07/30/10 4:10pm

The Johnson family may not want to come directly from the airport to their new home when they return tomorrow from their weeklong surprise vacation in Paris. “Organizers are frantic they may not be able to finish,” reports abc13’s Cynthia Cisneros, who adds that the project was still 21 hours behind schedule as of this afternoon (that’s marked down from about 30 yesterday). Meanwhile, the folks at HHN Homes have updated the company’s website for the project with a screaming headline: “Extreme Help Needed!!” and a list of specific trades they’re hoping to attract for shifts beginning 8 pm tonight and Saturday.

“Every radio station and tv station is soliciting the public for volunteers,” notes Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia, who visited the site this afternoon. And she noted evidence of more problems:

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07/20/10 6:24pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY THE BANK WON’T FINISH BUILDING THOSE TOWNHOUSES “. . . the bank would rather take the loss than become builders. The law in Texas puts certain long term responsibilities on the builder and the banks don’t want to get into it. I’ve talked to a few banks about finishing, or at least drying in, some of them and for them it’s cheaper to let them rot and write them off than to prolong the process and get financially deeper into a project that will probably never turn a profit. That money is making them +5.5% profit now if they invest it elsewhere, which over a very short amount of time, more than makes up for the loss. Bankers care about money not urban blight.” [SCD, commenting on Swamplot Price Adjuster: Some Unfinished EaDo Business]

07/08/10 5:58pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY “Only in Houston would someone use a blog post about a building’s code violations to advertise FOR the building.” [JCoy, commenting on The Somewhat Public To-Do List Posted at 230 West Alabama]

07/06/10 1:52pm

“Apparently ‘Houston’s newest chic address‘ has some code violations on its hands,” writes the reader who found a well-worn code enforcement tag at 230 West Alabama, the Midtown-ish apartment tower formerly known as Executive House:

I stopped by on Sunday, July 4, to see if the leasing office was open and found this notice on the door. The violation from the City of Houston Code Enforcement Department says: OBTAIN ELECTRICAL PERMIT AND REPAIR UNSAFE ELECTRICAL IMMEDIATELY…OBTAIN PLUMBING PERMIT AND REPAIR UNSAFE PLUMBING IMMEDIATELY…REPAIR UNSAFE STRUCTURAL IMMEDIATELY…SEE REPORT FOR DETAILS…SUBJECT TO CITATIONS DAILY FOR NON-COMPLIANCE. The date in the bottom right hand corner appears to be 04-04-10. I think I’ll keep searching for that apartment elsewhere.

The tag:

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06/24/10 10:36pm

A commenter on the TexAgs online forum is claiming that former Royce Builders vice president Shawn Speer called his supervisors and threatened him with the loss of his job. The fun started about a month ago when another forum participant, who goes by the name Comet*, complained online that workers constructing a house next door to his had been using water from his home without permission, leaving nails on the street and trash around the neighborhood. Comet* didn’t know who was building the home, but 2 days later, after several hours of phone calls, he received a call back from Shawn Speer. Comet*’s record of the conversation will likely be of interest to the many fans of bankrupt Royce Builders:

So I told him what was wrong, and he was extremely nice and will be doing a number of things to make sure that doesn’t happen. Went above what I expected, and I am very satisfied for now. No complaints at all anymore.

He said we’re not trying to hide who we are, I just ran out of signs, so that’s why there was no contact info on the lot.

me: So you’re just going by “Shawn Spears?”

s: Well, I have several companies and mentioned Travis homes as one of them (the only one I didn’t know Royce was working under).

But according to Comet* (or Comet*’s wife, who apparently also posts under the same account), the workers didn’t stop using the water spigot on his property. And then things started to escalate. Comet*’s wife wrote the next day:

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05/25/10 11:15am

A CONDO OWNERS FAN SITE FOR SHAYA BOYMELGREEN Still waiting for the developer of the twin-tower condo development proposed for San Felipe near the end of Woodway to provide an update on the project? Some New Yorkers would like a word with him too. The residents of the Newswalk Condominium in Brooklyn have created a website called Shame on Shaya, documenting in Russian, Hebrew, and English the “extraordinary number of construction defects” in developer Shaya Boymelgreen’s first high-profile development, constructed in 2002: “The building is now undergoing a two-year, $7 million construction remediation project. Newswalk residents are currently in legal action against Boymelgreen with a suit seeking no less than $10 million in damages.” Spokesman Michael Rogers explains: “Many of us got to know Shaya in the early days of Newswalk, and found him friendly and likeable. He may not fully understand what the residents of Newswalk are suffering, and this campaign is a way to bring him up-to-date.” [Previously on Swamplot]

05/14/10 11:31pm

First it was up, then it sat unfinished for a good long time, then it was down, and now it’s been . . . resurrected! Viula from the Heights Life blog sends in the latest photo of the corner townhouse unit in the former Waterhill Homes development at 8th St. and Nicholson in the Heights (where 8th Avenue Elementary School used to be):

Remember the one they were breaking down on the end? Well, they built it back up again. My husband thinks the ground floor (garage) is the same but I disagree.

