COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSTON’S MASTER PLANNERS 
“. . . I’ve talked a lot about the bad way some developers approach growth in Houston. But neighborhoods are addressing it wrong, too. They’re too reactionary. They sit around doing nothing until a developer proposes something they don’t like, then they mobilize to try to kill it. They need to ask themselves ‘what do we really want in and around our neighborhood,’ and then create master plans to communicate it. (The master plans wouldn’t be enforced — that would be zoning — but they could be used by developers to get a sense of what the neighbors would oppose.)
The Super Neighborhoods were supposed to be a venue where this could happen — they were originally under the auspices of the Houston Planning Department. But I’ve found that it’s actually the Management Districts that are doing master plans. It’s great that they’re happening, but Management Districts are paid for by and primarily serve businesses; and single family neighborhoods aren’t even trying to get in on the efforts.” [ZAW, commenting on Dogging the Morrison Heights Midrise with Doggerel] Illustration: Lulu
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Tag: Zoning
COMMENT OF THE DAY SECOND RUNNER-UP: NO ZONING MEANS WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE TRAFFIC SURPRISES “If there was only a way to plan for traffic and infrastructure by knowing the density that a site will have in the future . . . Oh yeah, its called Zoning. Then you know the worst case development scenario. And if you ever want to build bigger than you have to upgrade the infrastructure first. Nah, why do that, we can just let people build as big as they want and try and fix the problems later. Unless you are for zoning and rules than you can’t complain about traffic. They are the same. [DD, commenting on A Second Midrise Alexan Planned Right Beside the First One on Yale]
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.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT THEY’RE PLANNING TO BUILD IN HOUSTON “I always have to chuckle when people are discussing what is being built somewhere in town. ‘Why don’t THEY build . . .’ or ‘Why don’t THEY put in . . .’ There really is no ‘THEY’ sitting back and ‘planning’ what to put in. When property is up for sale, there are numerous buyers out there who already have their OWN project (whatever it is they do) looking for a place at a price they are willing to pay, and usually in a certain part of town. If it’s a medical group, ‘they’ are not going to say ‘Hey, this neighborhood needs a restaurant’ — unless of course they decide to put one inside the medical building they build. But you get my point. These are not planned communities with someone (called ‘They’) at the helm, making decisions. As long as the citizens let the rich ‘good-ole-boys’ swing the vote every time ‘ZONING’ comes up, people can generally build what they want — where they want in Houston, TX.” [Mr-DJ, commenting on Clearing an Empty Lot in the Museum District]
It’s 1 down and 2 to go for the properties comprising Shell Oil’s Bellaire Technology Center on Bellaire Blvd. A 3.2-acre slice leased by Shell for years is under contract for future redevelopment. The tech facility’s remaining 2 properties on the same megablock — one leased, one Shell-owned — will also hit the market as Shell ceases its 75-year presence in Southside Place later this year.
The oil company had announced in 2008 that it would close the center and relocate its operations to other facilities. City of Southside Place sources said the exodus ought to wrap up by the end of November.
