POPULARIZING TIRZWATCHING AS A HOUSTON PASTIME 
This week the Houston Chronicle editorial board called for TIRZ authorities to keep publicly accessible and up-to-date records, as well as to start recording videos of their meetings, as occurs with city council proceedings. The board says that the 27 TIRZs in Houston collected more than $100 million in 2015 — “about what the city spends on parks and libraries combined,” allowing some individual TIRZ management authorities “to take on projects with a region-wide impact.” Some Houstonians have already been keeping an eye trained on the TIRZ’s movements, cameras or no — last month residents of the Cosmopolitan condos (via Wayne Dolcefino) filed a criminal complaint alleging that members of the Uptown TIRZ had failed to keep records of meetings related to the purchase of land for the Post Oak bus lane project. Meanwhile, a group of residents on the flood-prone Memorial City TIRZ is preparing a lawsuit related to this week’s city council approval of new TIRZ board members. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Map of Houston Tax Increment Reinvestment Zoness: City of Houston
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Today our sponsor is Houston’s own Central Bank. Swamplot appreciates the continued support!
Central Bank has 4 (central) Houston branches available to meet your business or personal needs: in Midtown, the Heights, West Houston, and Post Oak Place.
Central Bank believes that change is essential to its success; the company actively pursues the latest in service, technology, and products. Central Bank aims to know its customers personally and to be their primary business and personal financial resource. The bank’s staff values relationships and strives to be available when you need them.
To learn more about how Central Bank can meet your banking needs, please call Kenny Beard at 832.485.2376 — or check out the bank’s website.
If reaching customers is central to your business, you should learn more about Swamplot’s Sponsor of the Day program.
Sponsor of the Day
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BUILD UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE OTHERS BUILD UNTO YOU 
“For this city-wide Houston experiment of no zoning to work, it takes good judgment, responsible developers, people living by the golden rule, doing what’s right, loving thy neighbor, walking a mile in another man’s shoes (or zipcode!), however you get there. I mean that. And I love Houston because — shockingly — this mostly works. When it fails, laws do exist to establish a minimum standard we all live by; those minimum standards [get] called on because someone tried to circumvent the law and selfishly do whatever the hell they wanted anyway.” [G Rod, commenting on The Shakeup Around White Oak Music Hall’s Outdoor Stage] Illustration: Lulu
If you missed the free Fallout Boy and Kendrick Lamar concerts during Final Four weekend, here’s your chance to catch both, condensed down to less than 5 minutes (no sound, though). This week photographer Geoffrey Lyon posted his time-lapse capture (from the upper levels of One Park Place) of Discovery Green filling up during the Friday and Saturday events held in conjunction with the college basketball championship finals; the park reached its maximum capacity on both that Saturday and the following Sunday and stopped admitting visitors. [KTRK; previously on Swamplot] Video: Geoffrey Lyon
Turned Up and Down Downtown
- Houston Named One of the Best Cities for First-Time Home Buyers by SmartAsset [Realty News Report]
- Houston a Case Study in How Non-Zoning Regulations Can Produce Sprawl [The Urban Edge]
- Japanese Grocery Giant Hidejiro Matsu’s Ashford Village Shopping Center Supermarket Named Seiwa Market [Houstonia]
- Heights Resident Considers Moving to Avoid Traffic from Next Week’s 18-Month-Long Yale Street Bridge Closure [abc13; previously on Swamplot]
- An Aerial Look at the Construction Progress Thus Far of Schlitterbahn Galveston’s Massive Watercoaster [abc13]
- ExxonMobil Seeks To Block Subpoena Over Climate-Change Documents [AP]
- Art Blocks at Main Street Square Aims To Activate Downtown Houston [Not Of It; previously on Swamplot]
Photo of Travis Street: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Some voids will be filled sooner than others.
- 3710 Purdue St. [HAR]
The Chase-occupied former Gulf Building at 712 Main St. (above) and the 10-story Great Jones building tucked next to it on the corner with Capitol St. are getting made over and rebranded together as The Jones on Main. Planned updates to the 37-story art deco skyscraper, which between 1929 and 1951 housed the Sakowitz department store in its first 5 floors at the corner of Rusk St. and Main, include a de-conversion of the ground level at that corner from office space back to retail usage — here’s a look at the intended floorplan released by developer Midway this morning, with Rusk at the bottom of the frame:
712 + 708
Southern-tinged Korean restaurant Anju closed suddenly last week in the Midtown Crossing strip center, following the latest in a chain of break-ins to its space. Owner An Vo tells Swamplot that the spot near the corner of Webster and Brazos streets, on the eastern end of the strip at 510 Gray St., was broken into “like 5 times” in Anju’s roughly 4 months of operation there; Vo says the last incident forced the shut down.
