Leaderboard

PROJECT: River Oaks Multifamily (assigned prelim name) ADDRESS: 1414 Waugh Houston, TX 77019 ARCHITECT: Page OWNER / DEVELOPER: Camden Securities Company INFORMATION: 34 floor residential high-rise tower containing 302 apartments with attached 6 level parking garage for 460 cars with amenity deck on roof. It will sit on the block bounded on the four sides by Waugh Drive, Bell Avenue, Rosine Street, and Pierce Avenue. The tower is approximately 594,826 gross square feet and the tower balconies are approximately 53,020 gross square feet. The parking garage is approximately 199,290 gross square feet. Residential floors will typically have private unit balconies on east and west elevations. Ground Floor areas will include the main lobby, building tenant services, office areas, fire command, security, mail room, maintenance, storage, loading dock, building fire and domestic water room, emergency generator, building electrical rooms, and drive through drop-off/delivery roadway. Tower level 6 is a tenant amenity floor containing fitness, recreation, socializing and workspaces for tenants. Contiguous with this floor level is the top of the parking garage where there will be 29,800 square feet of exterior tenant amenity spaces such as a lap pool, spa, lawn decks, paved decks, walking paths, fitness areas, and covered lounge areas. There is also a 2,063 square foot amenity deck at level 31 for social gatherings. The staggered picture frames on the exterior of the building will be translucent glass with internal LED lighting while the perimeter of the building elevations will be porcelain paneling. I have no information on the other phases except that a mid-rise / tower will be north of this one, between Bell and Clay.

The next two buildings that will be starting construction soon should round out Phase I. Building D: A 5-story office/retail building about 80,1470 square feet. It is planned to be 4 stories of office over one story of at-grade retail. Building H: This was originally planned as a 10-story office/retail building of about 300,000 square feet (9 stories of office over one story of at-grade office/retail). It is now a 5 level parking garage with 17,773 square feet of ground level retail. It will connect to the other parking garage that is being finished currently (Building G).

What a view the eastern units will have

August street view images:

Crane View.

1928 aerial photograph.

View from a far distance.

Frost Town did not extend as far South as MMP. MMP is on the site of Union Station. Here's the 1944 aerial, with Frost Town circled in red

Ho. Ly. Crap. Don't tease me with the redevelopment of that awful strip mall. It's my white whale.

Converting the hotel in to apartments. I noticed a green construction fencing around the lot a couple weeks ago. Architect -https://mwtusa.com

Had some extra time so I went inside this week.

Another rendering provided by WS Bellows. https://www.wsbellows.com/project/conocophillips-woodcreek-campus-renovation/

I really like the service alley and the separated garages so everything facing Waugh serves people rather than cars. The building itself is reasonably handsome though a bit too officey looking. If it werent for the balconies it would just be an above average office building. But it's not bad.

Now if we could get the 2 boutique stores and the other hotel to clean up their act that would be great

Camden Securities Company is a NY-based developer. https://camdensec.com/

Phase I, yes. But look at the Phase II and III map.

Maybe or

I'm confused. Is this site not under imminent domain for the I-45 project? They just demolished the apartments 3 blocks down on Chartres.

N. Shep is becoming the next Champs Elysees. A major thoroughfare lined with shops and cafes. And an HEB. But in all seriousness, the Radoms and the Brauns set higher standards in the Heights and you can no longer Ainbinder up a strip mall and get the kind of tenants who are going to be able to pay Heights rents.

