- Pasadena Refining Systems Plant Explosion Injures One, Sends Huge Plumes of Black Smoke into the Air on Saturday [abc13]
- Fairway Says Time Is Right to Convert Salt Dome Caverns More than 2k Feet Under Southwest Houston into Crude Oil Storage Space [Fuel Fix; previously on Swamplot]
- $3.9M Bunker Hill Village Estate for Sale Also Comes with a $90K Tesla [Houston Chronicle]
- You Need To Make $52K To Be Able To Buy a Median-Priced Home in Houston [Business Insider]
- Real Estate Company Allegiance Title Co. Moving into Uptown’s Redstone Building on Post Oak Lane [HBJ]
- Midtown Barbecue Set To Take Over Former Bourbon on Bagby Space in Mid-April [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Video: Inside Cabela’s First Houston-Area Store Opening March 17 in League City [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- $150M Project Will Extend Westpark Tollway 2.5 Miles West of the Grand Parkway [Houston Public Media]
- Thrillist Names Houston One of the Worst-Designed Cities in America [Houston Chronicle]
- How Oil and Gas-Dependent Areas Avoid Becoming ‘Ghost Towns’ [Oilpro]
- Local Nonprofits Feeling the Squeeze from Oil Collapse as Donations Drop [Houston Chronicle]
- City Council Members Dumbfounded by Public Art Costs [Glasstire; previously on Swamplot]
Photo of smoke from Saturday’s Pasadena Refining Systems plant explosion: Swamplot inbox
Headlines
LOL! Sure you can buy a $209,000 home in Houston with a monthly payment of only $1217. What a load of scat! This is what I love about all of these ridiculously flawed “estimates” paraded by pundits. They obviously aren’t aware of the real property taxes in Houston Texas. That PITI (principal interest, taxes and insurance) estimate from HSH is only off by about $300-$400 a month. Why…because they grossly UNDER-estimate Houston property taxes.
Epic fail by HSH and Business Insider for recycling useless sell-side garbage.
Uh, 52k is not an appropriate salary for a 1200$ mortgage (and it’s worth noting that the 1200$ for a 200k house is only with a larger than 5% down payment.)
@$150M WEstpark extension….
At $60M per mile, where’s the outrage? I mean, lightrail gets blasted for cost per mile but somehow this gets a free pass?
Not to mention, you’ll have to pay to use this road. I mean, you can take all the arguments against lightrail and transpose them to this project and they’d still all work. Expensive? Check. Limited use? Check! ( I mean, how many people really live out there now? It may be necessary for the level of congestion, but when it comes to projects that will impact the most people this doesn’t come anywhere close) Pay to use it? Check!
I’m actually a proponent of this project, but the “highway= less expensive, good, necessary, safety, relieve congestion” and the “lightrail or BRT = $$$$, bad, causes congestion, unsafe” narrative is getting old. No one challenges it so it just keeps propagating.
We have a “worst designed city” article and a “public arts” article. I think the later may explain the former. Why is Houston spending $1 million on birds? Why can’t art be a really, really good stucco job, ornate masonry, or well designed landscaping? Why must it seem like public art is always about murals and sculptures?
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Besides, if you want to see bad design (bad taste), then go downtown in the middle of the summer when it’s 100 degrees with 55% humidity and you can observe actual people wearing wool suits. Wool? Summer? Houston?
DNAguy,
Being a toll road means the $150million will only come from current toll revenues (i.e. the money is being taken from other potential projects).
@DNAguy Obviously this goes against “if you build it they will come” instead of the more obvious “build it where they are”.
Oh Brave Council Members! How we are indebted to you for protecting us from the preverted arts! So many great American cities have thrown themselves into permanent poverty by spending a tiny fraction of their budgets on the preverted arts. But do not stop there, get a crew out to the giant Miro sculpture and hall that thing to C&D to see if we can scrounge up a few hundred for the scrap metal. Put that Dubuffet thing on ebay and see what we can get for it. It doesn’t even look like anything. I bet my kids could do that.
The mortgage payments in question are misleading. That’s just for principle and interest. Most people have an escrow payment of $600 or more on top of that; and the ones with no escrow have to pay that much every month in insurance and property taxes.
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My completely unprofessional rule of thumb, based on being on my third house and my fourth set of mortgages, is to take what your mortgage guy says and multiply by 1.5 to see what you’ll actually need to shell out every month. Then multiply by 3 to see how much you’ll need to make a month to “afford the house” based on the government’s definition of affordability. To see if you can actually make it work, you really need to open your books and analyze your actual finances. If you can afford it for real, then go ahead. But too many people just blindly follow what their mortgage guy and realtors tell them and then they get in trouble later on.
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Re: Art: Houston’s City Council art budget really should be combined with its education budgets, and used to 1: help enhance art education in underserved areas; 2: give small “commissions” to art students and professors for installation pieces, preferably again in underserved areas. Let the private sector and non profits (MFAH: this means you!) buy multi-million dollar pieces of public art for Downtown.
The luxury real estate article says that a lot of owner/CEO’s of small oil companies are selling their mansions to help save their companies. That’s an assbackwards way, there’s a reason you stash a few million in your homestead, it’s exempt from creditors and bankruptcy. Let the dying company fold, file bankruptcy, sell the house later, and boom, you’re liquid again and start with fresh paper and zero liabilities.
The naked lady on 290 didn’t make the cut this morning? http://www.khou.com/story/news/traffic/2016/03/07/naked-dancing-woman-shuts-down-highway-290/81430358/
I realize oil is in a glut, but is it in SUCH a glut that there is literally no where left to store the excess?
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And even if market pressures force prices to tick up, all that stored oil has to be cycled in.
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Yeah, we’re not seeing much movement in prices for a looooong time.
DNA: The city forces parking on people which forces cars which forces roads. Until parking rules change, do you think mass transit will take off?
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Look at dense areas of the country. Do you think when you open a restaurant in NY you need 1000 parking spots to get your permit?
I was able to come up with around $1,420 monthly payments on a 30 yr. fixed rate mortgage using the $209,000 median listing price and making assumptions on interest rates, insurance, appraisal value, etc. If you make $52,000/yr. and put absolutely none of it into savings, the monthly payment will still eat up around 44% of your net pay each month! Way, way too high… As a recent buyer and being of the age where everyone is starting to get married and look for their first home, I notice that nobody ever talks about the additional costs of owning a house. Mortgage is one thing but feel free to add on another couple hundred each month (minimum) for gas, water, lawn care, security service, HOA… The list goes on. None of this is an issue when you’re renting.
I’m surprised no one has ever protested the large penis on that Miro sculpture downtown.
Re: Local Nonprofits Feeling the Squeeze from Oil Collapse
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I heard a similar story on the local NPR station today. I cannot pity the United Way since they take a cut of all of the proceeds before sending on donations to the member charity. That being said, I give directly to the charity to cut out the middleman.
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But, to the main premise of oil collapse pinching local nonprofits: it was bound to happen and while I hate to see it take a toll, no one is immune from economic downturns.
THIS:
“Re: Art: Houston’s City Council art budget really should be combined with its education budgets, and used to 1: help enhance art education in underserved areas; 2: give small “commissions†to art students and professors for installation pieces, preferably again in underserved areas. Let the private sector and non profits (MFAH: this means you!) buy multi-million dollar pieces of public art for Downtown.”–ZAW
$60M per mile, paid out of toll revenue, vs $130M+ per mile paid for by debt and taxpayers. Yeah, why *do* we waste so much money on roads?