COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSTON PAD SITE JUNKIES, JONESING FOR ANOTHER FIX “Woo hoo! Hopefully the other site will be a Chase. I’m in desperate need of more banking solutions. If not I can settle for an Arby’s.” [jb3, commenting on Swamplot Street Sleuths: Nestled ’Neath the Costco Oaks]
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Tag: Sprawl
FILLING OUT THE GRAND PARKWAY FROM 9 TO 12 O’CLOCK A vote in Commissioners Court yesterday authorized the Harris County Toll Road Association to start looking for consulting firms to coordinate the design of a wide northwest swath of the Grand Parkway, extending from I-10 West just east of Katy to a little past I-45 North. That’s a 39-mile stretch. The toll road, 180 miles in all, would help fill out Houston’s target map — by adding another ring. [Houston Chronicle]
Those highfalutin designers and their fancy theoretical jargon. Just skip the conceptual mumbo-jumbo and tell us where we’ll be able to make left turns!
A closer look at a few of those proposals for greenifying the new medians going in on the strip between I-45 and Mills Rd.:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY YOU HAVE SO MUCH MORE FREE TIME IN HOUSTON “Every other city has the EXACT same commercial development at major interchanges, except instead of being linear (and easily accessible) it’s clumped together, so you have to wade through a sea of traffic lights to get anywhere. Every trip you take to a feeder-fronting business, whether it’s Best Buy or Kroger, would take several minutes longer if you had to wade through the morass of traffic lights that characterizes freeway-centric commercial developments in the Northwest, the Midwest, or the East Coast. That’s WEEKS of your life back, actual time you spend having sex or playing video games or eating too much queso.” [Keep Houston Houston, commenting on Comment of the Day: The Invention of Feeder Food]
THE GREAT BIG MALL-AND-SPRAWL GET-TOGETHER What do The Galleria, the Houston Premium Outlets mall in Cypress, the Katy Mills mall, the Deerbrook Mall, The Woodlands Mall, the Baybrook Mall, First Colony Mall, the Willowbrook Mall, the 11,400-acre Bridgeland development way out 290, and 42.5 percent of The Woodlands Operating Company have in common? They’ll all be owned by the same company — if the Simon Property Group completes the proposed $10 billion buyout of bankrupt General Growth Properties it made public yesterday. That would make 550 Simon malls in all — more than a third of the U.S. total. [Developments]
HOUSTON’S GROWING SCALP The Center for Houston’s Future reports on the continuing disappearance of the region’s trees, mostly from sprawling new development: “The total loss of tree canopy in the greater Houston region between 1992 and 2005 is 680 square miles. This loss equates roughly to the physical size of the city of Houston, and since 2005, tree loss has continued. . . . No data exists as of December 2009 to inform the region how much tree cover we lost between 2005 and 2008. . . . Since 2005 the region experienced Hurricane Ike which literally decimated the tree population on Galveston Island. The island lost many of its 100 year old live oaks, most of which were planted after the Great Storm of 1900. Meanwhile, since 2000 the trend has been a steady increase in the number of trees planted by government agencies, volunteer organizations, and individual citizens. . . . From 2000-2008, almost one million trees were planted by public and private efforts, according to organizations that reported as part of this study.” [Center for Houston’s Future; full report (PDF)]
Swamplot reader Superdave, a self-proclaimed “Google Earth junkie,” is grooving on the program’s recently extended time travel feature:
In the most recent update of the free software, they added a feature where you can view aerial images from previous years, which is cool. At first they only went back 5 years or so. However, today I noticed that they’ve added imagery from December 1978 for nearly the entire Houston area.
I was numbstruck as I zoomed around and realized how substantially different this city is after our rampant growth over the past 30 years. I even got kind of sentimental seeing all those rice fields out west, where I grew up. I also felt a conflicted sense of relief that we’re in an economic downturn that will kind of apply the brakes (I’m sick, I know).
How’d the area around the Astrodome look 30 years ago?
From new travel-eating blog Eating the Road: This handy decisionmaking flowchart, to help you decide which chain restaurant to eat your next meal at. For a number of Outside the Loop neighborhoods, this may be the only restaurant guide you’ll ever need. And it works in a few other cities too!
Yes, that’s Yountville’s unchained French Laundry sitting all alone in the center — sadly, there’s no way to get to it from the decision tree. And what’s in the fine print to the right of Hooters?
Gift poster editions of the chart are available, though there seem to be a few problems with the online ordering system at the moment. Also from Eating the Road: Fast Food, Freezer Aisle, and Cereal editions.
- Where Should I Eat? Chain Restaurant Edition (Flowchart) [Eat the Road]
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H. Dan Miller, senior managing director of the Houston office of Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, commenting on the sale he recently brokered of the fully leased 30,000-sq.-ft. office building and bank drive-thru on an L-shaped property at 10411 Westheimer in Westchase, which received 18 offers within a week:
You had an irreplaceable location at the corner of Westheimer and Beltway 8 and three streets of frontage. I wish I had 10 of these types of buildings.
