05/24/10 11:20am

How’d that foreclosure auction go for the humongous early-eighties brick house on Harold St. in Montrose used in recent years as a party pad and chainsaw test site?

Let’s just say that the auction listing is gone, the property is back on MLS — and the price has been cut another $45K. But unlike the sudden, swift, and unexplained felling of the mature street trees surrounding this property, the chopping of the list price has resulted from a series of 6 hacks, from $644,900 last October to $469,900 just last week.

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05/10/10 2:34pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: PARALLEL PARK OR LOSE IT “It is one of those skills that tends to go away if you don’t use it. Back in the day I could zip right into a spot with six inches on either end of my car on one try; all these years of Houston living have made that a LOT harder!” [John (yet another), commenting on Swamplot Award Winners Converge as Phoenicia Moves in Next to Discovery Green]

05/07/10 1:07pm

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.:

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04/26/10 9:32am

WHERE THE WESTHEIMER SIDEWALK ENDS Following in the footsteps of groundbreaking Houston Press adventurers John Nova Lomax and David Beebe, an acolyte named Brent Zius has chosen today as the day he’s gonna walk the entire length of Westheimer, starting a full 3 miles west of West Oaks Mall and ending in Midtown, where the road gives up its name to Elgin. Zius, who claims he’s made “no real training or preparation” for the trek, is at least bringing his Twitter account with him: Already, he’s checked in with this photo showing the western limit of Westheimer’s pedestrian paving. [Twitter; details on Hair Balls; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Brent Zius

03/02/10 2:09pm

DARKNESS DESCENDS OVER THE EAST FREEWAY Hey, who turned out all the street lights along I-10 between the East Loop and Uvalde? Copper thieves! [Public Works spokesperson Alvin] Wright said a similar theft took place inside the loop, but this was the first time it had happened on such a large scale further east. In response, public works is considering replacing the copper wires with aluminum, and installing lock boxes to keep the copper conductors safe. Officials said they don’t know how long it will take to complete the repairs, which could eventually cost taxpayers thousands of dollars.” [KHOU.com]

09/18/09 1:31pm

ROOTING OUT THE BROADWAY OAKS The 510 dead oak trees that line Broadway get a week’s reprieve, as Galveston’s oak-removal extravaganza continues: “State officials have said they want new trees planted along Broadway in the same spots as their predecessors to maintain the 100-year-old patterns of the plantings. But forestry experts warn that planting new trees in holes surrounded by webs of existing roots could choke them off and kill them. The city’s tree committee hopes to start planting trees along other roadways in November, but with all of the approvals and agreements needed for planting around Broadway, the historic boulevard could stay bare for another year, Cahill said.” [Galveston County Daily News; previously on Swamplot]

08/13/09 3:41pm

WHEN WESTHEIMER WAS FOR CRUISING John Nova Lomax reminisces: “This was Oil Bust Houston, and it looked then like Montrose might become a full-on slum. There were no condos along ‘Theimer (as it was often called by the mullet set) and few fancy restaurants. From Montrose Boulevard all the way to what is now called Midtown, Westheimer was lined with little more than one “modeling studio” after another, and it seems like there were even more tattoo shops than there are now. The denizens and visitors to these businesses (not to mention the street hustlers, drag queens, punks and Guardian Angels that still lurk in the area) provided plenty for the hordes of suburbanites — getting their first taste of freedom and big city life — to gawk at from the safety of their Blazers and Cutlasses. . . . on weekend nights, Westheimer would be bumper-to-bumper from Bagby to well past Buffalo Speedway, and sometimes all the way out to the Galleria, a phantasmagoria of teenage hormones and sound-collisions: car-horns, engines revving, and squealing girls, the hiss-and-almost-subsonic bass rumble of ‘Paul Revere’ booming from a Jeep Cherokee interlocking with a Honda CRX chirping out that inane ‘Two of Hearts’ pop ditty or the root canal Teutonic skronk of that ‘Warm Leatherette’ monstrosity.” [Hair Balls]

07/17/09 12:54pm

Blogging at NeoHouston, Andrew Burleson declares that the connections a building has to the world around it — what he calls its interface — have a big effect on value:

A house may be great, but if it doesn’t have a nice front yard it won’t be worth as much as the house next door that does. Likewise, homes in an area with lots of big trees tend to be valued higher than places without them. The interface is better.

