Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
The end of these buildings doesn’t mean that it’s over.
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- 3416 Tangley Rd. [HAR]
Bankruptcy and, today, demolition — so ends the journey for the Black-eyed Pea at 4211 Bellaire Blvd. Swirling rumors and previously filed variance requests suggested that apartments would go up on the site, and an actual design for a multifamily midrise was even floating around as early as last year — but the property changed hands again in the fall, as a reader noted.  The new plan for the site, evidently part of Dallas-based serial apartment developer Ojala Holdings’s bid to cash in on the Texas big-box storage market, looks to be a 4-story storage facility. And permitting reviews look to have started in the fall, not long after Ojala’s Uncle-Bob’s-turned-Life Storage got wrapped up across from the no-longer-listed-for-lease Wabash Feed Store:
Clean Plat in Southside Place
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW TO BUILD ON THE EIGHTH WONDER’S EMERGENCY HOUSING LEGACY 
“We’ve already got a built structure that has housed people in distress before. We are already paying millions of dollars a year in upkeep for a useless building. Showers, bathrooms, food prep, these services all already exist in this space. We’ve got a round peg, let’s just fit it into the round hole: The Astrodome is the perfect building to house our homeless!” [toasty, commenting on Mansion Flats Reincarnated; What a Homeless Campground Might Cost; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Astrodome: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
A few wee-hours shots of the bus shelter at the southwest corner of W. Gray St. and Waugh Dr. show the stop’s short-lived cosplay as a thatch-roofed, mask-encrusted tiki hutch before the Friday morning rush last week. The shelter’s ensemble included carpeting, some upgraded bench upholstry, and flora of varying degrees of believability. The stop, directly in front of the orange-faced units of the W. Gray Public Storage facility, was purportedly back in standard business attire by 9am — though a tipster suggests that more such evanescent redecorating jobs may pop up around town in the future.
Catching Waves the 32
On Swamplot today our sponsor is Just Buyers Houston, a real estate brokerage that represents buyers only. Thanks for the support!
If you want to understand what’s going on with the city’s most popular neighborhoods — especially if you are not familiar with Houston — you’ll want to check out the table on the neighborhoods page of the Just Buyers Houston website (pictured above). It shows median subdivision sales prices for the previous year, as well as — the big shocker (for out-of-towners) — the property tax burden. And it shows Just Buyers Houston’s description of the demographic profile of the group that defines each neighborhood, such as Connected Bohemians (the coffee house crowd) or Money and Brains (the car pool crowd).
Current market conditions for each neighborhood indicate which side the market currently favors (buyer, seller, or neither); there are also links to public school information. Appreciation statistics are presented, so buyers can get an idea of which areas have proved to be the best investment over the previous 10 years. The column indicating the percentage of owner-occupied dwellings gives a hint as to how much rental property is nearby. The distance from Downtown is next, then the Walk Score (calculated from the center of the subdivision). Just Buyers Houston’s Judy Thompson says that Walk Score is becoming more important to young buyers — she hears walkability mentioned a lot.
There are plenty more pages filled with helpful stats, compiled and updated regularly, on the Just Buyers Houston website. If you’re looking to buy a home or condo in Houston and care about getting accurate information, you’ll want to check out Just Buyers Houston.
If you want to see your business on this page, check out this page. It’ll tell you all about Swamplot’s Sponsor of the Day program.
Sponsor of the Day
Pieces of the fencing surrounding the MacKie and Kamrath-designed ExxonMobil Upstream Research facility on Buffalo Spdwy. were spotted sprawled out on the grass yesterday along the campus perimeter after being plucked from their stations; more barriers are getting yanked up this morning, as seen in the second shot above. The property (which appears to have been transferred to the nonprofit Exxon Foundation in 2015 after the oil giant’s plans to offload the site were announced) was  sold this month to an entity directing its mail to real estate investment and development firm Spear Street Capital. A couple of readers report that other major shuffling around and cleaning out appear to have been going on at the facility for at least the last few weeks, with vehicles bearing the Precision Demolition logo making periodic guest appearances on the scene.
