HAVE HOME PRICES IN LINDALE PARK REALLY JUMPED THAT MUCH, THAT FAST? 
“I’d be curious to know what your more knowledgeable readers think about the rising prices in Lindale Park,” a reader writes. “Just today I saw this listing — for north of $400k! Over the past couple of months there have been a number of homes listed, and quickly pending, for around $300k. Most (all?) of these appear to have been flipped.
I bought my (not updated, in need of work, but a not-bad 3-2) house in Lindale Park for around $150k in 2010. There were a number of factors to picking Lindale Park, but the biggest was that we could get a decent-sized house in a close-in neighborhood that seemed to be on the up-and-up without breaking the bank. (The rail was a big reason too.) But when I saw this home — big and updated but right on 610 — for more than $400k . . . my jaw dropped.” [Swamplot inbox] Photo of 511 Kelley St.: HAR
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Here’s some raw footage from a camera-wielding drone flight landscape artist and researcher Steve Rowell piloted earlier this year over portions of the Baytown Nature Center, the Crystal, Scott, and Burnet Bay peninsula that not too long ago was the home of the tony Brownwood subdivision — before it got all sinky and decided to subside 10 or so feet into the water. In some portions of the video, you can still spot the occasional home or garage slab from a fifties- or sixties-era rancher or 2, not to mention concrete broken up from other foundations and driveways and recycled on-site into surge barriers that now control the more recent, court-ordered wetlands environment.
Touring Brownwood by Drone
Here’s where we break with the old ways, and break the old things. Every day.
- Can Houston Learn To Love Light Rail? [Atlantic Cities]
- Oden Hughes Building 384 New Apartments 4 Miles from ExxonMobil Campus [Prime Property]
- Island Church Rumored To Be Building a New House of Worship at Site of Former Gerland’s Grocery Store [Galveston County Daily News ($)]
- Two-Thirds of Texas Suffering from ‘Moderate’ or ‘Worse’ Drought Conditions [Houston Chronicle]
- Slideshow: The Historic Restorations on View During Preservation Houston’s Tour of Good Brick Award Recipients This May [Prime Property]
- Is Oak Forest the Friendliest Neighborhood in Houston? [Houstonia]
- Greater Houston Partnership’s New Image Campaign To Sell Houston as a Great Place to Live [Houston Business Journal]
- Some Food Truck Operators Say the Fad Has Passed as Many Eye Brick-and-Mortar Restaurants [Houstonia]
- James Surls Explains His Metal Tree and Three Flowers Sculpture Planted on a Kirby Median [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Slideshow: That Time in 1989 When Boris Yeltsin Visited a Randall’s Supermarket in Clear Lake [The Texican]
Photo of construction at Yale and Kohler: elnina via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Crisp cutouts and angled volumes designed into a 1974 custom contemporary in Deer Park give light, air, and views multi-level pathways throughout the tilt-topped property. Architect Irving Phillips, who designed this structure long before moving on to Montrose-area monuments and assorted condo towers, also opted for a fair amount of redwood, as evidenced by the ceilings (top) and sun-baked planks finishing the home’s exterior and privacy fencing (above). A week ago, the well-buffed home appeared on the market with a $295,000 asking price.
Redbox Location
Here’s an overhead view of the installation over the weekend of the 38-ft.-tall, 7,000-lb. sculpture by James Surls on the previously treeless median between West Ave and the 2727 Kirby condo tower on Kirby Dr., just south of Westheimer. Assembled from bronze and stainless-steel components, Tree and Three Flowers was commissioned by the Upper Kirby District; it’s meant to move in the wind. It’ll join other Surls public works in Houston — at Rice University, in Market Square, and at the Parks and Recreation department headquarters on Gragg St. The Kirby sculpture went in on this base:
Won’t Grow, but Will Move
Whatever the original plans were for the partial demolition of the gray-painted 1940 bungalow that sat across the street from the Menil Collection and across the footpath to the West Alabama St. parking lot from the Menil Bookstore, they appear to have been exceeded. A reader sends in these photos of the construction site at 1512 Sul Ross St.; they show that the woodframe structure intended for “adaptive reuse” into a new Bistro Menil according to a design by Stern and Bucek Architects has been removed entirely.
The Menil had announced plans for the bungalow-to-bistro conversion at that spot last October, in concert with an upgrade of the parking-lot path into a “new campus gateway” designed by landscape firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. “In keeping with the emphasis on sustainability that is a keynote of the landscape design,” read a Menil press release, “the Menil’s café is designed by Stern and Bucek through the adaptive reuse of one of the bungalows that define the character of the Menil’s campus.” The press release also noted that the Menil’s architect, Renzo Piano, had originally proposed putting a café in this exact location. Since named (via a contest) Bistro Menil, the arts institution’s first eating spot is set to be run by Café Annie, Taco Milagro, and Café Express alum Greg Martin.
Leaving Only Footprints
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Clearing out Hotel 31 on the West Loop, and other city checkouts:
- Anadarko Petroleum Planning To Increase Woodlands Campus by 600K SF [Prime Property]
- 3rd Floor, Pub Fiction, Celtic Gardens and CRISP Owners Behind Beer Market Co. Opening in Texadelphia Strip-Center Spot on Studemont, South of Washington Ave [Culturemap]
- Brazos Bookstore’s 40 Years at the Center of Houston’s Literary Scene [Houstonia]
- Houston Churches Increasingly Establishing New Outposts in Suburban Commercial Buildings, Schools, Auditoriums [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- So Far Uber and Lyft Have Been Issued a Combined 11 Citations for Drivers Improperly Charging for Rides [The Highwayman]
- An Unofficial Guide to Riding Metro’s Buses and Light Rail [OffCite Blog]
- Inside Artist Bill Davenport’s 11th St. Storefront, Bill’s Junk [The Great God Pan Is Dead; previously on Swamplot]
Photo of bluebonnets at Mason Park: Leonid Notax via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE BOOM IN SPRING BRANCH 
“This part of Spring Branch has seen the median listing price go up from ~$150k to ~$250k over the past two years. Listings all over SB get multiple cash offers on the first day; a $400k listing will get bid up well into half-mil territory by week’s end. If this ball keeps rolling, we could start to see the first teardowns north of Long Point before the end of the year. Decision, decisions . . . best to buy now, or sit tight and wait for the pop?” [Rodrigo, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: Auto Air] Illustration: Lulu
Long and lean, an updated and fortified 1945 property clings to the West Edgemont neighborhood’s retaining-wall border on the south bank of the below-grade Southwest Fwy. The Boulevard Oaks-area home had 9 owners in the past 30 years; since January, it’s been seeking number 10. The asking price remains $437,500.
Byway near the Highway
THE TOP SECRET WEST HOUSTON ROOFTOP CABINETS GRABBING HOUSTON TV SIGNALS FOR INTERNET STREAMING 
Chronicle tech reporter Dwight Silverman tours the rooftop base housing tens of thousands of tiny, dime-size antennas used by a New York-based company whose business model of capturing local TV, storing it on DVR servers, and streaming it to customers, is headed for a Supreme Court showdown: “Aereo’s local operation is located in a data center in west Houston. (I can’t say more than that – not because of Aereo, but because the data center is very security-conscious and keeps the location secret to protect other customers.) The location was picked partly because TV signals for most of Houston’s broadcast stations are strong there.
The antennas are stored in cabinets mounted on a platform on the center’s roof. To get there, you must climb about 20 feet up a vertical ladder (after receiving a detailed safety briefing) and exit through a hatch onto the roof.
The two cabinets each have a locked door that provides access on one side. Open them, and you can see long circuit-board racks, each about 14-16 inches long, that hold the antennas. Below them is equipment that converts the radio frequency signals to MPEG-2 video. The back side of the cabinets have what [Aereo founder and CEO Chet] Kanojia described as ‘RF transparent windows,’ made of a material that lets TV signals penetrate easily.
The converted MPEG-2 video is fed via 10-gigabit fiber-optic cables to a set of servers in the floor below the roof. Aereo has a relatively small space in the data center, but still has plenty of room to add more servers. A rack of transcoders convert the MPEG-2 video into MPEG-4, which is more easily streamed over the Net.
Two racks of hard drives, each with 3 terabytes of storage and spinning at 7,200 RPM, stores the data. Aereo saves each customer’s signal to the drives, even if they’re watching live, which is what allows its users to pause and rewind live TV. The drives also store recorded shows, with the amount varying based on whether a customer has the $8 or $12 Aereo plan.
When someone wants to watch a show, it’s streamed out through the data center’s big fiber-optic connection to the Internet.” [TechBlog; more info ($)]
Photo of Houston West Data Center (probably not the Aereo location) at 5150 Westway Park Blvd.: CyrusOne
- 5830 Willowbend Blvd. [HAR]
The vacant lots shown here at the corner of Bailey and O’Neil streets will soon become a community garden for the Fourth Ward’s Sutton Square neighborhood. The properties, which measure 12,000 sq. ft. in total, sit behind the office building on West Gray purchased last year by an energy-startup accelerator program (at center and left in the photo above) and relabeled the Surge Shack.
Growing in Sutton Square