Real progress doesn’t always follow a straight-line path, no? Last time we studied this well-weathered unit, you’ll remember, it was indeed on its way down:

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04/28/10 3:13pm

So what was the cause of all the hullabaloo over at Fire Station 16 at the corner of Richmond and Dunlavy that caused fire department officials to close it down for a few days earlier this month? A source told Swamplot on April 2nd that the building likely had foundation problems and was close to collapsing. Here’s what firefighters spotted:

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04/20/10 12:55pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: YOUR HOUSTON TOWNHOUSE IN 2050 “. . . Imagine your typical 100 x 100 ft lot, shared driveway down the middle, with 3 fee-simple townhouse units on each side. Now, imagine them 40 years from now, when the post-tensiooned slabs have failed, roofs are worn out, window/roof leaks have caused rot, etc. It is hard to imagine the scenario in which one of the middle units could be replaced with something new. It is going to be very difficult. So somewhere down the road, it may be necessary for a new entity to come in and buy all six units and replat them for the land to find some other productive use. And that doesn’t sound all that easy, does it? This doesn’t seem to be a problem that afflicts every townhouse project, but the ones with the internal shared drives, party walls and continuous slabs sure seem vulnerable. I see the potential for future slums.” [Mies, commenting on Up and Down in Hyde Park]

04/02/10 6:18pm

BREAKING FIRE STATION NEWS The upper floor of the fire station at the corner of Richmond and Dunlavy in Montrose buckled today and the building is close to collapsing, a source with second-hand knowledge of the situation tells Swamplot. Problems with the foundation of the 1979 structure were reportedly complicated by the removal of a building column some time in the past. An engine, ladder, 2 ambulances, and an EMS supervisor are being relocated to nearby facilities and the station will be “closed indefinitely,” reports the source. Station 16 covers the greater Montrose area, roughly from Kirby to Spur 527 and from Bissonnet to West Dallas. [Swamplot inbox]

03/24/10 4:12pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE RUTLAND ST. SCARECROWS “Those houses are still in various stages of uncompleteness. Woe looks to be the fate of anyone who tries to get anything done there. Bill Baldwin is now the latest to try and for his sake, I hope he succeeds. But those places have been eyesores for awhile now. Personally, I think that places like the old Eighth Avenue Elementary site and 2200-2207 Rutland serve as scarecrows of a sort, scaring off townhome developers, much like the ones at 15th and Yale used to before a community garden went in there. . . .” [Martin Hajovsky, commenting on Heights Home Composting: The Amazing Disappearing Waterhill Townhomes; previously on Swamplot]

03/22/10 12:42pm

Okay, tell us what was the plan for that block south of W. 8th St. along the new Heights Hike-and-Bike Trail, between Nicholson and Waverly?

This large, open space will be available for community gardens, both cultivated and natural, think edible weeds. Small animal husbandry, such as goats, chickens and rats could also be sustained. Compost houses flank the development to show clientele how their homes will indeed return to their natural state a lá the second law of thermodynamics, or something like that. Between the back row of Compost Homes are the E-condos. These models reflect real world living as they do not have plumbing or electricity.

Huh? Well, it’s not even a year since Houston Indymedia reporter Keefski tried to explain it all . . . but the Waterhill Homes at the Heights development is at last seeing some action!

What kind of action?

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01/21/10 12:44pm

A reader writes in to complain about the not-quite-complete renovation of the former Sterling Bank building overlooking I-45 South at 4600 Gulf Fwy. The building was stripped down to its structure and is being reborn as the largest Planned Parenthood administrative headquarters and healthcare facility in the nation.

Is anyone else really bothered by the fact that on the stair-stepped portions of the curtain wall the spandrel glass doesn’t line up with the spandrels on the rest of the building? I mean if you’re going to design a facade that’s all about geometry, shouldn’t the geometry work? There had to be better ways to do this, really.

A close-up view:

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12/14/09 1:45pm

You know you want to see it: Yesterday’s “controlled demolition” of the hobbled 31-story Ocean Tower condo at the northern end of South Padre Island. Controlled Demolition’s dynamite work took down the tallest reinforced-concrete structure ever to be imploded.

A few more videos below. South Padre sure knows how to party!

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12/11/09 9:04am

Here’s a little drive-by tour with expert commentary on the lost and leaning Ocean Tower on South Padre Island, slated for implosion this Sunday at 9 a.m. The condo tower has supposed to have 31 levels, but accumulated many more stories: Construction was halted last year after one side of the building sunk more than 14 inches into the sand.

Three months after topping out the tower last spring, developer Antun Domit sent a letter to buyers noting that a problem of “differential settlement” had occurred:

Unfortunately, there is a layer or stratum of which the engineers tell us is “expandable clay”, meaning that it is a clay stratum that compresses [when] weight is placed upon it. Although our foundation is engineered to a depth above that stratum, the weight pressing on the stratum has caused sinking of the building on it.

But there’s a fix for that!

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