COMMENT OF THE DAY: I’M SMELLING THAT LISTING ALREADY “I love this house . . . and I know exactly how it must smell: a homey mix of old furniture, mothballs, and mildew with a touch of Pine-Sol. I would buy it as is, furnished and everything.” [Miz Brooke Smith, commenting on A Lindale Park Cottage, Much as It Was]
Sign up for the Newsletter
A MEADOWCREEK VILLAGE HELP-YOU-SELL 
“SELLER WILL DO NO REPAIRS,” shouts the listing. But . . . um, visitors to this past Sunday’s open house did bring their own period furniture to dress up a brick flat-roofed Modern 4-bedroom in Meadowcreek Village celebrating its 49th birthday — as a foreclosure. That was for Houston Mod’s hastily announced Mod of the Month event. The instant living room arrangement from Heights vintage shop The Mod Pod is gone now, but the 2,558-sq.-ft. vinyl-over-terrazzo home at 2042 Forest Oaks Dr. is still on the market at $99,900. [HAIF; listing] Photo: Mod Pod/Karen Moyers
- 3809 Rice Blvd. [HAR]
- Nearly Half of Board Members Who Approve $37M in Development Tax Breaks for Downtown Have Real Estate Ties [Texas Watchdog]
- Alliance Residential Breaking Ground on 320-Unit Apartment Compound in Energy Corridor Within a Month [Prime Property]
- Studio Movie Grill To Finalize Purchase of League City Land for $9M, 12-Screen Movie Theater at I-45 and Victory Lakes Dr. [Galveston County Daily News]
- Dynamo Turns Down Houston Rockets Owner’s Offer To Buy the Team [Houston Business Journal]
- Champions Residents Say Shootings, Robberies Regular Since 2 Late-Night Bars Opened [Cypress Creek Mirror]
- With 2 Months Left in Official Hurricane Season, Houston Threats May Be Over, Says Expert [KUHF]
- ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ Ship Could Dock in Galveston’s Harbor This Winter [Galveston County Daily News]
- Slideshow: 25 Years of the George R. Brown Convention Center [Culturemap]
- More Concentration, Critical Mass Key To Growing Houston’s Startup Scene [Houston Strategies]
Photo of New I-69: Alliance for I-69 Texas
- 1937 Norfolk St. [HAR]
THE PLAN TO MOVE RICE UNIVERSITY CLOSER TO THE WOODLANDS — OR TRADE IT FOR THE GALLERIA It’s true, and was apparently taken reasonably seriously at the time. From the Rice Thresher in February 1973. [marmer, commenting on Headlines: Calculating Lower Westheimer’s Hip Factor; Westbury Gardens’ Walkable Kitsch]
You’ve reason to believe that you will be received with some gentility at this Lindale Park home on Graceland St. just west of Irvington, 7 blocks south of the North Loop. The newly listed triple-peaked brick cottage on a double-wide lot gained central air conditioning in 2005, but otherwise the 1945 home appears to have retained the qualities of an earlier era. Note the glass knobs on the interior doors and the lack of a dishwasher (or disposal or microwave) in the piney-woods-paneled kitchen.
