Headlines
07/30/12 8:30am

Headlines: Seaweed Invasion Early Warning System; A Pipe Organ To Live In

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Photo: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool

Comments
07/27/12 11:21pm

Comment of the Day: Making It Up with Quantity

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COMMENT OF THE DAY: MAKING IT UP WITH QUANTITY “Using numbers to determine what is ‘cool’ is a waste of time. One of the criteria used in the article was the number of pro and college sports teams in the city. Ok, fine, but do you really think the Astros are as ‘cool’ as the Yankees, Cubs, or Red Sox? Yet quantity wise, they each count as 1 and are considered equal. The same goes for museums. Is the MFAH really as cool as the Met? This exercise could be done for any of the categories Forbes used to rank the cities and Houston would come up short on almost all of them. So while Houston may be the coolest when you count numbers, its certainly not the coolest when you’re looking for the coolest things around.” [Walt, commenting on Headlines: Houston as America’s ‘Coolest’ City; Predicting Traffic Jams]

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Briargrove Park
07/27/12 3:28pm

Briargrove Park Split-Level Is All Decked Out

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A Briargrove Park 1974 contemporary plays up all its angles. The multi-level floor plan carves out a few unexpected spaces inside and out, including a series of decks, patios, and covered porches. Listed earlier this month at $480,000, the piney-woods property is just off a cul-de-sac that’s a block — or 8 homes — from the noise-baffling wall of the West Belt feeder road north of Briar Forest Dr. That places it west of Seagler Rd., the dividing line between the neighborhood’s start in the sixties and its seventies’ buildout.

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Proposed Developments
07/27/12 2:28pm

The Washington Heights Walmart Retail Buddy List

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THE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS WALMART RETAIL BUDDY LIST The list of stores is out. Who’ll be moving in to Ainbinder’s Washington Heights shopping strips at Yale and Koehler, across from the new Walmart in Houston’s West End? Yes, they’re all chains. And there’s a bank, a phone store, a Starbucks, and a nail salon in there, for street- er, parking-lot cred. The lineup: JP Morgan Chase, Taco Cabana, Visionworks, Sport Clips, Jersey Mike’s, Nailtime, GNC, GameStop, Corner Bakery (pictured), Starbucks, Verizon, Which Wich, and Chipotle. [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot] Rendering: The Ainbinder Company

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Industrial Properties
07/27/12 1:55pm

Where All Those New Chemical Plants Are Going

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WHERE ALL THOSE NEW CHEMICAL PLANTS ARE GOING It’s Houston’s plastics boom! “Chemical companies from around the world are flocking to the Houston area,” declares the Houston Business Journal, “to take advantage of vast amounts of cheap natural gas, which is used as a chemical feedstock.” The publication counts 8 new or expanded facilities. This handy map shows where they’re headed: Baytown (a new ethane cracker at Chevron Phillips Chemical and expanded ethylene and polyethylene facilities at the ExxonMobil plant), Old Ocean on Hwy. 25 (2 new polyethylene facilities, also for Chevron Phillips), Freeport off Brazosport Boulevard (an ethylene cracker for Dow Chemical), 8280 Sheldon Rd. in Channelview (an expansion of LyondellBasell’s existing ethane facility), 1515 Miller Cut-Off Rd. in La Porte (expanding LyondellBasell’s ethylene plant there), near Alvin on FM 2004 (more ethylene processing at INEOS’s Chocolate Bayou plant), and Clear Lake (a new methanol production plant at the existing Celanese facility). Welcome! [Houston Business Journal] Map: Houston Business Journal

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Downtown
07/27/12 1:08pm

Stripped

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STRIPPED Has the Strip House — the Shops at Houston Center stripper-themed steak house — closed its doors for good? Or is it just, you know, trying to renegotiate its lease with a landlord’s lockout notice for non-payment of rent taped to its McKinney St. front door? Reported outages of the Strip House’s Facebook page and Twitter feed may turn out to be mere negotiating tactics. “Our goal is to resolve this matter as soon as possible,” a release sent out this morning quotes owner Penny Glazier as saying. Her company, the Glazier Group, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2010. The chain owns Strip Houses in 3 other cities. [Eater Houston] Photo: Flickr user jerry1540

