“Ronald McDonald will soon have all of his parking spaces back,” writes Swamplot tipster Michele, who also sends in these photos from yesterday. They show the sales office for Randall Davis’s canceled Titan highrise — which hung out in the McDonald’s parking lot on Post Oak for many months — boarded up and readied for its next location and rebranding assignment.
So where are all the half-built homes? That question, asked by a Swamplot reader last week, prompted a slew of comments from other readers eager to identify pockets and neighborhoods in and around Houston where construction has come to a halt because of problems connected to the nationwide housing-market collapse. (As well as a few where construction stopped for reasons of a more local nature.)
Swamplot reader subprimelandguy suggested looking at Northwest Houston:
You need to go to the suburban areas, particularly the non master planned communities between the Beltway and Highway 6 / 1960. The most aggressive one is actually inside the Beltway near West Road and Gessner – a former Royce Homes (go figure) development called Westwood Gardens. It is a bombed out poster child for the subprime fiasco.
Then late yesterday, subprimelandguy sent in photos!
A reader writes in wanting to know where all the half-built houses are. Sure, High Street came to a halt after producing a naked frame, but what neighborhoods in the greater Houston area feature finer examples of similarly dramatic frozen-in-time residential work that a real-estate gawker could appreciate? Abandoned slabs, lonely stick frames, flapping Tyvek — that sort of thing?
THE TRANS-TEXAS CORRIDOR IS DEAD But maybe it’ll come back, with a new name! “In response to public outcry, the ambitious proposal to create the Trans-Texas Corridor network has been dropped and will be replaced with a plan to carry out road projects at an incremental, modest pace, a state transportation official announced today. ‘The Trans-Texas Corridor, as it is known, no longer exists,’ said Amadeo Saenz, Jr., executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation a forum in Austin. The state, he said, will carry forward with modifications to proposed projects and will rely heavily upon input from Texans through more town hall meetings and an updated Web site. He also made clear that, should toll lanes be added to various roads, tolls will be assessed only on those, and not existing lanes. The renewed effort now will operate under the name ‘Innovative Connectivity Plan.’ Saenz also said the state will continue to pursue various projects, including the Interstate 69 project. If, however, more lanes are needed along U.S. 59, the state will simply widen that roadway, Saenz said.” [Houston Chronicle]
Swamplot mentioned the cancellation of Randall Davis’s Titan condo project in passing yesterday, announcing at the same time that the project had scored the first-place spot in the hotly contested Most Grandiose Development category of the Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate. But really, if any 2008 event in Houston real estate deserves its own separate post on Swamplot, this is it.
Davis told the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff that slow sales convinced him to shut down the 25-story highrise project. There’ll be no rearranging of the deck chairs, no putting the project “on hold,” no “My Heart Will Go On.” It’s all over.
But the Titan will be sorely missed.
Here’s something we can all feel tingly and nostalgic about: Developer Bobby Orr’s Heights-ish fantasy — of brand-new old-timey storefronts facing long streetside parking lots off Yale St. and Heights Blvd. just south of I-10 — is dead. The Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff drops news of the demise of the Heights Village dream as an aside to her update on the stalled-out High Street development.
The entire 4.9-acre property, across Heights Blvd. from the ArtCar Museum, is back on the market, at $75 a square foot.
Sadly, Cushman & Wakefield’s listing for the property doesn’t include any misty watercolors to memorialize what might have been. But Swamplot remembers! Here’s a brief trip down invented-memory lane . . . in 3 quick images:
Problems getting credit have stalled or dashed hopes for many Houston developments, leaving vacant sites, ratty construction fences, and more than a few misleading “coming soon” signs touting unachievable goals. Off Westheimer just west of Mid Lane, though, we’ll have a much bigger and longer-lasting reminder of changed fortunes to look at, for a good long while: The steel frame of the first building in Trademark Property’s High Street project.
Work has stopped.
What happened?
NOT GOING WEST The Energy Corridor won’t be extending to Katy just yet. KBR’s big move to a new 8-building campus a mile east of the Katy Mills Mall has been scrapped — “for now”: “‘We hope it is a delay, not a change in plans,’ said Will Holder, president of Trendmaker Homes. The development division of the company is building Cross Creek Ranch, a 3,200-acre master-planned community in Fulshear. KBR announced its project in May, saying it wanted to be closer to its growing employee- and customer-base in west Houston, where it would be joining the likes of BP and ConocoPhillips. The campus was designed to include more than 910,000 square feet of space in a series of low-rise buildings at the southwest corner of Interstate 10 and Grand Parkway. Construction was expected to start by year’s end, with estimated completion in 2010. The company was going to lease the facility from developer Trammell Crow Co., which was going to build it on a 123-acre parcel along with shopping centers, restaurants, additional office buildings and hotels.” [Houston Chronicle]
