One of these Beall St. Townhomes in Shady Acres Extension — within a row built in 2002 — gets a bit of shade, On Tuesday, a midsized member of the similar but not identical housing octet popped up on the market. Price tag: $499,500. As with its neighbors, the close-to-the-street home is perched on a pier-and-beam foundation; the entry is up a few steps and behind a short iron fence off the sidewalk and gully drainage. Meanwhile, the sitting porch streetside has a back-of-house cousin (above right), each looking over a bit of grass and adjacent properties.
Another source of Houston’s pollution has got the attention of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality: tailpipes. Starting in January, the agency will place a pair of monitors within 160 ft. of 2 our most heavily used roads — including the Southwest Fwy. near the Westpark Tollway — to record the amount of nitrogen dioxide leaked into the air. Apparently, the stuff can be pretty nasty, writes the Houston Chronicle’s Matthew Tresaugue: “
“The developers are usually the 3rd or 4th step in gentrification. My understanding is that it goes like this: First are usually the lower income artistic types who give the area a ‘vibe.’ Then come slightly higher income artistic types who find fixer-uppers and start increasing property values. Then come the affluent who scrape the lots to build their own houses. Finally, the developers come in to build on any remaining semi-large contiguous lots. I don’t spend much time in this part of town, but I’m not aware of much of steps 1 or 2 happening there yet (but am open to being corrected). This feels more like developers trying to sell the area as being gentrified, make a quick profit (nothing wrong with that), and then leave the purchasers stuck with condos that will be underwater for the next 10 to 15 years. So if it is gentrification, I would call it ‘Astroturf Gentrification’ — from a distance, it might look like the real, but up close, its really pretty fake and inferior to the real thing.” [
Unlike that rather 
