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H-Town Man

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Everything posted by H-Town Man

  1. H-Town Man
    Starts off pretty well but I can't believe they really want to keep the Pierce Elevated structure. Thinking of cities around the world, I can't think of any great neighborhood where multiple levels are anything but detrimental, whether they be transportation levels, park levels, etc. You invariably ruin the ground level when you build levels above it, and you may or may not get something nice above it (usually not). Something thin like the Highline (NY) or the Katy Trail (Dallas) is one thing, but a large structure that casts a shadow below it is a whole different animal. It has proven so difficult for Houston to learn how to just activate the street level environment that it boggles my mind that they think they're going to activate the street and also activate an old freeway structure above it and somehow integrate the two in a vibrant way. That is like trying to do quantum mechanics before you have mastered Newton's laws of motion. Also, the plans for Buffalo Bayou on the West side seem similarly misguided. Building a signature bridge for the downtown connector should be a no-brainer. Expecting people to go to a market plaza underneath the downtown connector with all its traffic noise... I just can't believe it.
  2. H-Town Man
    In my last post I mentioned that I thought the grass was indeed named after the city in Florida. Also the city of Austin, Texas, is named after Stephen F. Austin, whose distant ancestor probably got his name from being raised in an orphanage run by Austin monks, otherwise known as Augustinian monks, who took their name from St. Augustine (of Hippo).
  3. H-Town Man
    Well... you can't really separate anything named "Augustine" from the impact that St. Augustine made. That impact is why things are still being named after him 16 centuries later. Or named after things that were named after him (like the grass is probably named after St. Augustine, Florida, which was named after him). Plus all the things named "Austin" are named after him or someone/something named after him (Austin was the medieval English shortening of Augustine). My posts here are a little tongue-in-cheek. I don't think the developers of this hotel are having seminar discussions on City of God, etc.
  4. H-Town Man
    According to some players in the industry, yes. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/new-texas-oil-boom/ Question is, how long will it take for debts to be paid off, etc., before things really ramp up? I'm guessing the first effects will be in retail and high-end residential sectors as current execs get more money in their pockets, while significant employment growth (and effects on office sector) don't start until next year.
  5. H-Town Man
    Since there is no brewery or large printing press nearby, but there is a university with theologians nearby, I'm guessing it's theologians... which pretty much dovetails with what I said before. St. Thomas and St. Augustine are the two greatest theologians in the Catholic tradition. It COULD still be St. Augustine grass, but I'm not seeing much of that in the renderings....
  6. H-Town Man
    All true, the only thing though is that the main driver of crude oil consumption is the need for gasoline, and even if we went to only 80% of our current oil usage, the price would collapse and it would effectively kill the industry. Prices are set on the margins, they spike when demand exceeds supply just by a percentage point or two, and they drop sharply when supply exceeds demand. During the pandemic, global demand for oil fell from about 100 million barrels per day to around 82 million barrels per day, and this caused the price for oil to actually go negative, massive layoffs, and companies incurring billions of dollars in debt, which they are slowly paying off now with the huge profits.
  7. H-Town Man
    Part of the difference with Fuji is likely that, in other countries, large companies like that have strong ties to government and the government makes sure that they don't fail. This is true of many familiar Japanese and German companies, which also get large regular infusions of research funding from their governments. Whereas in America, for the most part, we believe in "creative destruction" and the government takes a hands-off approach, with rare exceptions like GM and the airlines. Good points all in all.
  8. H-Town Man
    I don't disagree, fair points, but some of the examples you mention aren't really paradigm shifts. So Apple went from devices to... different devices. Marvel found a cinema outlet for their comic creations. IBM got out of hardware but kept their services, which they had been developing all along. A parallel for oil and gas companies might be the shift from land-based oil exploration to deep sea in the 1970's-80's, to fracking in the 2000's-2010's. Pretty big shifts, but their core business was still getting fossil fuels out of the ground, refining them, and selling them to people. Asking them to "evolve" to a future without fossil fuels is a rather larger leap. It is much more likely that the big energy companies in a world without fossil fuels will be totally different companies. But for the other reasons I mentioned, I think it is more likely that technological solutions will be found for the problems inherent in fossil fuels than that there will be a world without fossil fuels. Too much energy just sitting there.
  9. H-Town Man
    This is the most exciting thing I've seen on HAIF in years.