- 30,000-SF Office Attracts 18 Offers [Globe St.]
- 10411 Westheimer Executive Summary (PDF) [Holliday Fenoglio Fowler]
Photo: Holliday Fenoglio Fowler
LITTLE GRAND PARKWAY ON THE PRAIRIE NOT SO SHOVEL-READY AFTER ALL Those pesky federal regulators, ruining all the fun: It’s now looking like the 15-mile-long Upper Katy Prairie paving project known as the Grand Parkway Segment E won’t be getting the bucket of cash Harris County Commissioners Court wanted. County officials will instead request that the $181 million in federal stimulus funds earlier allocated to the way-out-northwest loop road be distributed to other projects: “The recommendation to withdraw the project from the Texas Department of Transportation’s list of stimulus projects was made by Art Storey, who heads Harris County’s Public Infrastructure Department. Storey declined to comment on his recommendation until it is considered at Harris County Commissioner Court’s meeting next Tuesday. ‘Staff and consultants have worked diligently and successfully to be on schedule to meet the deadlines to enable Segment E construction to qualify for and receive the stimulus funding, but the federal permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cannot be completely processed by the required mid-February date,’ Storey said in a letter to the court. ‘In fact, because of conflicts over environmental impacts and mitigation, that permit might never be issued.’” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: ANOTHER GRAND PARKWAY REVENUE STUDY “I think it’s time to feature just which entities have acquired land adjacent to this boondoggle. List which individuals hold controlling interest and then we can discuss interesting sidelights like contributions to various elected officials.” [devans, commenting on Investing in the Grand Parkway]
INVESTING IN THE GRAND PARKWAY Commuters struggling to cross the Katy Prairie on congested House Hahl Rd. will be happy to learn that traffic relief is on the way: Harris County’s commissioners voted yesterday to apply for $181 million in federal stimulus money for the Segment E marshland cut-through of the Grand Parkway, which will connect major employment and shopping centers in Katy and Cypress. $20 million in engineering and other contracts for the project were awarded a few months ago, but the commissioners yesterday approved a “comprehensive traffic and revenue study” for the segment. The study, which won’t be complete before construction begins in February, will help support claims that the road will be able to pay for itself, with tolls. [Houston Chronicle; more from Houston Tomorrow, both via Off the Kuff]
Hidden upstairs in that new double-decker strip center on the south side of 59 between the Kirby CVS and the feeder-road Chick-Fil-A, nestled between a hair salon and a spa, is a brand-new recital hall, outfitted with a 7-foot-5 Hamburg Steinway Model C grand piano and room for up to 100 fans of fine classical music. Leave the curtains on the back wall open, and performers can appreciate a sweeping view of the freeway traffic as they play.
The hall is inside the brand-new Dowling Music, a gifts-and-sheet-music store run by concert pianist Richard Dowling, who recently returned to his hometown and bought the Houston branch of Pender’s Music (which Pender’s had bought from the local Wadler-Kaplan Music Shop in 2000).
The strip center and its neighbors were built on the former Kirby Dr. site of Westheimer Transfer & Storage, which former Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon bought in 2002. Olajuwon demolished the building and flipped the land, parceling it out in pieces to suburban-style developers.
Dowling, who performs about 60 concerts a year around the world, can’t have expected much walk-in business from visitors patronizing other establishments in the strip center. Downstairs from his store is the Methodist Breast Imaging Center; an Israeli martial arts studio, a weight-loss clinic, a GolfTEC indoor golf clinic, and the Pasha Snoring & Sinus Center round out the second floor. But Dowling tells the West University Examiner‘s Steve Mark that traffic has doubled since he moved the store from its Portwest Dr. location:
BARGAIN BASEMENT LIVING “. . . it’s really proper to think of the supply of housing types and neighborhood styles as a lagging indicator of the demand for housing types and neighborhood styles. If everyone decided tomorrow that Tuscan was out and Tudor was back in, homebuilders would continue to build Tuscan until there was enough evidence that the trend back towards Tudor was solid. Likewise, if 1/3rd of homebuyers decided tomorrow that they wanted to live in a mixed-use, gridded, somewhat urban neighborhood, developers would keep building “loops and lollipops†exclusively until the demand for mixed-use grids was proven.” [Keep Houston Houston]
NO DEAL FOR BRIDGELAND Bankrupt General Growth Properties won’t be selling its Grand Parkway-lining sprawlchild to the Caldwell Cos. after all. The $95 million deal to sell Bridgeland’s 11,400 acres is off: “Jim Graham, General Growth’s director of public affairs, released a statement on Wednesday saying all discussions have been terminated with parties interested in purchasing or investing in Bridgeland, but would not disclose any further details concerning the negotiations. Graham says the decision was made ‘very recently.’†[Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot]