A tipster tells Swamplot that a parcel of the Memorial Club Apartments property at 904 Westcott  is “confirmed” as the future site of Houston’s fourth Trader Joe’s. Organized around the Rice Military roundabout near Memorial Park, the apartments are split down the middle by Westcott; the photo above shows a view from the roundabout looking east toward Washington.
“If you really wanna pass on the secrets, if you really wanna pass on truth, embed it in architecture,” says Glenn Beck in the January 10 episode of the Blaze. “That’s what I intend on doing.” The Dallas Observer‘s taking him at his word, speculating that Beck’s planning to build something like that radiant city in the screenshot above: it’d be a $2 billion master-planned community — with a theme park and an Alamo-inspired non-denominational church. It’d be called Independence, USA. And the Dallas Observer says it’d be in Texas.
It could become much trickier for vandals defacing murals of presidents to remain undetected, what with all these windows: Real Estate Bisnow‘s Catie Dixon reports that Alliance Residential has closed a financing deal on Broadstone 3800, a 203-unit apartment building planned for a 1.6-acre lot just across West Alabama from the yellow-brick former campaign headquarters where Reginald James’s mural of President Obama was given a rather sloppy second coat this week. The proposed site, at 3808 Main St. on the southwest side of the intersection, is home now to a surface parking lot; it’s bound by Travis, Truxillo, and West Alabama — where, Dixon reports, $8 million is expected to be spent on street improvements. This rendering shows how light rail might be incorporated into the 6-story project; the nearest Red Line stop along Main St. is Ensemble/HCC, where shops and eateries like Natachee’s and Double Trouble have congregated.
Rendering: EDI Architects
A City of Houston rep tells Swamplot that 3 of the 10 Freedman’s Town shotgun houses on Victor St. between Gillette and Bailey will be relocated in the Fourth Ward. (The photo shows a shingle-stripped one up on a trailer and ready to go.) A permit to demolish them was granted in 2011, but the city rep says that the owners have since agreed to donate some of the houses to the Fourth Ward Redevelopment Authority, which says it has plans to move them to a lot they own at 1414 Robin and rehab them into low-income housing. Swamplot reported this morning that the West Gray lot where the rowhouses are now located has been pegged for a 5-story mixed-use midrise called Dolce Living.
Photo:Â Chris C
“We’ve had a lot of angry calls about that tree,” says an Urban Living rep — calls presumably prompted by the sign posted recently here at 2917 Leeland in East Downtown. Renderings aren’t available, though Urban Living tells Swamplot that the designs for 3 Princeton City townhomes are working around the tree. They’ll also have an interesting neighbor:
A pair of West Gray lots — nearly vacant save their seen-better-days Freedman’s Town rowhouses in the back — have been put on notice as the proposed site for Dolce Living: that’s 5 stories and 176,344 sq. ft. of 1- and 2-bedroom apartments, with some street-level retail to sweeten the deal.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: I GOT YOUR HOT HOUSTON REAL ESTATE TIP RIGHT HERE “Hey, did you hear about that awesome new project happening over yonder? Too bad it’s misplacing that thing that some people like and others don’t. The architect/contractor/developer/use is still up in the air, but I’ll be sure to pass along any and all updates. Sincerely, Real Estate Insider” [RE Insider, commenting on A Terribly Vague Update]
A TERRIBLY VAGUE UPDATE 
“More to tell!,” says the Swamplot tipster who earlier in January shared some big vague news that something was going to happen to “a major (non-residential) Houston property” — and no, it wasn’t Macy’s — sometime this year: “It looks like some changes have come up. The part of the property to be demolished will retain some of the current façade and no notable architects will be brought in. However, a new structure may be built on another part of the property and that one is still very new in terms of recent developments, as in the past couple of weeks, so prominent designers and what-have-you aren’t entirely off the table. When it comes down to it, the property is going to have to fight to maintain its relevance in the new economic climate, and I don’t mean the recession and recovery. You might have guessed what it is by now, but I still can’t say it yet. . . . I just want to make sure you have the most recent information possible because it’s a Houston landmark even if I wish it weren’t.” [Swamplot inbox] Photo: Seth Bienek
Squatters and street artists might have to find another bygone building to pick on — but that’s only assuming there’s something really behind the renderings of renovations to Midtown’s Central Square Plaza that Claremont Property has been floating around. Could that demure stone mosaic on the wall facing Webster finally get its comeuppance after years of playing hard to get?