  10. H-Town Man
    Way better and more crisp, would look killer on Montrose Blvd as an homage to Philip Johnson's University of St. Thomas campus. Just donate the design to Skanska for their Montrose/Westheimer project. It does pay a slight homage to Philip's Post Oak Central buildings next door. But if we're griping about dated architecture, the shade-providing fins (or whatever they're called, louvers? help me out) on this are dated, considering that sometime in the 1960's they found a way to coat glass so as to accomplish the same effect without blocking tenants' views of the street below. But it is still cool the way a fully-restored late 50's Euro sportscar is cool.
  11. H-Town Man
    It is much easier for new companies to be created than for existing companies to transform themselves. Think of Kodak. Kodak actually invented the digital camera. But Kodak was, at bottom, a film company. It was not going to be a leader in the digital age. A company represents the crystallization of an idea, the fleshing out of an idea into the realities of production, distribution, marketing, etc. Crystals are not flexible. I think if oil and gas are doomed, Houston is going to suffer a pretty hard fall. We are going to have to fall back on our only other natural advantage, our port, but that will be a pretty big fall because, you know, there are a lot of ports. But I'm not so sure oil and gas are doomed. They still hold more energy than any other substances (with the exception of nuclear energy). Gasoline holds about 100 times the energy of the same weight of lithium ion battery. And the energy is just sitting there in the ground, waiting to be used. It's not like film vs. digital where, at a certain point, the only advantage that film really has is nostalgia. The advantages of oil and gas are still very real. There's just this problem with emissions. But just as technology can improve renewables, technology can also help solve the emissions problem.
  12. H-Town Man
    I respectfully disagree with you. I think this is a big 1990's blah. But it does fit the neighborhood and it is exciting to see stacked three-way mixed use going up in Houston, which puts us right in the 2010's.
  13. H-Town Man
    This is the "vibrancy" that people claim Houston benefits from by not having zoning.
  14. H-Town Man
    4,200 SF, to be exact...
  15. H-Town Man
    It only took 6 years from proposal to groundbreaking. I can't believe there were any doubts.
  16. H-Town Man
    Sounds like this is just an entrance and lobby conversion. They must be converting the actual living spaces separately.
  17. H-Town Man
    You're saying the two entities are unrelated?
  18. H-Town Man
    Yeah, if apartment dwellers almost universally prefer to have fences and gates in suburban settings, the same is going to be true when you have a bayou trail that leads under a giant freeway a few hundred feet away. Plus the occasional alligator. As long as there is a good sidewalk connection from the apartment entrance to the bayou trail, I'm happy.
  19. H-Town Man
    I suppose the best way to determine what the bayou is capable of is to visit another bayou in an undeveloped area of southeast Texas or southern Louisiana. I don't think any of them are especially clear. Translucent, maybe to some degree. I think Frederick Law Olmsted said that the first clear river going westward across Texas was the Colorado, and all the ones before that were muddy.
  20. H-Town Man
    One of the main points of present day environmentalism as well as landscape design is to be true and honest to what naturally exists and not try to enhance or improve upon it. Do not "teach the river a better course," or a better shade or color, for that matter. So I think this would fall into that category. Although the BBP has said that if we have better, more natural drainages leading into the bayou, much of the sediments that wash into it will be filtered out, and the water will be consequently less murky. More like black tea than chocolate milk, if you will.
  21. H-Town Man
    Obligatory "the bayou won't look like that."
  22. H-Town Man
    Nice work. But only 160,748 SF according to Costar.
  23. H-Town Man
    Well, it represents an investment of outside capital into biotech industry within the state. Somewhat noteworthy, and I'd like to know where it was. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
  24. H-Town Man
    Lol, here was my original statement: "$90 oil, folks! I imagine Skanska is already pushing forward on planning for these." Most people on here took it for what it was: a good-natured expression of optimism. You've subjected it to the level of analysis that a theologian might give to a sentence in the Gospel of John, and gotten bent out of shape over something I didn't say about Pittsburgh. Have a good weekend...
  25. H-Town Man
    No, they haven't changed. The price of oil is the major driver of office space occupancy in Houston. There are non-energy tenants such as banks and law firms but they primarily serve the oil industry. Go walk around the Class A buildings in Houston and look at their tenant rosters.
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