Listed a month ago, 3747 Bellaire Blvd. (above) is at the west end of the block that stretches from Braes Blvd. to Poor Farm Ditch. The asking price was about $50 per sq. ft., Transwestern’s listing rep says. He had nothing to add about the buyer or plans for the property, which has 475 ft. of frontage on Bellaire and 300 ft. on Braes Blvd. It’s zoned (yes, zoned) for low-intensity mixed-use development. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: COMES WITH THE LAND “If you take the Houston blinders off for a minute, you’ll realize that ‘deed restrictions protect property values’ and ‘zoning distorts property values’ are the same statement. Other things that ‘distort’ property values are: having a functioning police force so you have a reasonable certainty that a band of pirates won’t come steal everything you own; having roads to connect your property to other things; being located in a country with a functioning economy; public support of decent schools; a public health system that prevents outbreaks of Ebola; lack of a brutal murderous dictatorial regime; and not living downwind of a sewage treatment plant. Which of these are ‘evil planning’ vs ‘sensible government’ is, of course, determined by the political views of the speaker.” [John (another one), commenting on Comment of the Day: Keep Houston Cheap]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: YOU WOULD CRY TOO IF IT HAPPENED TO YOU “ALAIISEBY: pronounced ‘Alayzbee’. As Long As It’s In Someone Else’s Back Yard. This is the principle of land use in Houston. No one gives a crap that a builder/developer is going to do something that adversely affects a homeowner as long as it is in someone else’s back yard. Homeowners think that no zoning is great because their back yard is just fine. And when something happens to someone else’s back yard, it doesn’t matter. Thus, instead of coming together around attrocities like the Ashby High Rise and the Heights Walmart, homeowners cast scorn on those who are affected by bad land use decisions because it is someone else’s back yard and doesn’t matter. Let the West End take one for the team so people can [buy] bb guns at 3 am at Walmart. Southhampton should have to live next to a highrise because they make too much money and deserve a little taste of how much Houston sucks. Homeowners who do not live within the protective confines of deed restricted developments should come together and support some sort of land use restrictions in Houston. But they don’t because it doesn’t matter as long as it is in someone else’s back yard.” [ALAIISEBY, commenting on Riverside Terrace Assisted Living: Whatever It Is, You Should Be Against It]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: FREE ENTERPRISE CITY “And can we stop repeating the myth that Houston is some big unzoned city of freedom? Houston has a ton of ordinances regarding building forms and how property is used, from parking requirements that are stricter than most cities, to rules about setbacks, weirdly random designations of areas as ‘suburban’ and ‘urban’ with accompanying rules, rules about the sizes of townhouses, and so on. People love to say that we’re some kind of mecca of affordable housing because we have ‘no zoning.’ It’s nonsense. We have affordable housing because we have no natural boundaries preventing expansion and therefore have spread out more than most cities, and because we subsidize the building of big roads to make it easier to get to remote places. . . .” [John (yet another), commenting on Preservation Ordinance Passes]
Residents of the Magnolia Creek subdivision in League City are protesting plans by developer Lynn Watkins to drill for oil and natural gas on a 3-acre site next to a daycare center near the corner of League City Parkway and Bay Area Blvd. To gain the drilling permits, Watkins would need to rezone the land to light industrial. Abc13’s Kevin Quinn reports:
Those who purchased homes say they were told the land is zoned as commercial. They expected a strip mall of some sort to be built here — not a drilling rig that stands 131 feet tall. Dozens of homeowners have signed a petition asking the city not to grant the special use permit the developer seeks. . . .
[Watkins] insists there would be minimal impact to the surrounding neighborhood and schools.
Additional traffic, he insists, would be less than that coming and going from a home being built in the neighborhood. He says also of the 400,000 operational wells across the state, there have been only 900 blowouts in the past 30 years. Those, he says, resulted in 131 injuries and nine deaths.
“In that same period, there’s been 90,000 traffic deaths on Texas highways in that same period,” Watkins said.
HOUSTON ZONING PAPERWORK REQUEST An out-of-towner with “an (admittedly) strange fascination with Houston land development” is trying to locate a copy of the zoning ordinance that Houston voters rejected 17 years ago. “A classmate and I are trying to do a little stats project comparing the 1993 proposed ordinance to the land development that actually happened since then. We’d like to see how actual development patterns differed from what the planners envisioned (for better or worse). Of course, we’d be willing to share any interesting findings.” [Swamplot inbox]
Will the Houston Dynamo get to build their stadium in East Downtown — or off Westpark, near the Galleria? So far, the odds are . . . neither. The final go-ahead for building a soccer stadium on the EaDo site will require county commissioners to formally join the new East Downtown TIRZ (boundaries shown outlined above). But they can’t vote on that proposal until commissioner El Franco Lee puts that decision on the agenda. So far he hasn’t done that — and he apparently won’t talk to the press or constituents about his intentions.
Meanwhile, over in Bellaire, city officials are rushing to put in some “stop-gap” zoning changes to the Research and Development District at the northern edge of the city. Most of the site of Midway Companies’ proposed Dynamo Stadium development there lies within Houston city limits, but a small portion on the east side is apparently in Bellaire’s RDD.
