FIRST PHILIPPINE BAPTIST CHURCH’S NEW NEIGHBOR: SPIKE SPORT VOLLEYBALL CLUB 
Site work is about to begin on a volleyball gym off the Fort Bend Pkwy. that’ll fill in the gap between First Philippine Baptist Church (shown above) and the Missouri City drainage ditch officially known as VIII-BI. The planned 8-court gym is the latest from Spike Club, which previously held court in a complex next to the post office on S. Gessner north of W. Bellfort. Since moving out of there earlier this year, its players and staff have taken temporary refuge in the Westbury Christian School’s athletic complex over on Fondren Rd. They plan to arrive in the Missouri City location sometime next spring. Photo: Southern Baptist Convention
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Tag: 77489
PAVING THE WAY FOR A BIKE LANE ON W. FUQUA 
This morning, City Council plans to vote in support of some roadwork that’d add on-street bike lanes to W. Fuqua St. between Chimney Rock and Houston’s border with Missouri City, just west of Fondren Rd. Over that 1.7-mile stretch — which crosses over the Fort Bend Pkwy. — a couple upgrades for cars would be put in as well, including turning lanes at Fondren and traffic lights at W. Ridgecreek Dr. in place of what’s now a 3-way stop. It’s all lumped into that application the city plans to submit to the Houston Galveston Area Council in order to get funding for a bunch of other transportation projects around town, too, like that widening and heightening effort on Dairy Ashford. [Houston City Council; previously on Swamplot]
IN THE MISSOURI CITY AIR 
Wild West Well Control is expected to finish capping an oil well this evening on McHard Rd. just west of the Fort Bend Tollway that blew out last night, sending foul-smelling fumes southeast into Fort Bend County. Nearby residents got a nose-ful: “Winds carried the smell across a large portion of the area; it is believed that the smell was from hydrogen sulfide. Total Fire has been conducting air monitoring in the area and has been unable to detect significant amounts of the chemical in the air.” [Fort Bend County OEM]
Photo: Fort Bend County OEM
MITT ROMNEY’S MISSOURI CITY MORTGAGE Among those who answered the clarion call to invest in Houston-area real estate back in the early eighties, just a few years before its big crash: Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Long before he earned billions at the helm of Bain Capital, Romney bought 5 rent-to-own houses in suburban areas of Houston — “without putting up any of his own money,” according to Mike McIntire’s report. Romney got stuck renting out the houses until the late 1990s, when he unloaded 4 of them, “mostly at a loss.” The tenants of the fifth house wanted to buy their 1,836-sq.-ft. 3-bedroom home (at 1350 Gentle Bend Dr. in Missouri City’s Hunters Glen neighborhood) but couldn’t qualify for a mortgage. So Romney became their bank. Tim and Betty Stamps have been making out $600 checks to Romney every month for 15 years. They refinanced the property with him this June. [NY Times]
What are these Campbell Construction Company workers doing? Just building a fence down aways on Barron Ln. from their Missouri City office — in order to block the driveway belonging to their neighbor, Cesar Larias. Owner Jeff Campbell ordered the fence built after Larias refused to pay a $50 monthly fee to access his own garage.
Ten years ago, Campbell bought several parcels — one of which apparently includes Larias’s driveway and most of his front yard — from a tax auction. How’d they come up for sale? Channel 2 reporter Stephen Dean explains:
Court documents reviewed by Local 2 Investigates show that the original landowner who developed the entire neighborhood had divided off several of the strips of land in question, hoping to sell them separately someday if the government expanded Hillcroft Street down through the subdivision. That expansion never happened.
The original landowner died and Fort Bend County ended up selling the parcels of subdivided land at an auction on the courthouse steps because no one was paying taxes on those parcels anymore.
Until Campbell asked him and several neighbors to start paying a fee to access their own properties, Larias had no idea that his driveway and front yard did not belong to his family’s homestead. Alas, such appears to be the case.
Asked if he has considered selling the land back to the homeowners, Campbell said, “Yeah, but the amount they want to give for it, I don’t want to sell it for that. You see the situation that I’m in?”
Campbell insisted he’s not trying to gouge the neighbors or force them from their homes, although he admitted he may want to expand his nearby construction business.
“Well, my decision was to have them pay something to use it,” said Campbell. “I’ve been really above and beyond fair about it. I’m not trying to hurt these people.”
He admitted that it may appear heavy-handed for him to have placed a Dumpster across the driveway when the Larios family stopped paying for access.
Wait! How’d you reporter dudes find out about the Dumpster?
A Swamplot reader from the Missouri City neighborhood of Quail Glen writes in asking for help figuring out what to do about a neighbor who’s tapped her water line:
“. . . the guilty party had dug up the ground and connected a line from [their house] (previous and currently disconnected for several months) into the active line that provides water that we are paying for. This investigation was initially sparked during January 2009 due to skyrocketing water bills. After several visits to our home and meter, the City of Houston discovered the problem on today. When confronted, the inhabitants fabricated a story saying that they pay a 300.00 water bill each month to the City of Houston (despite their account being disconnected) and that they are moving anyway.
Our reader has a bit more to say about those neighbors:
The Willowisp Country Club is being transformed — from not-loved-enough golf course . . . to tilt-wall paradise! First, the clubhouse was clubbed. Then somebody probably had to go around and remove all those holes. Now the first three buildings of Trammell Crow’s new 168-acre Lakeview Business Park are under construction, reports Amy Wolff Sorter in Globe St. They’ll be complete next year, and total 240,000 sq. ft.
Whether the remainder of the park goes spec, build to suit or a combination of both depends on the market. “We’re offering the buildings for sale or for lease, which is a little different from our typical program,” says James Casey, TCC’s managing director in Houston. TCC’s more traditional MO is to keep and lease what it builds.
“This method offers us greater flexibility since we have a lot of land for the business park,” Casey tells GlobeSt.com. “We’d like to get this park developed as quickly as we can and think offering these for sale will accelerate velocity of bringing users to the park.”
After the jump: a site plan, plus public-transit-friendly views of the first three buildings!