I recently visited Columbus, Indiana, a small city of 50,000 that Cummings Engine calls its headquarters. Columbus has been the beneficiary of a program that ran during the last half of the last century to hire world-class architects to design churches ( Eliel Saarinen), the library ( Pei), shopping center ( Pelli), private estates ( Eero Saarinen), a corporate building for the local newspaper ( SOM), schools, a local bank, post office ( Roche) and Cummings Engine's global hq (Roche). The program had mixed results. Columbus felt like a small college town with some interesting architecture during summer break , thus absent students and the lively culture that I associate with college life. The program was sponsored by the Miller family, which founded Cummings and owned the local bank and a multitude of other holdings in Columbus. It provided sophisticated contemporary design for public and commercial buildings not often seen in small town America , but failed to address bringing more residents downtown by providing housing. This was driven in part by racism, as the city opposed ( and the Millers supported) Fair Housing ordinances and zoning changes that would have allowed a diverse group of people to reside there. (Slum clearance resulted in a nice riverfront park with a memorial to the neighborhood of run down housing that was home to a diverse group of people). It seems that Columbus did not get the best work out of these architects and many of the buildings seem dated, and dreary, especially the Roche designed post office. Without a local population the mall was not a success and was demolished. The newspaper closed and its building now houses a school of architecture. The local bank building sits vacant. The Cummings HQ ( picture attached) is another of Roche's sprawling mega-structures that extends several city blocks and wraps around an historic industrial building that was surreally placed in the middle of a reflecting pond. To me, it looked like a metastasized structured parking facility, and was dehumanizing from the street level. I can't imagine how diminished an employee might feel driving into one of its tiered parking lots and then parking his or her rear in one of the thousands of workspaces in one of the office modules. Many of these low-rise one tenant corporate campuses have become white elephants and hard to reuse once the corporation is sold, merges or otherwise changes its business model. It's nice to see that Midway has found a way to find new uses and a second life for this one.

From Sunday morning.

The 3D view has finally updated!

I am so excited for them to open. Wondering what their target date for opening is.

From about 70 years ago:

Tower crane base was set this morning, I talked with the site superintendent and he said they plan to do the mat pour on Friday, weather permitting. He hopes to erect the tower crane sometime next week, it will 180' high with 200' of jib. I told him about the incident at the White Oak apartments crane and he told me they shot the level with a transit to make sure his tower crane base is level. The AT crane they use to install the tower crane will be set up on Stanford St.

So they set up the vertical mast on the tower crane yesterday and then took it back down. The tower crane operator at the Marquette Companies White Oak apartments was watching while he was in his tower crane (he is about half mile away). He saw my post on IG and at the end of his shift he DMed me about why it was taken back down. I didn't know but he has lots of connections in the business and found out it wasn't plumb/level so they took it back down. Talked with several workers at the site this morning and they confirmed it. They also said lots of the work has been shut down because all the sections of the tower crane take up a big portion of the property. A boss told me they are waiting for shims so they can level the concrete base. Sounds like a very expensive mistake.

Large bump in Houston payrolls logged through September 2022... Dallas Fed "... Payroll jobs have grown 5.8 percent this year through September. At that pace, the metro would add 183,600 jobs by year-end to reach 3.4 million. That would represent a full recovery to the number of jobs Houston would have reached had it stayed on its 2000‒19 pace of growth. Year to date, all industries have grown. The one-month change in local payrolls accelerated to 6.6 percent, led by the leisure and hospitality sector and professional and business services. However, monthly jobs data are highly volatile at the local-industry level and subject to substantial revision. Of the four industry subsectors that lost jobs in September, only the large trade, transportation and utilities sector declined for two consecutive months. Houston’s unemployment rate ticked down to 4.4 percent in September amid continued labor force growth. For comparison, the unemployment rate was 4.0 percent in Texas and 3.5 percent nationally..."

Looks like the tower crane will be place where the four boxes are.

This area is one of my favorite places in Houston for aerial photography because of the great views of downtown, unfortunately it was a bit too windy as I flew higher with my drone, I will have to wait until the wind calms down to take more pics.

Photos of restaurant Riverhouse and East River 9 golf course. Both are opening this month at 65 Hirsch Rd in the East River mixed-use development. The photos were posted Riverhouse's social media a few days ago.

More screenshots from Walking Houston and Atastefultrip's Instagram stories earlier this week. They're not the best quality. Walking Houston hosted a walking tour of restaurant Riverhouse and East River 9 (65 Hirsch Rd), the golf course opening soon at East River.

Liebherr tower crane base has been installed.

A rendering for the Levy Park Tower has been posted.