Monday, January 28, 2008
January 28, 2008 – 12:37 pm
If you were wondering why the four-year effort to redevelop the Astrodome seemed like it was being run by the Keystone Kops, here’s a small piece of information that might start to explain a few things: Michael Surface, who up until a few weeks ago was chairman of the Harris County Sports and Convention Corp., has been indicted on corruption charges:
In order to secure business from the city of Houston, prosecutors allege, Schatte and Surface bribed Monique McGilbra, the city’s director of building services under then-Mayor Lee Brown, and hired her boyfriend, Garland Hardeman, as a consultant.
McGilbra pleaded guilty in 2005 to accepting bribes and has cooperated with prosecutors on the indictment.
According to the indictment, Schatte, 59, and Surface, 47, gave McGilbra free use of Schatte’s California condo, tickets to professional football games and a box containing champagne and $1,000 in cash. They also paid Hardeman more than $40,000 in consulting fees — $7,800 of which he funneled to McGilbra.
This is, of course, the same Michael Surface who decided to run a “competition” for the right to redevelop the Astrodome more than four years ago with this screwy premise: Ideas would only be considered if they were proposed by developers who had experience with projects of a similar size; but developers with experience on projects of a similar size would not be considered unless their ideas were considered acceptable. And yes, he’s the same Michael Surface who kept pushing the “winner” of the competition — Astrodome Redevelopment Corp. — to change its proposal from a space-themed amusement park to a convention hotel. And who gave them, during all that time, exclusive rights to negotiate a deal.
It’s not so surprising that new proposals for the Dome have begun to leak out in the few short weeks since Surface abruptly resigned his HCSCC post.
Read more about: 77054, Astrodome, Crime, Development Strategy, Public Buildings, reliant-park
Thursday, January 24, 2008
January 24, 2008 – 7:39 pm
For four years, the fate of the Astrodome has been chained to the proposals of a single company. Those proposals at first went in all sorts of different directions but lately have seemed to be going nowhere. And now, finally, the stewards of the Astrodome’s future have declared that Astrodome Redevelopment’s exclusive right to redevelop the Houston landmark will be coming to an end.
That’s great news, because all that exclusivity and secrecy and incompetence has overshadowed one of the best ideas ever suggested for reusing the Dome — which today can finally be revealed: Let’s turn the Astrodome into . . . horse stables!
Astroturf and tiered stadium seats would give way to more than 1,000 horse stalls and an arena with a capacity of at least 6,000. The vast open area where former Astros stars Jimmy Wynn and Jeff Bagwell hit towering drives would be turned into a three-story exhibition and stalling space, Shafer said.
Isn’t doing time as a livestock storage center the hallmark of a historically significant building? And it will make the next renovation so much more dramatic: “Can you believe it? Before they restored it, they used this thing for horse stables!”
After the jump, some reasons why this plan might have legs.
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Read more about: 77054, Astrodome, Attractions, Development Strategy, Historic Preservation, Proposed Developments, Public Buildings, reliant-park
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
January 22, 2008 – 8:36 am
Renovate or demolish? It’s a false choice, really. Now you can do both!
If ever one listing encapsulated the essential paradox at the heart of the Third Ward’s uh . . . “resurgence,” it’s the one just posted for 2103 Berry St.
Contractors are hard at work completely renovating this Third Ward duplex . . . so that you can buy it and tear it down. Then you can start over and build brand-new townhouses! The brand-new listing features the construction-site photo above and the following description:
GREAT DUPLEX UNDER RENOVATIONS LOCATED MINUTES AWAY FROM DOWNTOWN,MIDTOWN, TOYOTA CENTER AND MINUTE MAID PARK. CORNER LOT SURROUNDED BY NEW CONSTRUCTION. PHENOMENAL OPPORTUNITY FOR A DEVELOPER’S OR INVESTOR’S TO BUILD TOWNHOMES.
Who says you can’t have it all?
After the jump: Can’t we just slather the stucco over the exterior brickwork and call it even?
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Read more about: 77004, Buying and Selling, Demolitions, Development Strategy, Duplexes, Homes for Sale, Real Estate Marketing, Renovations, Third Ward, Townhomes
Monday, December 31, 2007
December 31, 2007 – 9:14 am
After years of visionary stewardship, the man who created the brilliant plan to find a new use for the Astrodome has resigned from his post as chairman of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation.
