Hey, it worked for the River Oaks Cleaners and CityCentre! The latest, perhaps only half-unwitting entry into the ongoing Houston name-sprawl competition is “Heights at Park Row,” an apartment complex announced yesterday by an Atlanta developer but apparently already under construction in advance of an announced October opening date. The 342-unit rental compound, a mere 14 freeway miles west of the similarly named Houston neighborhood not known (yet) for its apartments, will hang back a tad from the southern freeway exposure of Wolff Companies’ this-and-that-use Central Park development, wedged ’twixt I-10 and a planned the recent extension of the Terry Hershey Park Bike Trail.
Central Park will, in fact, be entirely central to its own location, along Houston’s central concrete ribbon but only a little east of Hwy. 6:
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The stuccoed, 5-story apartments will fit on a 9-acre site just east of a 35-acre portion of the development the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center purchased for a new medical campus a little more than a year ago, at the end of the not-yet-tower-studded road labeled Central Park West. All apartments developed by the Worthing Companies, apparently, carry the Heights name — including another one listed on the company’s website that’s slated for Westchase.
- New luxury apartment complex to open this fall in the Energy Corridor [Houston Business Journal]
- New luxury multifamily complex to open this year in Energy Corridor [Prime Property]
- Previously on Swamplot: Metro Chief Very Excited About Sprawl
Rendering: The Worthing Companies. Site plan: Wolff Companies
That “planned extension of the Terry Hershey Park Bike Trail” is already done and open to the public now.. A certain blog posted about it last year:
http://swamplot.com/a-look-at-the-hike-and-bike-now-running-to-the-addicks-park-and-ride/2013-03-19/
@slugline: Missed that, thanks! It’s tough keeping up with all these random Houston blogs and their bike-trail news bits.
@Swamplot: If it makes you feel any better, whoever put together the copy for this past weekend’s Houston Marathon described the Dynamo Stadium in the future tense as well….
Back on topic: the “Heights at Park Row” name does cause me much amusement. I suppose it is higher than the flood reservoir! I was partially motivated to move out of this area recently due to rising rents and can look wistfully back to the start of the Great Recession when my apartment complex was less than half occupied and way more affordable. Now it’s a game to see how many “luxury” apartments this corner of town can sustain.
The developers of the Target center on I10 and Taylor / Sawyer called the thing “Sawyer Heights”. Now developers are calling parts of the First and Sixth Wards “Sawyer Heights” in their marketing materials and For Sale signs.
I always chuckle when I see businesses with “River Oaks” in the name south of 59 (or east of Shepherd, for that matter). Dream on!
The Atlanta-based developer has or is building ten different apartment complexes around the country that are all uniformly branded as “The Heights at [place name]”. The denizens of the Houston Heights are NOT so special or important that they can universally monopolize the word “Heights”. Many neighborhoods are named as such, even in different spots within and around Houston itself; and those other spots just fine with the varying names and character they have. They don’t need to be annexed into the Houston Heights if they happen to be close by (i.e. Washington Heights); they don’t need to be ridiculed if they are further away. Everything is just fine aside from self-important opinion-leading douchebags misconstruing this as being all about them.
No, Niche, the Atlanta based developer should maybe do a bit more local research on places where they purchase land and decide to do business. If I were a Houston based developer and bought some land down by the Atlanta airport and called it “Buckhead Plaza Apartments”, I have a feeling Atlantans would snicker at the name being so far removed from the neighborhood in that city named Buckhead. Yeah, it’s just a name, but sometimes a little local knowledge is in order if you own a business.
Niche, exactly who on here is being a douchebag????? I didn’t see a single comment leading to your response.
I am with Niche on this one. Besides, does anyone really think that anyone who leases in Katy gives a rat’s ass about the “Heights” moniker?
@ sjh: You should read the article itself before reading the comments.
@ ShadyHeightster, if you see the word ‘Buckhead’ anywhere, you can reasonably infer that there is some kind of connection to Atlanta, whether by design or by accident. It’s a unique term. (It’s also a much higher-profile neighborhood than the Houston Heights.)
If you see the word ‘Heights’, well damn it could be referring to municipalities or neighborhoods almost anywhere in the English-speaking world. If ‘Heights’ is name creep, then why aren’t the denizens of Brooklyn pissy about it? Quick, somebody write a letter to the editor! ‘Heights’ may also refer to meanings other than a place name, for instance “Heights” the band or “Heights” the film or “Heights” the ten distinct mathematical constructs identified on Wikipedia’s disambiguation page on the term “Heights”. (Buckhead has no disambiguation page.)
Remember when McDonald’s sued Jus’ Mac for trademark infringement over the use of the word “Mac” as though it might be confusing to somebody. Everybody in the Heights was in a hubub because it was a really stupid lawsuit. (It was stupid, they were correct about that much even if only by coincidence.) But yeah, that’s sort of like what is going on here with this presumption of name creep into Katy.