NEW VOICE OWNERS DUMPING HOUSTON PRESS BACKPAGE ADS 
A well-trafficked source of ads for real estate in Houston and the rest of the country — and oh, by the way, escort ads often described as conduits for prostitution and human-trafficking schemes — is separating from the chain of alt weeklies that founded it. A group of Village Voice Media managers headed by company president Scott Tobias is buying out the chain of 13 city weeklies (and websites) that includes the Houston Press, the Village Voice, and LA Weekly. The Voice’s current owners will hold onto Backpage.com, the nation’s top venue for “body rub” ads. [Denver Post]
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Time to do a number on these:
- Houston Ranked Second in List of Metro Areas with Strongest Recoveries, Finds Brookings Institution Survey [KUHF]
- Peter Piper Pizza Opens First of Projected 25 Restaurants in Houston Region [Houston Business Journal]
- At 100 Years Old, Rice University Becomes an Official Texas Landmark [abc13]
- Counting Coffee Shops, Food Trucks, and More, ‘Lower Westheimer’ Ranks As Nation’s 20th-Hippest Neighborhood on Forbes List [Forbes via Prime Property]
- TxDOT To Widen US 90 from SH 61 to FM 1009 in South Liberty County [Cleveland Advocate]
- At Least 16 Pedestrian Crosswalk Signals Are Broken, Bagged, or Missing [Galveston County Daily News]
- Woodlands Township To Consider $380K Reforestation Bid Following Loss of 25,000 Trees in Drought [Courier of Montgomery County]
- Flare-Up at TPC Plant Off Highway 225 Has Neighbors on Edge [Click2Houston]
- Number of West Nile Virus Cases in Houston Reaches 60 [abc13]
- Galveston City Council Forms Committee To Handle Common Residential Complaints [Galveston County Daily News]
- The Storybook Tale of Disney-esque, Walkable Westbury Gardens [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of Lovett Hall, Rice University: Shu-Wei Hsu via Flickr [license]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY WE REALLY NEED THE EARLY MORNING CONCRETE CURE “It’s partly due to traffic, but the main reason you pour concrete in the extreme early hours is due to temperature. Concrete is actually a substance undergoing a chemical reaction and continues to get warmer. In the south, it’s not uncommon to pour concrete in the early morning hours before it gets too hot. If the concrete gets too warm it becomes brittle really fast. There are ways of dealing with heat such as adding ice to the mix, but it is not the preferred way to go. This is also the reason why in west Texas you don’t see to many concrete roads. It’s really hard to maintain the temperature during a large placement. So yes, there is some concern with traffic, but it has to do more with heat. Now, some of you may say that the slab of your house was placed in the heat of the day. Yes, but the strength lost in the heat for your house is not enough to effect the overall structure. Bridges, highways, highrises, and large placements where high loads are experienced can get susceptible to the heat and weaken the overall structure. . . .” [kjb434, commenting on About Those “Early Morning†Concrete Pours]
COMMENT OF THE DAY RUNNER-UP: TAKING A FENCE “Having lived in a number of other cities around the country, I am continuously shocked by what contractors in this city get away with at construction sites. No fences around construction sites (the smaller ones, anyway), complete destruction of the public sidewalks until project completion, lack of protection for street trees, work taking place at 5:30 in the morning in residential neighborhoods, etc. A new home is being built in my neighborhood, and they broke some part of the water main across the street from their site and failed to fix it for a month while we had standing water in the middle of the sidewalk. This just seems to be part of Houston’s any-construction-is-better-than-no-construction-no-matter-what mentality. This type of behavior is disrespectful to neighbors and simply not tolerated in other cities.” [tracy, commenting on About Those “Early Morning†Concrete Pours]
Why is Houston the only major city in the country that bans propane-equipped food trucks from operating Downtown — and one of the few that prohibits all food trucks from serving near seating areas or even setting up their own chairs for customers? A few clues appear in Katherine Shilcutt’s fascinating account of Tuesday’s city hearing, during which council members expressed a few concerns: that food-truck purveyors might be selling “other items” on the sly, or that there might not be a sufficient number of city inspectors to police the existing fleet. But, Shilcutt reports, “The questions got even stranger when Council Member Andrew Burks began hinting at the possibility of terrorists using food trucks’ propane tanks as weapons, a comment that prompted laughter from the audience.”
The possibility of overfueled taco trucks blowing up Downtown Houston, however, wasn’t the only frightening specter Burks conjured up before the mostly mobile-food-friendly crowd:
ABOUT THOSE “EARLY MORNING” CONCRETE POURS 
A neighbor of the Park Memorial construction site in Rice Military writes: “Just a question on Houston city ordinances. Are there any restrictions on construction in the middle of the night? I was awakened at 3 am this morning by a massive concrete pour. The site has been lit up with floodlights and there are multiple trucks with back up signals, machinery noise and yelling workers. I found some general noise ordinances but wondered if there are any other rules? This is as bad as any nightclub or worse.” [Swamplot inbox; previously on Swamplot]