Yeah, it’s a shock and a shame, too. Michael Surface had so many useful connections within the development community and county government.
Read more about: 77054, Astrodome, Development Strategy, reliant-park
Friday, December 21, 2007
December 21, 2007 – 4:15 pm
Uptown renters: Were you planning on staying in your apartment for a while?
A sharp-eyed reader notes that ZOM — the developer of the Bel Air on Allen Parkway and the new Katrina Memorial apartments planned for Revere St. near Kirby and Westheimer (pictured above) — is also planning a 250-unit apartment complex somewhere near the Galleria. The company’s going to stick with its strategy of buying existing apartment complexes, demolishing them, building newer apartments in their place, and then selling them off, ZOM’s Trip Stevens tells Globe St.’s Amy Wolff Sorter:
“It’s the only way to go in that submarket,” Stevens says. But then he adds real news:
Stephens says ZOM will do the same thing to get its third Houston project into the Galleria submarket. He says the closing for the existing apartment complex should occur late in the first quarter. The plan is to start scraping the three-acre site around midyear.
That’s information a few Galleria-area renters who live in three-acre apartment complexes will probably want to know.
Read more about: Apartments, Demolitions, Development Strategy, Galleria, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments
Thursday, December 13, 2007
December 13, 2007 – 3:01 pm
Looks like a lot of pedestrian action going on in these marketing drawings for Orr Commercial’s new Heights Village, a five-acre restaurant, retail, office, and “upscale housing” development slated for the current site of the Sons of Hermann hall just south of I-10, between Heights Blvd. and Yale St. and an adjacent parcel abutting railroad tracks to the south.
Why, with all those people in the drawings walking to and fro, it looks like this development will have all the charm of a small old-town Main Street . . . or at the very least all the charm of an old small town that decided to build a multi-level parking garage, but still turned its Main Street into a parking lot anyway, just to hedge its bets.
After the jump: more parking-lot pedestrians!
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Read more about: 77007, Apartments, Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Houston Heights, Mixed Use, New Construction, Office Space, Parking, Parking-Garages, Proposed Developments, Restaurants, Retail, Shopping Centers, Strip Centers, Washington Corridor
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Read more about Apartments, Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Mixed Use, Neighborhoods: Houston Heights, Neighborhoods: Washington Corridor, New Construction, Parking, Proposed Developments, Restaurants, Retail, Shopping Centers, Strip Centers
December 13, 2007 – 10:10 am
Here’s the problem with these sleek houses on full-acre lots in River Oaks: They’re selling for too damn cheap! The gorgeous land at the southern boundary of Memorial Park fronting Buffalo Bayou at 3840 Willowick — hogged by this eighties-modern home designed by New York architects Stonehill and Taylor — got swept up for between $45 and $57 a square foot at the end of August.
At that price, wouldn’t your head be spinning with the themed-towering-mansion possibilities? Bring on the demo and stucco crews!
Well, the stucco and foam cornice pieces will probably take a while, but the big machines with the giant claws are on their way, according to this morning’s demolition report.
Photos, plans, and details of the house-that-got-in-the-way — including some fine examples of how to distract from a River Oaks land sale — after the jump:
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Read more about: 77019, Buffalo Bayou, Buying and Selling, Demolitions, Development Strategy, Home Design, Land Prices, Land Sales, Memorial-Park, Modern Design, River Oaks
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
December 11, 2007 – 1:22 pm
Houston is such an international city! If you’ve been here a while, you’ve probably already found Tuscany in Houston and Hong Kong in Houston, and perhaps also Charlottesville, New Delhi, Versailles, New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Dubai, Atlanta, and maybe even some Lubbock in Houston as well.
Well, here’s a new one: Now you can discover Barcelona in Houston too. And it’s in Spring Branch!
Fortunately, for those of you tired at the thought of all that around-the-world-in-eighty-themed-apartments travel, this little bit of the Spanish Mediterranean comes in the familiar form of a Houston townhome six-pack: two rows of bright yellow tightly fit stucco-coated boxes facing a bare concrete driveway.
So really, it shouldn’t seem so foreign after all.
After the jump, more pics!
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Read more about: 77055, Development Strategy, Home Design, Homes for Sale, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Real Estate Marketing, Spring-Branch, Theming, Townhomes
Thursday, December 6, 2007
December 6, 2007 – 2:35 pm
A reader who lives in the neighborhood points us to drawings and information from New Urbanist planners Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. about the firm’s designs for the former MDI Superfund site in the Fifth Ward. DPZ, of course, is most famous for the enormous small-town-sized stage-set the company designed for the 1998 Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show, which became so popular that it was kept on and is now used as a Florida Panhandle resort named Seaside.
