will never see a landfill (and there are multi-ethnic billionaires living in River Oaks). And there are areas where poor white people have the same experience (like the dioxin dump on the San Jacinto River). It has nothing to do with race.

  And the proper term is actually “environmental social justice” in the textbooks, not “racism.” And it’s been studied and reported on for decades.
• awp July 17, 2014 at 2:55 pm

  “Environmental Racism/Injustice” is a thing, although 95% of what is identified as such is not racism/injustice. The other 5% can generally be blamed on the govt. listening to white/rich folk more.
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  Low land prices are associated with both low income (and low income is still correlated with race) and pollution, in both directions with a positive feed back. This type of project even more so than normal because most of the employees will be low skilled/income and firms want to be located close to their employees (and vice versa). Another strain of “social injustice” complains that poor folk have a harder time getting to jobs.
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  1) Yet another reason it sucks to be poor
  2) Yet another reason it is hard to become not poor (Pollution increases illness, thus decreasing work days for adults, and education/physical/cognitive attainment for children in polluted environments)
• DNAguy July 17, 2014 at 3:11 pm

  Times like these I wish we could post gifs on Swamplot…. But alas i cannot. :-<

  That’s_racist.gif
• ZAW July 17, 2014 at 4:27 pm

  Until you’ve had someone propose or build a waste transfer station near your house, you really don’t know what it is. True, the term “environmental racism” is loaded and not entirely accurate. As Superdave said, nobody’s sitting around deciding how best to stick it to minorities. Rather, they are making decisions solely for their own organization’s convenience and financial interests – and they really don’t care if their facility happens to be next to a residential neighborhood. (It’s almost worse, if you ask me – if they were trying to stick it to minorities and the poor, at least they’d be acknowledging that poor minorities exist).
  .
  That said, this is precisely why we have laws to require things like buffering, air quality monitoring, and the like. I just wish the City would keep on these things even if the State won’t. Dirty industries won’t like it – they’ll go crying to the courts to try to get them to stop (they already did once – Southern Crushed Concrete v. City of Houston) – but it will really help the quality of life in our poorer neighborhoods.
• joel July 17, 2014 at 9:15 pm

  gotta love houston’s cancer rate, the “city with no limits” indeed
• Rodrigo July 17, 2014 at 11:30 pm

  ZAW, it impacts the cost of living of every Houstonian. So many of us are too proud of our home to admit that we live in an ugly, polluted, illogical city, because we are cheap, corrupt, and worst of all, lazy, quick to spout the tired “business-friendly city” meme and slow to put in the literally sweltering work needed to improve, beautify, and unify our city. Houston, our pride and joy, crisscrossed by concrete, pockmarked by potholes, and bathed in benzene. I raise my $1 Lone Star as I lower my head in shame.
• Local Planner July 18, 2014 at 8:47 am

  To echo another poster, when your city’s area is overwhelmingly dominated by Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and essentially all of the land that’s less expensive and near other industrial uses also correlates to neighborhoods of that demographic, the environmental racism allegation for a project like this is pretty much baked in the cake.
• Cody July 18, 2014 at 11:31 am

  DNAguy: Here ya go.
  http://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/002/135/sw50sw8sw578.gif