Across W. Alabama St. from the building’s more curvaceous end, the spot occupied until early last year by the empty shell of honky tonk Blanco’s has since been filled in with athletics stuff for St. John’s School:
Exxon Exit
- Houston Downtown Management District Launches 20-Year Planning Project [Houston Chronicle; more here]
- Dallas Investors Buy 1,516 Apartment Units Across 4 Communities in Houston [Realty News Report]
- 3 Retail Stores To Take Over Former Chippendale’s Antiques Space on 19th Street in the Heights [Houston Chronicle]
- Christie’s Re-Enters Houston Real Estate Market with New Affiliate [HBJ]
- $381M Luce Bayou Project Breaks Ground, Will Deliver 500M Gallons of Water a Day to Lake Houston [HKA Texas]
- Mayor To Announce New Plan To Address Houston Homelessness This Thursday [abc13]
- Largest Portable Ferris Wheel in the Western Hemisphere Coming to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo [abc13]
- Film Commission Wants To Convince Moviemakers To Shoot in Houstons [abc13]
- Texas Firefighters Ask People To Stop Flying Drones Near Wildfires [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of Sawyer Yards: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
They left tracks in history that will never be demolished by wind or rain, never plowed under by tractors, never buried in compost of events.
- 5216 Holly St. [HAR]
TXDOT TO PIERCE ELEVATED: YOUR YEARS ARE NUMBERED, PROBABLY 
Pending a vote next month by the Texas Transportation Committee, some early-stage projects connected to TxDOT’s plan to reroute I-45 and the whole downtown freeway exchange system could be getting started a few years sooner than TxDOT officials initially thought they would, Dug Begley writes in the Chronicle. (Those early stages include the reworking of the bottleneck on northbound US-59 where Spur 527 now peels off 2 of the freeway’s lanes just before SH 288 merges into the mix.) The first few projects “are incremental compared to the overall plan,” writes Begley, but “officials say [the projects] are important and send the clear message: The I-45 freeway is relocating and the elevated portion along Pierce will be abandoned and maybe demolished within the next dozen years. . . .Work on revamping the freeway intersections is slated for late 2020 or early 2021.” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Pierce Elevated: Russell Hancock
COMMENT OF THE DAY: ON HAVING YOUR ART DECO STRIP CENTER AND EATING IT, TOO 
“’Everybody wants walkability, but nobody wants density’ is the urban-planning equivalent of ‘everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.’†[Angostura, commenting on Where Weingarten Plans To Stab That 30-Story Residential Highrise into the River Oaks Shopping Center] Site plan of future highrise development: Weingarten Realty
Today’s Sponsor of the Day is Unit 204 at the Parc V in Montrose. Thanks for sponsoring Swamplot!
Parc IV (at 3614 Montrose Blvd.) and Parc V (at 3600 Montrose Blvd.) are iconic Modern, concrete-frame residential towers designed by William R. Jenkins and Roy Gee, planted in the mid-1960s at the corner of Montrose and Kipling St. The University of St. Thomas, the Museum District, and some of Houston’s best restaurants are all within walking distance; it’s also an easy commute to downtown, Rice University, and The Medical Center.
This 1-bedroom, 1-bath unit on the second floor of the more northern of the 2 buildings faces north, across treetops and the grounds of the neighboring Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral and toward Westheimer. (The balcony view is shown at top.) Inside, the brick walls and concrete columns have been exposed, raising the ceiling height and bringing a loft esthetic to the interior. The oak flooring has an ebony stain; the kitchen has concrete countertops, a glass tile backsplash, Metal Fusion flooring, and appliances from Bosch and Liebherr. The unit comes with a stacked washer and dryer as well.
To see more photos of this uniquely renovated unit, look through the photo gallery on the property website. This condominium is offered for sale by Michael Good of Michael Good Properties; see his webpage on HAR for contact details and more information.
Midcentury Modern or Turn-of-the-Century Whatever: Our readers will be interested to see it when it’s a Swamplot Sponsor of the Day.
Sponsor of the Day
An extra crane was spotted standing around in oncoming Kirby Dr. traffic on Saturday morning just north of Richmond Ave., helping to disassemble the tower crane that’s been used to lift pieces of the Kirby Collection’s under-construction office building into place over the last year-and-a-few-months. A representative from Thor Equities tells Swamplot this morning that the office midrise should be wrapped up by the end of 2017. The ellipse-footed residential tower (peaking over the top of the rectangular office building’s frame in the shot above) hit its full height earlier this month as well:
Down To Earth
FLOODED-OUT FLOODING SYMPOSIUM TO TRY AGAIN IN APRIL 
That January meeting of city officials, scientists, urban planners, business folks, engineers, conservationists, architects, and other flood-minded citizens — the one that was cancelled due to flash flooding — has now been rescheduled for April 5th. The symposium is still slated to take place at the George R. Brown Convention Center, and the same panelists appear to be on the docket. The event is free and open to all high water spectators, but you’ll need to register online by March 29th.  [Previously on Swamplot] Photo of flooding along Brays Bayou on April 17th, 2016: Chris Klesch
