- City Hall Water Supply Found To Be Unsafe To Drink [Houston Chronicle]
- Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service Will Test Your Well for Contaminated Water for Free [Houston Chronicle]
- Flood-Damaged Wortham Theater Center Will Be Closed Through at Least May 15 [New York Times]
- Home Depot Signs Large Houston Warehouse Lease After Harvey [HBJ ($)]
- Judges Order Landlords To Stop Removing Renters’ Belongings in Harvey-Damaged Forest Creek Apartments and Grand on Memorial [Houston Chronicle]
- Houston Homeowners ‘Begging’ for Contractors as Work Piles Up [CNBC]
- Congressman McCaul Calls for Levees at Cypress Creek To Prevent Future Flooding [abc13]
- How Would Houston Property Values Be Affected If Data on Every Property’s Flooding Experience During Harvey Were Easily Available? [Watershed Texas]
- Checking In on Kashmere Gardens After Harvey [OffCite]
- Houston’s Low-Income Residents Struggle After Losing Vehicles in Floods [The Texas Tribune]
- How Houston’s Restaurants Rewrote the Playbook on Disaster Relief [Esquire]
- Recent Rains Set Yearly Record for IAH Measuring Site [Houston Chronicle]
- The Impact Mayor Turner’s Proposed Property Tax Hike Could Have on Restaurants [HBJ ($)]
- Prelude Coffee & Tea Now Open Inside Downtown Tower 609 Main [HBJ]
- Texadelphia Returns to Houston on Oct. 2 [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Marq’E Entertainment Center Nightclub Drink Houston Closes, Citing Loss of Business from Harvey, Curfews [HBJ]
- Taco Bell Planing To Open Up to 350 Drive-Thru-Free Locations, Many Serving Booze, Over Next 5 Years in Mostly Urban Areas [Food and Wine]
- Estimating How Many LEGO Bricks It Would Take To Construct Houston Landmarks [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of M.L. Wisdom (formerly Lee) High School demolition: BOldbury via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Re: Levees at Cypress Creek
Texas Congressman Michael “McCaul even showed us an Army Corp of Engineers map from the 1940s that penciled in levees at Cypress Creek. It would alleviate pressure on all of the water southeast of it, but it was never built.â€
ONLY PARTIALLY TRUE. True, he levees were not built, BUT they would only aggravate the flooding southeast of it (duh). The ONLY ANSWER is to build water retention areas as the levees would raise the amount of water going ‘south’. Where do these idiots come from, and how on Earth do they keep getting elected?
Re: Kashmere Gardens. Whomever wrote that Cite article relied way too much on the H-GAC Kashmere Gardens Livable Centers study, which also included most of the area that people talk about when they talk about 5th Ward. The article ought to have focused on the City’s Super Neighborhood #52, Kashmere Gardens, which is far more relevant to flooding from Hunting Bayou, but it would’ve included slightly less damning demographic statistics. (I inserted a link to information about both below.) As most Houstonians have no idea where Kashmere Gardens is located or anything about the character of the neighborhood means that journalists really ought to apply a higher standard of care in communicating information about it.
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http://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Demographics/docs_pdfs/SN/52_Kashmere_Gardens.pdf
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http://www.h-gac.com/community/livablecenters/planning-studies/documents/Kashmere-Gardens-LC-Final.pdf
RE: Taco Bell expansion. This reminds me of the old movie Demolition Man, wherein Taco Bell won the franchise wars, and was the only restaurant remaining.
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/07/taco-bell-demolition-man/491234/
RE:Homeowners ‘Begging’ for Contractors
Please, please, PLEASE get the word out to your family and friends, neighbors and strangers. Anyone who needs a contractor needs to vet them **completely.** Everyone keeps talking about how you need to hire a licensed plumber, electrician, etc. Yes, do this but in addition, don’t hire them if they want an exorbitant amount of cash up front and don’t hire them if you do not have firsthand knowledge of their work – ethic or labor.
Based on my personal experience with a contractor, you MUST do a search of the court systems prior to anything! Go to Harris County Clerk’s site and search their name and/or their business name in Civil and Criminal courts. If they’re from Brazoria, Montgomery, or potentially did any work in any neighboring counties, check their County Clerks’ records as well. These are public documents and FREE to access once you sign up. You could even go so far as to run a background check prior to hiring them. I know I would.
Please don’t end up like me who tried repeatedly to make amends with our old contractor only to have him outright ignore everything and sue us anyways. If only we had known about his litigious background to begin with, we would never have hired him.
USSEldridge: You’re right on. People seem to be worried about looking into someone to see if they were sued. I’m more afraid of dealing with someone that DOES the suing.
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Re: Kashmere Gardens. We have some properties in that area that are in the flood plain. They did amazingly well. Not sure how/why I got so lucky.
we need a carfax, but for homes!
toasty: That won’t help when you have people that simply have something happen to their home, and fix it. Many people plan for bad events (with savings, as a type of self insure) and when they happen, they deal with them. It would never end up in some giant database.