BACK IN THE WATERWAY, EVERYONE! City Council voted earlier this week to relax restrictions on the construction and renovation of homes in frequently flooded areas. The restrictions had been enacted quietly 2 years ago and protested by floodway residents ever since. “Under the revised rules, permits for construction on vacant land in floodways will be issued only if the building uses a pier and beam rather than a slab foundation, and if the applicant pays for any necessary mitigation, [deputy public works director Andy] Icken said.” [Houston Chronicle]
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Tag: Flooding
COLLECTING RAINWATER: NOT JUST FOR PLANTS The Public Works Department may modify proposed regulations requiring detention ponds or barrels on new construction and residential additions — before they go into effect in October: “City officials acknowledge the proposal is too broad and does not do enough to differentiate big projects from small projects that have less of a flood impact. They said changes will probably still require detention ponds for big projects – like town homes — that contribute to flooding, but smaller construction projects may be exempt.” [11 News]
Here’s the setup: Evacuated from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a family moves in with relatives in Houston. Hilarity ensues.
Drat! We missed the premiere of “As For Me and My House,” which began showing locally this week on KNWS, Channel 51. It sure would be great to see more clips.
And yes, this is the sitcom’s actual tag line: “The Hurricane may be over . . . but the Real Storm is just beginning!”
- As For Me and My House [MySpace]
- As For Me and My House – Trailer [YouTube]
- Life after Katrina inspires sitcom [Houston Business Journal]
Telephone Road south of I-45 has changed forever, declares John Nova Lomax:
Gone is the Mexican Catholic blue-collar neighborhood to the north around Queen of Peace church, its place taken by a string of hot sheet motels, clip joints, massage parlors and other such venues of vice. This is what’s left of the Telephone Road Mark May, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Culturcide and others have written songs about.
But it’s all impossibly sadder. The Telephone Road that Earle and Crowell sang about in the rollicking songs of that name is long gone. Crowell’s version is set in the ’50s and early ’60s, and Earle’s in the early ’70s. Today’s Telephone Road far better fits Earle’s “The Other Side of Town.â€
There’s more street-level reporting in Lomax and David Beebe’s latest narrated and well-lubricated walking tour, which starts Downtown and heads east along Leeland, through a neighborhood called Edmondson Addition:
Boarded-up hovels line some streets, awaiting inevitable transformation into the (mostly shoddy) condos that are springing up like dandelions here. Other streets reminded us of some of Galveston’s less opulent older districts – one and two-story wood frame houses standing on bricks, interspersed with brick warehouses and workshops.
The story includes Lomax’s encounters with Golfcrest’s underground shopping-cart economy and his retelling of a Telephone Rd. crack-and-hookers tale too uh . . . racy to fit into a song lyric.
After the jump, a very different portrait of Telephone Rd. from an earlier era.
The charms of gated acreage near Lake Conroe: large, wooded lakefront homesites, plus only a 25 minute commute . . . to The Woodlands! Oh, and if we’re talking about 1400-acre Crown Oaks in Montgomery County, lots of lawsuits, too!
Last year, the Crown Oaks Property Owners Association, along with individual homeowners, sued Affiliated Crown Development LTD, citing poor structure of the two manmade lakes in the development, located outside Montgomery.
But so much has happened since then: After new board members decided the developer would finally work with them to solve the lakes’ problems, the property owners association dropped its suit this fall. But now two groups of 10 individual homeowners have hired separate legal teams to continue their lawsuit against the developer. And in turn, the developer is now suing the engineering and construction firms it hired to build the dams on both lakes.
But there’s even more lawsuit fun:
“The POA tried to get out of the suit as a plaintiff, so my group has also sued them,” [homeowner attorney Kevin] Forsberg said. “The individuals were not satisfied. … Even though the POA started working with the developer in the hopes that the lakes would be fixed, nothing has actually been done.”
What’s it like to build your home on a lake that doesn’t bother to show up? Thanks to the amazing power of the internets, you can experience all the highs and lows of manmade-lakefront real-estate investing yourself — from the comfort of your own computer! Watch videos and read details of the whole dam story . . . after the jump!
Having perhaps exhausted other methods of communicating his distress at City of Houston Ordinance 19, Article III, Division 3, Sec. 19-43 — which now restricts the abilities of homeowners in floodways to improve their properties — White Oak Bayou-area resident Jay Green has, unfortunately, turned to poetry. And wouldn’t you know it, his poem begins “’Twas the night before . . .” but for some reason changes the holiday from Christmas to New Year’s and the tale from a rooftop landing to a collapse in property values.
Most of the poem would be too painful to reprint here, but let’s just say Mr. Green doesn’t think much of Mayor White, and throws just about every rhyme in the book at him. As a caution to readers against any future forays into the real-estate-poetry genre, only a couple of the uh . . . better stanzas are excerpted below:
Why has this property in Riverside Terrace been floating aimlessly on the market for almost five months? Sure, it’s being sold “as is” — and the “is” apparently doesn’t merit an interior photo. But the home has four bedrooms, contains 2,875 square feet of living space, and is apparently salvageable. Plus it sits on a 11,100-square-foot lot on a “lovely, tree-lined street” in a part of town that’s been pretty hot recently, no?
Worried that there still aren’t going to be enough places to live near the corner of Westheimer and Kirby after all the construction is done? Relax. The Texas division of Orlando, Florida’s ZOM Development just got a slew of construction permits approved yesterday for their next fancy apartment complex just a few blocks to the east of that busy intersection, at the corner of Revere and Cameron, at 2701 Revere St. (Cleverly, the address on the permits is listed as 2727 Revere. Why would they give it that number?)
Going up: Le Maison on Revere, 431 rental units on a just-under-six-acre site, a five-story mix of “flats and high-end loft units.”
But it looks like there’s more to it. Not satisfied with the Beaux-Arts-meets-the-Alamo stylings of the Bel Air Apartments they recently developed and filled up not too far away on Allen Parkway, the sleek modern look of the 2727 Kirby tower now going up across the street from their new development, or the apparent Superman-in-Gotham City theme of West Ave on the other side of Kirby, ZOM has apparently decided that their new complex will, at last, point out the absurdities of the area’s stylistic hodgepodge.
How? By theming the building with a higher, more symbolic purpose in mind.
That’s right: The Le Maison on Revere apartments will be marketed and dressed up to look like “New Orleans garden style apartments,” and thereby perform the public service of reminding residents of the former glory of their neighboring city and the dangers of living at low elevations in a high-water town.
Expect the top floors to fill up first.
- Le Maison on Revere (see “projects under development”) [ZOM Living]
- The Bel Air [ZOM Living]
- 2727 Kirby [MDA Holdings]
- West Ave: Shiny, Happy People Holding Shopping Bags [Swamplot]
If you’re looking for a home with plenty of wood paneling, you’re probably not going to do better than this fine 1953 concoction on Bevlyn Dr., just a few blocks south of Brays Bayou in Braes Terrace. Sure, it appears sedate from the street, but the interior walls comprise a small catalog of wood-paneling possibilities.
Minutes from the Medical Center and Rice University this classic mid-century home is located on a quiet tree-lined street. Large rooms with all formals, huge Family room that leads to a sun room and the wonderful pool.
The house is 3200 square feet, sits on an oversized lot, and is listed at $384,777. At the end of the agent’s description is the requisite disclaimer:
Per seller this home never flooded.
Of course it didn’t! Otherwise you’d be looking at water lines on all the wood walls.
After the jump, photos from inside, featuring: panels!
One of the more frustrating obstacles to paving more of this city is Houston’s little flooding problem. If we didn’t have so much damn water to get rid of, there’d be a whole lot more room here for basketball, high heels, rollerblades, and parking.
Tests now being conducted in a Rice University parking lot may change that soon. A segment of sidewalk is being built with pervious concrete, a not-so-new building material with the texture of Rice Krispies:
the product allows water to drain through rather than run off the surface. Environmental benefits include allowing water to percolate back into the soil or be detained rather than being channeled directly into storm drains; a surface that isn’t slippery when wet; and a brighter surface that helps reflect heat.
But there’s more environmental benefit here than just allowing parking lots to drain faster. Using more pervious concrete may allow us to get rid of those annoying green spaces developers are now putting in within larger developments:
The biggest cost benefit to using pervious concrete, said Max Amery, senior facilities engineer and project manager, is that it reduces or eliminates the need for water retention areas to contain run-off, which can be quite expensive in space-limited areas like a city or campus.
Next step: Revising city building codes so everyone can use it!
- Rice tests water-permeable sidewalk [Rice News]
Photo: Portland Cement Association