At a Neartown meeting two days ago, Kirk Baxter presented these two drawings for a Mary’s memorial, according to a HAIF poster, celebrating the 30-year heyday of the Westheimer bar for Montrose’s gay community. Some 300 memorial services were held here over the years. Mary’s was closed in 2009; the building where it sat since the early ’70s opened this weekend as the coffee shop Blacksmith.
The drawings show a kind of replica Mary’s installed near Waugh and Hyde Park; two of Mary’s original doors — donated to the project by Blacksmith owner Bobby Heugel — would sit underneath tiles reclaimed from the original roof.
Nothing about the memorial has been approved or decided yet, says the HAIF poster. During the meeting several other potential locations were brought up: a spot behind the original building the regulars called the Out Back, and across the street, facing the building, in front of Half Price Books.
Photos: HAIF user trymahjong
The general landscaping public hasn’t been able to shop at San Jacinto Stone since January 19, when the 68-year-old Heights rockyard began the process of closing for good. (Contractors, at least, have until the end of February.) Back in August, San Jacinto Stone agreed to sell its 8 acres on Yale to a retail developer; yesterday, the deal was closed by Ponderosa Land Development, who says it has plans to build a shopping center on the property just south of I-10 and just north of the Washington Heights Walmart.
Photo:Â Swamplot inbox
Shell Oil moved out the last of its things from the 3-building Bellaire Technology Center in 2012, consolidating R&D operations about 15 miles west of Southside Place in a spruced-up campus near Texas 6 and Richmond. Now, it appears that these 3.2 acres (shown in the map) of the 9.7 that the Center vacated are being eyed for residential development.
NIMBY IN PASADENA 
This scruffy corner at Genoa Red Bluff and Space Center, right on the border between Pasadena and Houston, is the proposed site of a few 90- to 150-unit housing developments for low-income residents — a category which can include seniors and those with disabilities, reports teevee’s Samica Knight. But one potential neighbor Knight interviews doesn’t seem likely to prepare any welcome baskets: “‘If I had been looking for a new home and there had been low income property across, I wouldn’t have chosen this neighborhood,‘ said Pasadena resident Janet McClellan. ‘I would be afraid of crime, more crime. . . . Everybody does have to have a place to live, but I just think there are better more appropriate places to build those kinds of homes.'” [abc13] Photo: abc13
One more of each, thank you: Creekside Park Village Center, rendered above, will be the Woodlands’ 7th and will be anchored by its 4th H-E-B, the master-planned community says. The shopping center will serve Creekside Park, a 100-acre community planned to go in up there west of Lake Paloma. It appears that the center will herd its shoppers inward toward a 4,300-sq.-ft. glass-walled restaurant, which you can see in the rendering. And there’s gonna be a fire pit in that park-like median-thing. (And a water feature on the other end. You know. Just in case.) In all, 80,000 sq. ft. of retail and office space are proposed for the site on Kuykendahl.
The four squares that were the Bissonnet Village Apartments are gone, and Hanover Co. has now denuded the site near Bissonnet and Dincans, preparing it for something else “residential,” says a company rep. The site extends along Dincans between Bissonnet and North, backing into the Bank of America that faces Kirby. Swamplot reported last week that Hanover has purchased property on Morningside for Phase II of their mixed-use midrise now under construction, less than a mile away, in Rice Village.
Photos: Allyn West
