wilcal

Target looking very very close. Saw many employees showing up for their shift this morning I'm guessing for stocking/etc. You can see the 3 lifts in the picture, so clearly some painting/finishing/whatever is still happening.

Wasn't able to grab a pic, but the mural was looking really good.

Four-way stop added to intersection Austin @ Holman by HCC. Really nice touch! Much safer imho. They also added bikeway wayfinding signs on HCC's campus.

This is a few dozen page PDF put ought by the city: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/docs_pdfs/User's Guide for WP and TOD report_6_24_2020.pdf It's pretty quick to scan though, and covers both Walkable Places and Transit-Oriented Development.

Fiesta to become "Greentown Labs" a green energy incubator.

I honestly think someone is living there. It seems like there is a vehicle or two there all of the time.

I'm just saying that Kamin said recently that they would be applying again for the HGAC funds during the next call for projects whenever that happened. HGAC call for project when they were rejected started in 2018, so they had to have funds allocated from before that. And yes, Harvey rebuild may have been part of it: that's what happened to the W. Alabama funds.

Houston-to-Dallas bullet train given green light from feds

City budgets vs national budgets make the difference there.

From the planning department's platting update email: Nothing we didn't already know, except that it's interesting that applicants can try to get a waiver on the sidewalk requirements. Also will be interesting to see how many SPAs are requested/granted. It was a mega PITA before, so hopefully it's actually easier now.

You're leaving the HGAC component out of this. They applied for HGAC funds, which require matching funds from the applicant. I honestly got the feeling that they only scheduled CIP funds for the lower Westheimer portion of the project to try to get the HGAC grant, and when that failed they decided to pull all funding and reallocate. They (I think Kamin?) said that they would be applying for HGAC funds again in the next round.

I'm kind of stunned why they would build a highway so close to another highway.

A bevy of building permits issued for the retail build-outs:

No joke. There's probably room for 50 things like this across the East End.

Stopping for the bus occasionally is still faster than having the bus passengers requesting stops/pickups in their own personal cars instead.