Well, sure. Big trees is nice! But Burleson also claims that the value effects of interface success — and suckage — can travel:

Interfaces are highly radiant, they have a significant impact on the values of surrounding properties, and this value has a tendency to spread. If a street is truly beautiful, every adjacent property is likely to be highly valued. If a street is very ugly, every adjacent property is likely to be somewhat undervalued, even if some individual structures on that street are highly valued.

So why are we jumping over fences in Midtown? It’s all part of Burleson’s photo tour of the “interfaces” of 3 apartment complexes within a few blocks of each other: The Post Midtown Square (the good), the Camden Midtown Apartments (the bad), and 2222 Smith Street (the so-so).

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07/16/09 4:52pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE MIDTOWN CVS DOMINO EFFECT “. . . CVS didn’t follow Post Midtown’s urban scale approach even though its lot was right across the street and the collective wisdom at the time was that Gray and Bagby would be built out with mid-rise, mixed-use developments right up to Main and the new rail line. It seemed so obvious and for those who longed for true urban living in this town, it was a dream coming true. CVS didn’t play ball simply because they didn’t have to. No code required them to build in any way, shape, or form that might have benefited the collective vision of Midtown. So be it, that’s Houston. However, after CVS bucked the urban trend, so did most every developer after them. So instead of all or most of Midtown being walkable, populated with street life like just the 3 blocks developed by Post ultimately became; Midtown’s blocks are populated with suburban style apartments complexes with no street life whatsoever, just block after block of gates and fences. If Houston had had the guts to enact urban design strategies then, Midtown would be the success that similar areas have become in Dallas, Atlanta and other cities. Houston punked out and we are all the losers for decades to come. Ironically the very same developers who fought urban guidelines in Midtown were building successful urban properties in all those other cities at the same time. . . .” [John, commenting on Cul de Sac City: Houston’s Ban on New Street Grids]

07/14/09 7:36pm

Working from a remote and undisclosed location, the now-expatriate Houston engineer known as Keep Houston Houston puts together a rough diagram identifying the city’s “traditional” walkable neighborhoods, and comments:

Houston has no shortage of gridded, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. Thing is, they’re all kind of squished together. And with a couple of exceptions, they were all platted out before 1935. What’s there is there. We’re not adding to it.

Why?

Developer conservatism plays a role, but is ethereal, subject to evaporate as soon as *someone* steps up and proves that suburban [Traditional Neighborhood Development] is sufficiently profitable. But several city standards and rules are standing in the way.

Are Houston’s development rules really the obstacle?

Keep Houston Houston scans through the city’s development ordinance, then throws together a quick design for a residential neighborhood following the basic requirements. What does that end up looking like?

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07/14/09 11:08am

NO MERCY FOR GALVESTON STREET TREES Hundreds of Galveston residents have been calling the city’s tree-appeal hotline, arguing that particular street trees targeted in the massive post-Ike chainsaw sweep should not be cut down. After seeing new leaves on the 3-story Live Oak in front of his Avenue L home, one resident offered the city $1,000 not to chop it down. His tree got a re-evaluation, but didn’t exhibit enough new growth to get a reprieve. “If the city could give the trees more time to recover, and if it rained soon, a few more might stand a chance of survival, [Texas Forest Service urban forester Pete] Smith said. But the city will get reimbursed only for the expensive removal process through Sept. 12. Between now and then, crews are scheduled to remove an estimated 11,000 trees in the public right of way and about 30,000 trees on private property. Live oak tress must have at least 30 percent of their leaves to be spared. Other varieties must have at least 50 percent of their leaves.” [Galveston County Daily News]

06/29/09 9:53am

HAIF poster Htowngirl, who lives near the new Ei8ht nightclub at the corner of Roy St., complains about . . . uh, parking difficulties in her neighborhood. And posts a few photos of an early Sunday morning scene from a few weeks ago:

The parking for Ei8ht in the neighborhood is already horrendous, I can’t even imagine what it will be like when Taps, Busty LaRoue’s, and this new “country” bar open…

Sample of the parking issues… I live a few blocks off Washington, near Ei8ht…the scene outside my house at 3 AM Sunday Morning a few weeks ago. Drunk suburbanite 21-year-old drove into our ditch.

Still there in the morning…

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