Some burger stand, street signs, a car wash, bungalows: So many little Heights-y things muck up the foreground in development blog Going Up! City’s construction pix of the 6-story concrete-and-brick condo building going up just north of the restaurant-heavy corner of 11th St. and Studewood. 1111 Studewood Place, which at last report included 9,000 sq. ft. of retail space on its ground floor, has a website up which for now carefully avoids use of the word “condo.”
Neighborhood residents hoping to weigh in on the details of the proposed settlement announced 2 weeks ago in the lawsuit filed against the city of Houston by the developers of the proposed Ashby Highrise were greeted at last night’s meeting with Mayor Parker with news that the agreement had already been finalized. The settlement requires the city to approve and permit a 21-story mixed-use tower at 1717 Bissonnet St., as long as the predicted traffic it generates meets a few prescribed limits. The agreement also puts a few restrictions on traffic flows in and out of the building on separate driveways facing Bissonnet and Ashby St., and requires developers to build an 8-ft. fence and camouflage the 5-story parking garage behind it with greenery where the building backs up against homes on its south and east sides. Also included: some lighting and noise-mitigation requirements, and a free morning and afternoon weekday shuttle service for the project’s future residents to and from the Med Center.
Here’s the sign that’s gone up on the northeast corner of Weslayan and West Alabama, where PM Realty plans to start construction later this year on the 35-story apartment tower it announced last year. The tower, PM Realty’s first in Houston, will have 12,500 sq. ft. of retail space on the first or second floor, 250 apartments, and a 3,000-sq.-ft. fitness center, according to a Houston Business Journal report last year. On the 2.6-acre site, which the company bought from Interfin last August: the remains of the State Grille restaurant. New on-the-scene blog Going Up! City has these pix of the site:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WE JUST RUN THE NUMBERS “If you dig a bit deeper into the Milhaus proformas, what the developer is REALLY saying is that there won’t be retail because: 1. lenders don’t like it; 2. buyers don’t like it; 3. adding retail reduces my return on cost somewhat; AND 4. mostly because of #1 and #2, it kills my numbers. If you look at the overall return on cost (NOI/cost) you get 7.7% return on cost with retail vs 8.7% return on cost without retail. That’s a substantial difference, but not eye popping. If the Midtown TIRZ really wanted some retail in the deal, they could easily toss Millhaus a bone and bridge this 100 basis point gap with ease. The real problem, at least according to Millhaus (not that I disagree), is that the lenders and buyers treat mixed use differently. In the example comparison, Millhaus assumes the non-retail deal gets a permanent loan underwrittien to 1.25 DSC [debt service coverage] vs 1.30 DSC for the with-retail deal. This means a larger permanent loan upon completion for the no-retail deal (more cash in Millhaus pocket). He’s assuming lenders will get more aggressive on a apartments-only deal. He also thinks his eventual buyer will prefer a non-retail deal. He calculates the as-completed value using a 7.00% cap rate for the non-retail project, but uses a 7.25% cap rate for apartments+retail project. What he’s really saying is, ‘Don’t blame me for not including retail in my development. Blame the lenders and buyers.’†[Bernard, commenting on Nixing Milhaus Retail: Why These New Midtown Apartments Won’t Have Shops on the Ground Floor]
Is all that living space on the second floor of this metal warehouse building right off the Tomball Pkwy. frontage road near the end of Jones Rd. really window-free? Built a decade ago, the 5,062-sq.ft. structure is an unrestricted property suitable for mixed use — and that includes homesteading.
A real-estate firm out of Indianapolis with a keen interest in developing mixed-use projects plans to build a midrise apartment complex on 2 vacant blocks in Midtown, just south of the Pierce Elevated and 4 blocks east of the light rail line running down Main St. Like almost every other recent residential development in the area built before or after the Post Midtown Square about a dozen blocks to the west, though, the Milhaus Midtown won’t include any lease spaces for stores or restaurants. If you’re wondering why not, the company has a detailed explanation ready.
Walking by the vacant site on the corner of Binz and Chenevert on the way to Hermann Park, reader David Hollas notes that the large sign advertising a 75,000-sq.-ft. medical-offices-and-retail development planned for the site has been taken down. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhood has been peppered with Ashby-Highrise-style signs protesting Balcor Commercial’s planned 6-story Parc Binz building and parking garage at 1800 Binz St— and “hi-rise buildings” in general. Opposition to the development got some media attention last year, but Hollas has seen sign changes on the property before: “About 2 years ago, the signs offered the sale of townhomes that were to be built imminently, but never materialized. After a period of inactivity and weed growth, the city came and decked out the site with code violation placards. Eventually the site was mowed and trash removed, and the city signs and townhome signs disappeared.”
A few memorial photos, from a reader who’s been marking the death and burial of the former J.B. Earthman funeral home at 5740 San Felipe at Bering, across from T.H. Rogers Elementary:
Here’s a shot of the now-vacant corner of Weslayan and West Alabama, where PM Realty Group has announced it’ll be constructing a 35-story apartment building and parking garage — with a restaurant and “service retail” — beginning next year. The 2.6-acre site is the former location of the Confederate House at 2925 Weslayan, later known as the State Grille, which was torn down in 2008. PM Realty bought the site from Giorgio Borlenghi’s Interfin Cos. last month. No renderings from PM Realty’s architects, RTKL, have been passed around yet.
Photo: Candace Garcia
Development firm Read King is “gearing up to break ground on” a mixed-use project at the southwest corner of Shepherd and West Alabama, across the street from the shopping center that houses the vacant Alabama Theater. Real Estate Bisnow‘s Catie Brubaker says preleasing has already begun for 30,000 sq. ft. of “high-end” retail; the development would also include 250 luxury apartments. The targeted opening date is in the middle of 2013, so it shouldn’t much matter that the design “is still in flux,” right? The placeholder rendering appears to show 5 stories of apartments perched above 2 retail floors.
Whatever happened to that Park 8 condo tower, hospital, and strip-mall development planned for Beltway 8 next to Arthur Storey Park, just south of Bellaire Blvd.? The Chronicle‘s Purva Patel surveys the wreckage of the self-styled “Land of Oz”: The highrise project has long been in bankruptcy, the contractor and lender are battling over ownership of the land in court, and 2 different groups of investors and condo buyers are suing developer David Wu for their investment losses (totaling more than $2 million), alleging he has or had no intention or ability to complete the project, and that he misled them about funding and leasing commitments. Neither Wu nor his attorney would respond to the reporter’s questions.
Is this what the mysterious new 6-story concrete-frame mixed-use building going up behind the 11th St. Someburger in the Heights is supposed to look like? Sort of, but not exactly. The rendering of the project above (and a whole bunch more, below), found on the website of ZDA Architecture in San Antonio, shows a decked-out version of the more boxy structure that’s pictured on this new sign and that showed up on the corner of Studewood and 11th 1/2 St. yesterday:
A new “final” rendering is out for the second phase of Blvd Place, which includes a brand-new 48,500-sq.-ft. Whole Foods Market near the corner of Post Oak Blvd. and San Felipe just north of the Galleria (and yes, only a few feet east from the old Eatzi’s location), as well as two 4-story mixed-use buildings flanking it along Post Oak. Plus: a parking garage in back. The 4-story buildings (marked 1N and 2 on the recently updated site plan below) will have 2 office levels above 2 floors of retail, like the lone building in Blvd Place’s first phase, which opened last year a block south. Wulfe & Co.’s Elise Weatherall tells Swamplot the remaining portion of the old Pavilion on Post Oak on the site will be demolished this fall; construction on the new Whole Foods and the adjacent buildings is scheduled to begin about the same time, with everything opening in the first half of 2013.
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Atlanta’s Post Properties has announced that it’s ready to get started with a third phase of its Midtown Square mixed use development, notes Houston’s InnerLooped blog. A rendering of the project on the front cover of a recent company financial report (above) may not be the latest, though — that looks like a 2005 date scribbled in the bottom right corner. The $21.8 million development will include 124 apartments and 10,864 sq. ft. of street-level retail and should begin opening mid-to-late next year, the company says. The apartment units should run a little smaller on average than those in the existing Post Midtown Square complex at 302 Gray St. Post Properties hasn’t responded to our request for details about the development’s exact location, but the rendering appears to show the view looking east from the narrow corner of West Gray and Webster in the Fourth Ward, a few blocks west of Post’s existing outpost of street activity.
Rendering: Post Properties
COMMENT OF THE DAY: DOWN IN FRONT “Actually, ground floor retail is an uphill struggle. Apartment managers want to manage apartments. Shopping center managers want to manage retail tenants. Plus, with the slim profile of this lot…where 10 extra feet is needed for the parking…putting 50 or 100 foot deep retailers in the garage would be even worse. And, despite the claims of the poster several spots up, mixed use retail space is a very hard sell. Dallas pushed several developers to include ground floor retail in new complexes, and most of them sit idle. The fact is, Houston is capable of separating the two, so developers and retailers prefer to do so. Only in dense urban areas do retailers attempt to carve out space wherever they can find it. Despite the love affair with mixed use retail, it is still a very rare bird . . . especially in new development. . . .” [Dave, commenting on Apartment Building Replacing Tavern on Gray Won’t Have Any Retail, But Really Wants To Hug the Street Anyway]
