The Houston Chronicle’s annual neighborhood-sales-data extravaganza came out this weekend. Since it covers the 2008 calendar year, the survey is timed just right to document the continuing drop in sales and prices of far-flung lower-priced homes — but maybe a bit early to catch the extended Wile E. Coyote-style midair hang a fair number of closer-in half-a-million-plus homes on the market are currently experiencing.
A few highlights:
Sales activity dropped in all counties for non-foreclosure transactions. All counties showed a rise in sales of foreclosed homes.
And those foreclosures are also clearly missing the bullseye: In 2008 there were only 362 foreclosures inside the Loop and 2,556 between the Loop and Beltway 8 — but a whopping 9,342 outside the Beltway. In total, foreclosures were only up about 11 percent over the previous year. But the number of non-foreclosure sales dropped by almost 22 percent. So in 2008 foreclosures accounted for just under 22 percent of all sales.
It’s now a whole lot easier to figure out how to get around Houston using public transit: Metro routes have at last been embedded in Google Maps. Which means if you use Google to plan a local trip, figuring out how to get there by bus or rail is now as simple as choosing “By public transit” from a dropdown menu. Schedule info is right there too.
So far, the public transit option shows up whenever you use Google Maps to get directions in Houston — or you can start from a separate Google Transit gateway here. Not yet activated for Houston: Google’s Transit Layer, which in other cities lets you see all the routes at once.
Even more convenient: If you can get Google Maps on your mobile phone, you now have access to bus and train directions and schedules there too. Here’s a video demonstrating how that works:
Today’s as good a day as any to highlight the work of YouTube user hcp051000, aka Senior Airman Pan, who has compiled an impressive array of videos documenting the performance of some of this city’s finer vertical conveyances.
What’s it like to ride in these Houston elevators, really? Now you can find out — and shop for your favorite — from behind the comfort of your own computer screen.
Here’s S.A. Pan’s ride in the colorful cab of a Dover elevator at the Kemah Boardwalk Inn Hotel:
Earlier this week, Google greatly expanded the areas covered by its Street View feature. The expansion means street views in areas way outside of Houston and its surrounding areas are now viewable from within Google Maps. In fact, Google’s new coverage map indicates that pretty much all of Texas (or at least areas near its major roads and highways) now has navigable street images available, excepting a few patches here and there and a couple of wide swaths of land near El Paso.
What about the rest of the country? Oh, there’s some expanded coverage out there too:
Google has rolled out another update to its Street View feature, this time allowing simultaneous views of a property from the air and the street — as shown in this view of a familiar Rice Village site. The button labeled “Street View” that used to sit at the top of most maps is gone. In its place: a character named Pegman who stands at the ready above the zoom slider on the left side of each map, and who narrates this video detailing the new Google Map features:
This 1946 Dmitri Kessel photo of some not-long-vacant Houston property is just one of a half-million images from the Life magazine photo archives that are now only a Google search away. Google is announcing that the entire collection of photos taken for Life magazine — about 10 million in all — will be available within the next few months. About 97 percent of these images have never been seen by the general public.
The images are available from a simple Google image search. You can single out the Life images by adding “source:life” to your search or by starting at this gateway.
Houston photophile Robert Kimberly, who’s been poring through the collection, says
There are loads of Houston pictures, but add “TX” or Texas” to narrow a search to the city.Otherwise you’ll be seeing lots of “Whitney.”
Tired of looking at the same old images of Hurricane Ike devastation? Now, thanks to the amazing aerial camerawork of Dallas’s Hawkeye Media, you can conduct your own Bolivar Peninsula post-disaster flyover, focusing only on the destruction you want to see — from the comfort of your own broadband internet connection.
Hawkeye’s interface allows you to navigate through the company’s panoramic overhead views of wasted homes and newly desolate landscapes, zooming in and out as fast as your middle finger can scroll.
A company called U.S. Forensic has posted 1700 aerial photographs taken from a low-altitude airplane the company flew over southeastern Texas and Louisiana a few days after the hurricane. The photos are arranged in an overlay accessible through Google Earth, so you can import the file into the free software and search for views by address.
Even if you don’t use the Google Earth interface, the directory of individual photos provides some shocking scenes:
Having trouble finding photos of your Iked house on Flickr? Try finding it from the air, using NOAA’s brand-new aerial photos, taken only a few days after Hurricane Ike.
Thanks to the efforts of a volunteer firefighter, banished Surfside Beach and Surfside Shores residents may be able to view their homes on Flickr. Former New Orleans resident Adam P. Devaney has taken more than 800 photos of surviving homes in the area, though he’s only halfway through with the uploading.
Devaney, who has taken photographs as a hobby for about 10 years, said he did not zero in on the most dramatic damage, but rather tried to document the entire landscape. He estimates he has photographed bout 95 percent of Surfside Beach since Ike’s landfall.
He will try to photograph the beachside communities of Treasure Island and San Luis Pass later this week at the request of some homeowners. He tried to enter Treasure Island on Tuesday, but was turned away by Brazoria County Sheriff’s deputies, who are keeping the area off limits, due to severe storm damage.
Here it is, the bastard brainy child of those old David Hockney photocollages and Quicktime VR: Microsoft Photosynth. Someday, maybe, it’ll revolutionize online real-estate gawking. For now, though, it just looks kinda cool.
Another lost jogger, rescued by iPhone. But what happens when Google Maps fail? “Every time I am in Houston I am filled with renewed trepidation over the in-laws neighborhood. It’s lovely, of course, but it’s also a Houston suburbs’ subdivision. Despite having visited numerous times over the course of the past three and a half years, I am remarkably unable to maintain any sense of cardinal directions or relative location once we enter the sprawling land of pale-red-and-cream houses in well-manicured cul-de-sacs with nice names.”
Houston’s Downtown wireless-access experiment is now up and running, with a network of 20 free hotspots, identified in the city’s interactive map above. The hotspots offer download speeds of up to 2Mbps and uploads of up to 1Mbps, which is in the ballpark of cable and DSL service. Brave iPhone tester (and Chronicle Tech columnist) Dwight Silverman reports coverage is pretty spotty between Wi-Fi hotspots:
I’d get a decent signal on my iPhone in one block, then turn a corner and get bupkis. But if I walked a few more feet, I could usually get enough of a connection that I could check e-mail.
Silverman also offers this tip:
If you want a good connection and you’re not near a hotspot, look for one of the dual-antenna access points mounted atop street lights. Get close it for a stronger signal.
Swamplot covers real estate, home design and renovation, architecture, and the landscape of Houston, Texas. Swamplot did not flood during Allison — or Ike! Honest! Read more
