TODAY’S YOUR LAST CHANCE TO VOTE IN THE 2016 SWAMPLOT AWARDS 
You’ve got just a few hours left to vote in this year’s Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate — all polls close at 5pm tonight. Until then, you can still put in votes for all 8 categories: Favorite Houston Design Cliché, Best Demolition of 2016, The “Where Are They Now?†Award, Best Industrial Incident, Special Achievement in Parking, The Houston High Water Award, Neighborhood of the Year, and Greatest Moment in Houston Real Estate. If you need a final refresher on how to vote, read back through the voting rules. Tune in later this week as we tally the votes and announce our 2016 winners. Best of luck to all of this year’s worthy candidates!
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- Houston Median Home Value Up 7% to $176K Year-Over-Year in November, Finds Zillow [HBJ]
- Houston’s High-Rise Apartment Rents Fell the Most Nationally in 2016, According to Realpage [HBJ]
- Marriott Marquis Downtown Opens Ahead of Super Bowl [abc13; previously on Swamplot]
- Law Firm Kirkland & Ellis Preleases More Space at 609 Main Downtown [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- Maharishi Peace Palace in The Woodlands To Become Co-Working Space [HBJ]
- New Restaurants, Festivals Made 2016 the Year of Barbecue in Houston [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Can Houston Sustain All These New Performance Venues? [Houston Public Media; previously on Swamplot]
- Upscale Indoor Gun Club Brazos Shooting & Social Club Planned for Missouri City [HBJ]
- Debating Whether To Save a Detailed Model of The Woodlands [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Western Westheimer Could Be Test Bed for Automated Buses [Houston Chronicle]
Photo: thranth via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
These are pretty special, depending on what you can live with.
Hey, wait! One last thing before we dash off for the holiday — now’s a great time to make sure you’ve voted for all 8 of the categories in this year’s Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate!
All votes are due in by 5pm Tuesday, December 27th — so you’ve got all weekend to whip up support from friends and family for your favorite nominees, too. As a quick recap of the awards at stake, here’s the complete list of this year’s official ballots, built out of your thoughtful and entertaining nominations:
- Favorite Houston Design Cliché
- Best Demolition of 2016
- The “Where Are They Now?” Award
- Best Industrial Incident
- Special Achievement in Parking
- The Houston High Water Award
- Neighborhood of the Year
- Greatest Moment in Houston Real Estate
For the complete guidelines on how to stuff the ballot boxes with all 4 of your votes for each category — that’s once each by comment, by email, by Comet and Vixen Facebook and Twitter  — check out this explainer page. Now vote away, vote away, vote away, all!
Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! Swamplot is skipping off a little early to go get into the spirit of the holiday, uh . . . “season,” such as it is. We wish you a joyous and peaceful remembrance of whatever brings you and yours together this time of year, be it Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, or the birthday of Emperor Akihito. We’ll meet you guys back here on Tuesday to wrap up that last bit of 2016 together.
Photo of Hermann Park and refurbished Memorial Hermann seasonal lighting: Meredith Nudo
Deck the Halls, Crank the AC
This is it, folks. We’ve reached the final ballot in the final category of the 2016 Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate: the award for the Greatest Moment in Houston Real Estate.
What makes something great? This award aims to honor the event this year that stood out above all the rest. Is that a Houston real estate happening that made the city a better place? Or is it something that left its mark on the local landscape in other ways? It’s up to you to decide who gets this award, and what it means — so be sure to explain yourself when you cast your ballots!
You can vote by adding a comment below, or by email, Facebook, or Twitter. And you can vote using all 4 methods — as long as you follow these rules. Tell us which of the following nominees represents the greatest moment in Houston real estate — and then tell us why.