InTown Homes and Lovett Homes owner Frank Liu bought the MDI site — a former metal foundry and spent-catalyst “recycling” facility famously polluted with lead and several thousand chemistry sets’ worth of other toxic substances — from the EPA late last year, with promises that he’ll spend a couple of years and $6.7 million remediating the property before letting Houstonians live there. Still, 36+ acres of inner-loop land at $5 a square foot doesn’t sound like too bad a deal.
After the jump: a look at DPZ’s MDI plans, plus large grains of salt.
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Read more about: 77020, Development Strategy, Environmental, Fifth Ward, Hazards, Land Development, Master-Planned Communities, New-Urbanism, Proposed Developments, Superfund-Sites, Toxic Sites
Monday, November 19, 2007
November 19, 2007 – 11:52 am
Sure, Metro talks a lot about transportation in this city’s central districts. But a Houston Business Journal profile shows us Harris County Metropolitan Transit Authority Chairman David Wolff is also enthusiastic about Houston’s westward spread:
Many developers are building various types of commercial properties west of Houston and beyond.
The city of Katy, with an estimated population of 205,000, sits square in the path of Houston’s westward growth pattern.
“The whole city is going that way,” Wolff says. “I think Katy is going to be the next Sugar Land.”
He recalls the creation of Park 10, and how much the area has grown over the last three decades.
Says Wolff: “It was just rice fields. That was really the edge of the world then.”
After the jump, the METRO Board Chairman’s exciting projects way out west, plus how to get folks in the “next Sugar Land” to build freeway on- and off-ramps for your developments!
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Read more about: Buying and Selling, Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Freeways, Katy, Land Development, Metro, Proposed Developments, Real Estate Investing, Sprawl, Transportation
Thursday, November 15, 2007
November 15, 2007 – 11:36 am
The Lenny’s Sub Shops continue their Houston conquest. The franchise is now up to seventeen stores, with eleven opening soon, including one in this new shopping center about to begin construction on the Gulf Freeway feeder just north of Wayside. That’s almost a third of the way to the company’s goal!
The I-45 (northbound) and Wayside property developer is Bobby Orr, who complained to the Chronicle’s Nancy Sarnoff about the glut of suburban strip centers back in June: “We’re going urban,” he said. And really, the Orr Commercial properties are all over the map. But don’t be fooled by the side-of-the-freeway location and strip-center layout on this one: Luring hungry drivers out of inner-loop freeway traffic jams is an important part of Houston’s urban spirit.
Read more about: 77023, Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, East End, Fast Food, Franchises, New Construction, Retail, Shopping Centers, Strip Centers, Traffic
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
November 14, 2007 – 10:15 am
By now everybody knows the full story about the latest proposal to turn the Reliant Astrodome into a wacky, gondola-and-balloon-filled convention-hotel donut, right? Sure, it took the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation four years to work out the plan — and okay, the would-be redevelopers might be a little stingy about actually showing anybody what the thing is supposed to look like. But the proposal’s clear enough that when the Rodeo and the Texans say they don’t like the project we know enough about the plan to understand what they’re objecting to. Right?
Well, maybe not.
In the latest installment of the Chronicle’s “Oh, by the way, we failed to mention” series on the latest Dome redo efforts, reporter Bill Murphy drops this little nugget about twenty-three paragraphs in:
The rodeo’s [Chief Operating Officer Leroy] Shafer said he understands that officials in his organization might be viewed as “obstructionists” because of their opposition to the plan. But the public, he said, would understand the rodeo’s stance if officials of the group could speak freely about what they see as the project’s problems. Rodeo officials had to sign confidentiality agreements before they were allowed to review details of the plan.
Hey, Harris County residents should feel lucky: we got to see a drawing of the project without all of us having to sign non-disclosure agreements! If we all promise to sign and keep our mouths shut, can we find out about the project secrets too?
But there’s more:
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Read more about: 77054, Astrodome, Attractions, Development Strategy, Historic Preservation, Hotels, Proposed Developments, Public Buildings, reliant-park
Friday, November 9, 2007
November 9, 2007 – 1:27 pm
How do you pack so many condos into an old warehouse building in Houston’s First Ward? Easy! You knock the warehouse down, build a gate around the block, and pack ’em in!