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Headlines
07/27/12 8:30am

Headlines: Houston as America’s ‘Coolest’ City; Predicting Traffic Jams

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Photo of mural at Shepherd and Nett: Ruben Serrano via Swamplot Flickr Pool

Construction Problems
07/26/12 3:46pm

Old Dead People Blocking Progress of Grand Parkway

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OLD DEAD PEOPLE BLOCKING PROGRESS OF GRAND PARKWAY Texas’s department of transportation is requesting permission to remove 4 bone fragments found buried in the Katy Prairie — in the path of what will eventually be the largest-circumference ring road ever constructed around a U.S. city. The bones, believed to represent the remains of several people, are at least 2,000 years old, which would make them older than any human body parts previously discovered in the Harris County area. They were unearthed by construction workers. As a result, construction of a portion of Segment E of the Grand Parkway, which will connect I-10 to U.S. Hwy. 290 through acres of uninhabited grasslands, has been halted. TxDOT’s application asks for “expedited removal” of the remains so that work can continue. [abc13; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Deeya Maple

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Champions
07/26/12 2:07pm

Breakfast Bar of Champions

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Scratch that whole Whole Foods Market reannouncing its BLVD Place plans bit. The new Houston store the grocery company announced yesterday will be a 40,000-sq.-ft. spot in a new strip center planned for the Champions area — on a now-forested plot of land at the southeast corner of Louetta Rd. and Cutten Rd., a few blocks east of the Vintage Park shopping center. And it won’t open until 2014.

Photo: LoopNet

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Galleria
07/26/12 1:48pm

Waiting for a Galleria Whole Foods

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WAITING FOR A GALLERIA WHOLE FOODS Has Whole Foods Market finally signed a lease for the store on Post Oak Blvd. near San Felipe that the developers of BLVD Place have been promising since 2007? Yesterday Whole Foods announced it had signed leases for new grocery stores averaging 37,500 sq. ft. in 12 cities, including Houston. Whether that means a new location near the Galleria or somewhere else in the city, it could still be a while before it opens: “These stores,” says the press release, “currently are scheduled to open in fiscal year 2014 and beyond.” [MarketWatch; previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Wulfe & Co. Update, 2:50 pm: The new store will be in Champions.

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Development Regulations
07/26/12 1:13pm

Property Owners, Not Developers, Paying for New City Drainage Program So Far

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PROPERTY OWNERS, NOT DEVELOPERS, PAYING FOR NEW CITY DRAINAGE PROGRAM SO FAR Although it’s been collecting drainage fees from property owners for a year, the city of Houston still has yet to begin collecting a parallel funding source for its new ReBuild Houston infrastructure program. A deputy director of public works admitted in a meeting last week that a promised developer impact fee — one of 4 sources of funding established for street and drainage improvements — has not yet been put in place. Fees from developers are meant to pay for measures that would offset the effects of future development on flooding and street capacity, according to a city website describing the program. [The Leader]

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Home Decor
07/26/12 12:29pm

Nassau Bay’s Purple Waterfront Playhouse

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It all seems so seasidey serene at this Nassau Bay property on the border of Bal Harbour Cove and Swan Lagoon. A mid-July initial listing, the 3-story $2.2 million property has water views from all its rooms. There’s a lakefront pool, a fire pit on a cantilevered deck, a pair of palapas, palm trees bending in the breeze, and a double-slip boathouse perched above the lapping waves. In the front yard, there’s a tiered waterfall. But inside, this rock-encrusted 2-story  waterfall-with-aquarium in the entry is the real tipoff that while the home is on the water, its interior isn’t a driftwood-nautical knot kinda retreat:

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