Here they are — your 2016 nominees:
The 2016 Swampies
The map above (a snap from Luke Whyte’s click-and-zoom-able original version, published this week by the Texas Tribune) shows the abandoned oil and gas wells scattered in and around the Houston area, per the official accounting of the Texas Railroad Commission. The state agency (which has had nothing to do with railroads since 2005) regulates pipelines, oil, and gas, and keeps tabs on so-called “orphaned wells” whose original owners have stopped keeping tabs on them for one reason or another, writes Jim Malewitz this week — the ones that were reported in the first place, that is. Kerry Knorpp, formerly on a defunct state committee overseeing oilfield cleanup efforts, also tells Malewitz that “there is about to be a tsunami of [newly] abandoned wells — wells were drilled at $110 oil that you would have never completed otherwise.â€
The shaded hexagons above are meant to help show the density of those holes, not the degree to which they might pose a pollution hazard (though the agency ranks each well by its hazard potential, too, to help it decide which ones to plug up first, of the more than 10,000 currently on the docket).
Just what kind of hazards can a bunch of abandoned holes pose, anyway?
Boom and Bust
- City Council Approves Sale of Landmarked Heights Waterworks Land to Apartment Developer Alliance Realty Partners [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Foreign Correspondents Neighbor Canard Follows Suit, Closing Jan. 1 [HBJ]
- La Vista in Briargrove To Close in the Spring, Reopen Somewhere Else in Houston [HBJ]
- Sneak Peek at 5 Out of the 6 Restaurants Opening in the Marriott Marquis Downtown Monday [Eater Houston]
- Downtown Houston I-10 Entry Ramp Closed Until Mid-January for Emergency Repair [Houston Chronicle]
- A Look at C3’s Efforts To Lessen Exploitation of Texas Construction Workers [The Texas Tribune]
Photo of Aris Market Square reflection: elnina via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
A house is never finished, only abandoned.
HIGH SPEED RAIL CASE HEADS TO TRIAL 
A trial has been set for July 3rd for the case over the would-be bullet train between Houston and Dallas, Kyle Hagerty reports today. Judge Halbach denied bullet train developer Texas Central a preliminary injunction it had requested, which would have forced some unenthused landowners along the proposed rail route to allow the company surveying access to their properties. The surveying is only one of the hangups currently facing the project; in addition to delays on the project’s environmental impact studies, Hagerty writes that the rail company “admitted to having less than 1 percent of funding needed for the project,” and notes that the estimated completion date has been scooted back from 2021 to 2022. [Houston BisNow; previously on Swamplot] Map of proposed high speed rail routes: Texas Central
COMMENT OF THE DAY: COMPARING THE INGREDIENTS IN HOUSTON’S NIMBY STANCES 
“Just amazing what our city can do in [terms of] jeopardizing huge sums of taxpayer money to help Southampton fight off developers and laughable amounts of ‘increased traffic’ — and then turn a blind eye to communities having to do garage and bake sales just to fight to keep their children’s sanity and dignity.” [joel, commenting on Ban and Bake Sale for White Oak Music Hall; Hurricane Ike’s Last Blue Tarps] White Oak Music Hall lawsuit map: Harris County District Clerk’s office
The density of fast-food chicken options at S. Rice Ave. just south of 59 is increasing precipitously, a couple of readers note. The most recent addition: the newly-constructed Chik-Fil-A at 5325 S. Rice Ave. (visible above on the right, just south of Pollo Loco and across the street from Raising Cane’s). The Chik-Fil-A is not yet officially open for fowl distribution (though it does appear to be giving away prizes on Facebook. The Pollo Loco and Chik-Fil-A represent the fulfillment of the Wal-Mart Supercenter version of the Shoppes at Uptown Crossing site plan, passed around back in 2014; the Marriott Town & Place shown on that plan has since come to be as well:
Flocking Together in Gulfton
... "Pin It")
- Harris County Commissioners Select Kirksey Architecture To Design Astrodome’s Basement Parking Garage [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Houston Rent Grew 1.6% Year-Over-Year in November, Finds Yardi Matrix Report [Houston Public Media]
- Foreign Correspondents Closes After Founding Chef Departs, Treadsack To Redevelop Space [Culturemap]
- Carlo’s Bakery of ‘Cake Boss’ Fame Opening Somewhere in Houston in Spring 2017 [Eater Houston]
- Houston’s First Poke Restaurant, Ono Poke, To Open Early Next Year in Montrose [HBJ]
- Energy Corridor Dutch Junctions Underway, Should Be Completed by the Spring [Houston Public Media]
Photo of Discovery Green: elnina via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
You miss 100 percent of the demolitions you don’t take.