Permit in hand, Terramark Homes begins construction on the Sawyer Brownstones at 2110 Shearn St. The forty-two units will take up the block surrounded by Shearn, Hemphill, Spring, and Henderson Streets, just south of I-10.
No images of the outside yet, so it’s hard to say if these brownstones will indeed have brown stone or just be brownstone-like. But continue after the jump and we’ll show you the secret to shoehorning so many townhome-style condos into a single block!
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Read more about: 77007, Construction Materials, Demolitions, Development Strategy, First Ward, Garages, Homebuilders, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Parking, Proposed Developments, Townhomes
Thursday, November 8, 2007
November 8, 2007 – 11:22 am
Now that a drawing of the Titan condo tower has been posted on the proposed Galleria development’s website, it’s clear why Randall Davis wasn’t so worried that potential buyers would be distracted by the McDonald’s that’s gonna be rebuilt next door. One look at the Titan tower poised on top of its launch-pad parking garage, and you’ll likely become more concerned about lift-off than drive-thru.
Where are the rocket boosters? And will the heat-shield tiles stay on? Don’t worry — as with most Randall Davis projects, the Titan will only reach a comic-book-level approximation of its theme. To confuse things further, Michelangelo’s statue of David appears to have been chosen as the tower’s mascot.
Read more about: 77056, Condos, Development Strategy, Fast Food, Galleria, Highrises, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments, Randall Davis, Real Estate Marketing, Restaurants
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
November 7, 2007 – 8:02 am
More high comedy surrounding the Astrodome: Just what is Texans owner Bob McNair’s problem with the proposal to redevelop the Astrodome into a hotel? It’s . . . the hotel!
“A hotel would be in direct conflict with our games and when the rodeo is going on. You can’t tell guests they can’t come to the hotel on Sundays. That wouldn’t be fair to them. It wouldn’t be fair to our fans.
“We’re trying to be open-minded about this. We’re willing to look at anything that doesn’t conflict with our events.”
Now, you’re probably asking yourself: Haven’t the Texans known that the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation was wanting to turn the Dome into a hotel now for about . . . what, three years? Wouldn’t the two groups maybe have wanted to chat with each other at some point during that period?
Silly you! You’re presuming that the Texans and the Rodeo and the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation — Reliant Park’s landlords — actually have some intention or incentive to come up with a workable plan to redevelop the Astrodome. And you’re forgetting that turning the Dome into a hotel was an idea pushed early on by . . . the HCSCC’s chairman, Mike Surface! Remember that space-theme amusement-park concept that was so brilliant that the group that proposed it won the “competition” the HCSCC set up four years ago — even over other developer groups that had more experience and deeper pockets? That group was the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation.
A year later the ARC scrapped its own space-park concept in favor of the convention-hotel complex pushed by the HCSCC. With the Sports and Convention Corporation’s backing, the company worked in secret for three more years to refine the proposal.
Good thing the HCSCC didn’t solicit any alternate proposals during that time. Just think of the confusion that would have caused!
Photo of Astrodome from August 28, 1992: Flickr user j4e0f0f
Read more about: 77054, Astrodome, Attractions, Development Strategy, Historic Preservation, Hotels, Houston-Texans, Proposed Developments, Public Buildings, reliant-park, Rodeo, Tourism
Thursday, November 1, 2007
November 1, 2007 – 10:22 am
You know things must be getting desperate for the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation, which earlier this week suffered the indignity of having two rather important stakeholders come out against the latest incarnation of the company’s tightly guarded, four-years-in-the-making, Frankenstein-inspired proposal for bringing the Dome back to life. When they finally got to see the proposal, “recently,” the Texans and the Livestock Show & Rodeo decided the Astrodome’s new incarnation would be incompatible with their own operations.
But the greatest indication of the redevelopment group’s desperation was revealed just yesterday in local ABC-TV reporter Miya Shay’s blog. That’s right, the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation is going for broke: The company finally decided to release to the public actual images of its proposal for the county-owned facility!
Yes, it’s a daring strategy to use on a property paid for by local taxpayers, but it just might work.
After the jump: the newly released images of the Astrodome hotel-under-glass!
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Read more about: 77054, Astrodome, Attractions, Development Strategy, Historic Preservation, Hotels, Houston-Texans, Proposed Developments, Public Buildings, reliant-park, Rodeo, Tourism
