- Developers Propose Expanding $15,000-per-Unit Apartment Subsidy Program To Meet Downtown Demand [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Scenes from a Helicopter Tour Above the ExxonMobil Campus-in-Progress [Houston Business Journal]
- Stream Realty Partners Says It’s Erected the First 6-Story ‘Tiltwall’ Office Building in Texas [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot]
- Johnson Development Building 2,700-Home Master-Planned Community at Grand Pkwy. and West Airport Boulevard [Houston Business Journal]
- NerdWallet Names The Woodlands Top ‘City on the Rise’ in Texas [Houston Business Journal]
- Anonymous Investor Has Agreed To Purchase the Rights to the Balinese Room Name and Rebuild at the Same Location [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Galveston Island Brewing Preparing for May Opening [Galveston County Daily News ($)]
- Fixing Houston’s Traffic Problem Will Take More Than Pouring Concrete, Mass Transit or Bike Lanes But a Shift in Attitude [Houston Press]
- Metro Logged Record Rail Riders on March 13 with 71,054 Trips Taken on Day of Rodeo, Maroon 5 Concert [The Highwayman]
- Artist’s 7,500-lb. Fish Sculpture Sitting in a East End Warehouse Yard Until It Can Find a New Home [Culturemap]
- Waco Artist Arrested in Connection With Prada Marfa Vandalism [Glasstire]
Photo of Fifth Ward house: David Elizondo via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Stream needs to focus on their project on Market Square–yeah, right, we’ll most likely be colonizing Mars before they even get close to getting financing for their “International” Tower—too bad, it a really cool design–oh and Galveston needs to make the developers of the Balinese Room build as close as they can to the original design, it was unique and scaled properly, the last thing we need is another Flagship type monstrosity jutting out over the Gulf (I can live with Tilman’s Coney Island, it has historic context)
I can’t imagine them rebuilding the Balinese Room and getting it anywheres near the original. Luckily, we wandered in there for drinks in the springtime of ’08, before it blew away.
What’s with linking to paywall articles in the Chron?? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Shannon, I agree.
This new ‘Balinese’ should smell the same too – low air-change and humidity and cigars and spilled drinks. I’m not kidding.
In fact, I was at a beach resort several months back. The original bldg built in the ’40s. Right on the sand. Cracked plaster, thick walls, jalousie windows, oddly low door-frames. I kept expecting Lana Turner or Clark Gable to appear – It was so fun to experience!
Wait a minute–the “market” is demanding more downtown housing, but government subsidies are needed to get them built?!? Maybe the “market” is really just demanding better options to get downtown, like improved public transit and improvements to infrastructure, you know more options for less stressful and shorter commutes.
There’s long been demand for downtown living, but not at the rents that were needed to make projects work financially. It’s only in the last couple years that supportable rents (except at the thin top of market where One Park Place operates) for general Class A urban core apartments have even approached levels where the current subsidy program could even have a material impact. I question whether the program should be expanded to the proposed unit quantity though – I’d rather let it sit awhile and see how the already planned projects perform.
It is just torture to think about what this city could have been if we had elected Brown a few years back.