What sort of zoning changes are being discussed? Instant News Bellaire‘s Angela Grant explains:
The new Comprehensive Plan envisions the RDD as a mixed-used urban area that includes residential, retail and offices, along with METRO’s future light-rail station. But as the zoning codes are currently written, developers could construct car lots, warehouses or other things that conflict with the “urban village†idea. . . .
The main change would be that developers wishing to construct residential, commercial or mixed-use buildings would need to go before the city in a planned development process to have their ideas approved before moving forward. The city would get a chance to review the plans, consider whether they conformed with the Comprehensive Plan, and reject any developments that did not.
- East Enders appeal to El Franco [Off the Kuff]
- Residents: County Commissioner stalling Dynamo stadium construction [KHOU.com]
- City Moving To Protect RDD From Undesirable Developments [Instant News Bellaire]
- Bellaire mayor challenges Dynamo stadium plan; others on board [Bellaire Examiner]
Map showing outline of TIRZ 15: Gensler (PDF)
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW WE BEAT THE ZONING BOARDS “. . . I’ll have to plead the 5th as to how I came to understand this, but let it be known that city councils and P&Z boards can be bought over quite easily. All it takes is for a developer to contract the consulting services of a well-connected ex-councilmember at some ludicrious price and send him to town with a five-figure entertainment budget (which sounds like a lot, but isn’t in the scope of a $50 mil. project); meanwhile, the developer ensures that their first renderings contain a few blatantly offensive architectural features that the targeted politicians can criticize. The developer makes the changes requested (which they would’ve made anyway) so as that the targeted politicians can save face with their constituents. And the really dangerous part of all this is that once a politician is clearly in your pocket, it’s hard for them to say no to just about anything else in the future so long as the developer provides them with a mechanism to save face. . . .” [TheNiche, commenting on Ashby Highrise Loses Appeal]
NOT ON THE BALLOT The Chronicle sneaks a general question about “land-use restrictions” into its Zogby-run poll of likely voters for the city’s November elections. “Out of 601 people surveyed between Oct. 12 and 15, 71 percent said they strongly or somewhat agree that ‘Houston should enact tougher land use restrictions.’” [Houston Chronicle; details]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT’S THE PLAN? “. . . It would be nice if someone would come up with a ‘master plan’ for these areas of unrestricted land and at least ask the developers to work within that plan. I suspect if some had been a little nicer the developers of 1717 Bissonnet might have been nicer as well. They did buy the land in good faith as they say. They were not legally obligated, nor are they, to get anyone’s permission to build whatever they wanted to build beyond meeting the requirements of city code. There was also no indication on the part of the city or anyone else what was “desired†for that area. As it stands, it’s a hodgepodge of multi-family and commercial. Neither of which fits the definition of ‘single-family’ which seems attached to every argument made against 1717 Bissonnet. I’m not sure you can have a perfect plan but someone needs to at least attempt some sort of plan for future development in Midtown and the Museum District and Montrose and the Heights and of course Galleria which at this point is at critical mass in terms of traffic. . . . We don’t have zoning but we do have unrestricted land. Which is the same thing when you think about it. No one thought about possibly restricting the unrestricted land until the plan for 1717 Bissonnet was announced. . . . The problem here should have been addressed a long time ago. As for urban planning, it should have happened yesterday. Hopefully tomorrow the next mayor will make some sort of ‘master plan’ a priority for these unrestricted areas and we will have something developers and neighborhoods can work with. . . .” [Matt, commenting on Comment of the Day: Missing That High-Density High Density]
NEW WEST U BUFFALO PARKWAY “West University Place’s Zoning and Planning Commission recommended a proposal Monday night to be sent to City Council, which includes a zoning ordinance amendment that would allow driveway stubs and parking areas in front of homes on Buffalo Speedway. A 2003 amendment allowed such driveways on Kirby, Bellaire/Holcombe and Bissonnet, but not Buffalo Speedway. Upon moving to West University Place from the Champions area, [Belma] de Berardinis immediately forecasted a traffic snarl in front of her home and tore up her front lawn with the intent of building a paved maneuvering area. City officials delivered the news that, under West U. law, this was not permitted. De Berardinis had the lawn replaced and every morning . . . confronted angry motorists as she made the dangerous drive in reverse onto traffic.” [West University Examiner]