The now ex-Anju space previously held  beer bar Gray’s Public House, which opened there after the departure of The Good Life. Around the corner along Gray St., the strip center currently hosts Buffalo Wild Wings, perpetually probing sandwich shop Which Wich?, River Oaks Cleaners, and Gyu-Kaku:
Webster at Brazos
What businesses and real-estate listings have been sponsoring Swamplot recently? Here’s a list of Sponsors of the Day since our last roundup:
- Crowdfunding site NextSeed
- The edible-garden gardeners at Edible Earth Resources
- The 2-story home at 243 Maple Valley Rd. in Tanglewood
- Edible-garden supply store Farmstead: Grow & Eat
- The home at 2420 Reba St. in Avalon Place
- “Nourish,” the 41st annual spring home tour put on last weekend by the Rice Design Alliance
- The 3-bedroom home at 2910 Ann Arbor Dr. in Briarmeadow
- Houston’s own Central Bank
- The townhome for sale at 2797 West Lane
- Condos for sale in Regency House, at 2701 Westheimer
- Judy Thompson, Exclusively a Buyer’s Agent
- Real estate news site Realty News Report
- The 1.85-acre residential lot at 601 Strey Ln. in Bunker Hill Village
Thank you, all!
If you appreciate the support these businesses and listings have been sending Swamplot’s way, please click on the links above (and on the links in those links) to check out what they have to offer. Or find a way to let them know you’ve noticed what they’re doing.
Would you like to see your company or listing get this kind of attention from Swamplot readers? Talk to us about how to become a Swamplot Sponsor of the Day.
Sponsors of the Day
A more permanent fence has taken over for the one previously wrapped around the lot at 3482 Inwood Dr., where possibly-murdered apartment tycoon and singer Harold Farb was midway through building a house for himself and his wife at the time of his death in 2006. The property initially hit the market partial-house-and-all, with the expectation that future buyers could finish up the construction of a 17,404-sq.-ft. estate overlooking the River Oaks Country Club’s golf course. After a steady price decay from $14.75 million to about $10 million by mid-2010, tactics changed; the property got a demo permit and a subsequent smoothing over, and was relisted in October of 2012 (and again in December of 2014, then to the tune of just under $9 million).
The fully re-undeveloped land hit the market again last Thursday, now for $8.5 million, Here’s the current view of the front gate, and what’s inside it:
Green in River Oaks
- Houston Home Sales Fell 2.2% as Inventory Increased to 3.6 Months Last Month, Finds HAR [Houston Chronicle]
- Houston-Area Home Market Shows Resiliency Amid Oil Downturn [Houston Chronicle]
- Tunnels to Close as Houston Chronicle Building Becomes Parking Lot [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- New Hope Housing To Break Ground on First Mixed-Use Development This Week [HBJ]
- Sneak Peek Inside Martin Fein’s Olympia at Willowick Park Luxury Apartments [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- Downtown Galveston Frost Bank Office Building Eyed for Apartments [Galveston County Daily News]
- City Approves $5M in Loans for Acquisition of Abandoned Crestmont West Apartment Complex [Houston Public Media]
- Booker T. Washington HS Breaks Ground on New $51.7M Campus [The Leader; previously on Swamplot]
- Astro Craig Biggio To Open 2-Story Sports Bar Biggio’s Inside the Marriot Marquis This November [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- More Details on Tout Suite’s Planned Second Houston Location Inside the Memorial City Mall [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- Residents of TIRZ 17 Call for Self-Selected Representation on TIRZ Board Amid Flooding Concerns [Houston Press]
- Houston Homebuilder Casa Villarreal Builders Files for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy [HBJ]
- A Computer-Generated Video Ride of the World’s Tallest Watercoaster Coming to Schlitterbahn Galveston [Houston Press]
Photo of former Houston Chronicle building: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Or when all else fails, demo.
- 8036 SH 316 [HAR]
Something is stirring drinks these days inside former location of Beirut Fine Lebanese Cuisine, which reopened last fall as Fig + Wasp Test Kitchen and then quickly closed again. Up & Down on Washington will be officially opening at 4105 Washington Ave. this Friday after a few weeks of soft operation in the upstairs of the space; whether the fig-wasp name was a deliberate nod to the creepy symbiotic relationship between the 2 components is unclear. Photo of 4105 Washington Ave: Kuehn Inc.
Rice Military Buzz
