The New Willie G’s Seafood Is Here; Metro Bus and Rail’s On-Time Performance; Contaminated Drinking Waters of Texas

Photo of Sawyer Yards: Mark Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool

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  • Re: lightrail adjacent property benefits/development/values

    It’s probably less due to the actual lightrail, and more due to the reduced city land regulations along the lightrail. If a developer is able to build less parking and have reduced setbacks in a particular area, they’re going to be incentivized to build there because their developable square footage increases relative to land size and cost.

    Richmond Ave is a good example of this. The light rail isn’t there yet (and may never be) but you have developments like Kirby Grove and 4306 Yoakum that take advantage of transit corridor code incentives.

    Simply reducing the city parking requirements by 20-25% in a particular area would instantly have many of the same property effects as the lightrail areas. No lightrail needed. Better yet- it’s FREE to taxpayers and the city.

  • Light: Or, when you take the governments boot off of a property owners neck, the value increases. Makes sense.

  • Metro we’ll get you there….. when we feel like it..

  • The light rail studies are nonsense. The exact same types of redevelopment that is happening near the light rail is happening all over the inner loop. Light rail station proximity has zero to do with it.

  • Yeah, light rail has had such an impact that it took them almost 15 years to finally fill in the super block south of McGowan.

  • I have yet to see definitive evidence that light rail was the major factor enabling private sector, for-profit development, though it probably played a supportive factor for some investment decisions. The principal projects I can think of in this regard are Venue Museum District and Mid-Main.
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    A similar statement can be made about the stadiums. For example, the Dynamo Stadium is not the primary investment that caused the growth of EaDo, though it may have increased awareness of the area.
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    Generally, a transportation investment is going to have to be truly transformative in terms of access and mobility to be claimed as the principal cause of new investment. I don’t think we can say that light rail in the manner it has been deployed in Houston fits that description.