THE EAST DOWNTOWN ENRON MILLS MALL THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN Long before he sold the land where the brand-new BBVA Compass Stadium for the Houston Dynamo soccer team now sits to the city, former council member and longtime land speculator Louis Macey had a deal ready to go that would have turned the vacant land into some sort of close-to-Downtown entertainment venue, Catie Dixon reports: “He ended up with six blocks around Bastrop and Texas, which attracted the attention of Katy Mills and Enron. They agreed to buy the site if he could get 12 blocks and an exit ramp off the highway. (He convinced TxDOT to put in the Polk Street exit.) The deal fell through at the last minute . . .” Macey began buying up the properties in 1997. [Real Estate Bisnow; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Real Estate Bisnow
just wasn’t meant.
Well it is an entertainment venue. Just wait until the soccer fans warm up. And start rioting. Riots are always fun to watch…
“(He convinced TxDOT to put in the Polk Street exit.)”
Nothing new there. TxDot pretty much exist to build infrastructure which has a primary purpose of vastly increasing the property values of Texas’ millionaire good ol boys club. Look no further than the Grand Parkway. We can’t pay for schools, but we can spend billions building highways through the countryside that will make a few select landowners even richer. Hell, we can’t even maintain the roads we have, but we TxDot never stops being the corporate welfare piggy bank for the well-connected – land owners, road construction companies, and engineers, especially in Houston Metro area. If you’ve lived here long enough, you know that the MetroRail and Commuter rails would have been built 20 years ago, except that doing so would have used funds that Bob Lanier, Billy Burge, and their major landowning cronies had already “decided” to use to enrich themselves with by building more highways, toll roads, and infrastructure through their own lands. If we had real journalists in this city, they wouldn’t still be getting away with it to this day.