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KirbyDriveKid

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Everything posted by KirbyDriveKid

  1. KirbyDriveKid
    We think that pool gets, what, a combined 3 hours of sunlight per year? Might be planning the best summer solstice party in town, though.
  2. KirbyDriveKid
    It's worth noting how this $3 billion over 30 years is useful for today. The revenue capacity from SB 1057 is used to support lending now of the magnitude of that at play in Dallas. It provides the backing for the loans that will be taken out in the near future to finance the improvements. The intention is not to gradually spend in dribs and drabs over 30 years as revenue comes in. SB 1057's structure, after all, is exactly what was used in Dallas. The whole point was to give us the benefits that Dallas had previously won for themselves from the Texas Legislature. See https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/analysis/pdf/SB01057H.pdf
  3. KirbyDriveKid
    This is art deco now. I dont make the rules.
  4. KirbyDriveKid
    This is a month old, but I thought other construction nerds in the forum might enjoy this non-paywalled article covering some specifics of the construction process with the builder. Talks a good amount about specs, materials, and design elements that I hadn't seen before. Can't wait to see this building completed! https://www.enr.com/articles/58146-first-ismaili-center-in-us-is-a-site-to-behold-in-texas
  5. KirbyDriveKid
    No! Not Avalon Diner! NOOOOOOO! 😭 Quick someone plant some live oaks in the parking lot so those Montrose nimby's save the true heart of Upper Kirby culture.
  6. KirbyDriveKid
    *bows* The collective knowledge of this forum is really remarkable
  7. KirbyDriveKid
    Where we finding these $5 lobster rolls? Closest restaurant to me in Boston that sells decent lobster rolls (Alive & Kicking) costs north of $30 now...
  8. KirbyDriveKid
    The clue's in the name that I'm a fan of the Kirby area, but advertising the office space as "providing unmatched views of the Kirby Drive corridor. " is an all-timer for me 😂
  9. KirbyDriveKid
    As opposed as I am to these fights... Houston has been a cultural leader in Texas by any reasonable definition. Whether its fine art (Menil, MFAH); performing arts (Ballet, Symphony, Alley, Opera); popular arts (non-country music); global diversity (blowing Austin out of the water, see, e.g., Ismaili Center); food (authentic global, domestic, fushions). If one's definition of culture of Parisian boulevards, then we aren't that, but that definition would be woefully underinclusive. I won't say that other cities don't have culture. Lots of great things in Texas. But don't knock down Houston to make that point. It misses the mark. Our fair city is blue collar -- it makes stuff. Lucky for us one of the things it makes is culture.
  10. KirbyDriveKid
    It is tall, and I love a tall tower. But the pickup-sticks cap is pretty silly.
  11. KirbyDriveKid
    Went down an Ismaili-center rabbit hole and fell in love with the center in Dushanbe. This link had great photos: https://simergphotos.com/2015/09/27/dushanbes-ismaili-centre-through-the-lens-of-muslim-harji/. In particular, I thought it was interesting that Farshid Moussavi seems to have drawn on this design, placed above the front door in the Dushanbe center, and made it the centerpiece of the main hall of the Houston center.
  12. KirbyDriveKid
    Nothing may be happening at Mimosa Terrace, but in the meantime, I have spent a not insigificant amount of time thinking about this house and inventing an ever-more-elaborate backstory for it. I just have so many questions.
  13. KirbyDriveKid
    Not a huge fan of the plans. At least in the renders, I'm getting the impression that the new quad and the architecture of the surrounding buildings are somewhat at war with one another. Very much in keeping with a lot of contemporary public space designs with their emphasis on curves and asymmetry, but I'm (1) not entirely convinced by the trend in general, and (2) I dont think it fits very well with the formal, linear, and symmetrical design of the buildings composing the quad. All for a refresh, but I think a plan more in line (pardon the pun) with the gardens of the new Ismaili Center would have better complemented this space.
  14. KirbyDriveKid
    Hmmm, yes, thank you. I would like this one.
  15. KirbyDriveKid
    Don't you dare wish for the death of Avalon Diner!! If every Houston surface lot has to go, I hope it's the last one.
  16. KirbyDriveKid
    I wasn't totally sold on this development's amenities, but now that I see *drive in movie theater* I am sold. I kid. I think..? (From CityLiving's photo above)
  17. KirbyDriveKid
    On a depressing night for Houston baseball I have come here for comfort... and a reminder that our skyline is infinitely better than Dallas'.
  18. KirbyDriveKid
    Very sorry if I missed it, but has anyone posted a site map with the buildings labeled? Such as... which one Building 3 is?
  19. KirbyDriveKid
    Provides some context to this fight (tldr; we are all in a sticky spot) -- https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/commercial/texas-cities-are-booming-but-their-offices-are-the-most-vacant-4cffb565 America’s highest office vacancies aren’t in the East and West Coast cities that have been shedding population and workers. They are in Texas, a thriving Sunbelt state that has been luring companies away from the big coastal cities. Houston, Dallas and Austin top the list of major U.S. cities with the highest office-vacancy rates, according to Moody’s Analytics. About 25% of their office space wasn’t leased as of the third quarter. That was more than double New York’s vacancy rate of 12% and well above San Francisco’s vacancy rate of 17%. Texas office floors are struggling to find tenants even though the state’s workers have been more eager to get back to the office than in most other places. According to Kastle Systems, which measures occupancy by counting keycard swipes in 10 major metro areas, Houston, Austin and Dallas have the highest office-return rates. Vacancies are high largely because Texas developers build too much. All three cities experienced a surge in construction in the 1980s, when tax rules favored developers and loose lending created a commercial real-estate bubble. Another construction spurt in the late 1990s aggravated the problem. [...]Office markets in other booming Sunbelt cities such as Atlanta are also suffering, despite economic growth and job creation. But the Lone Star State is an extreme case. Cheap land and lax regulation encourages developers to overbuild during boom times, said Thomas LaSalvia, head of commercial real estate economics at Moody’s Analytics. Construction in Texas has slowed from the 1980s, but new office completions as a share of the market still outpaced the rest of the U.S. each year for the past 16 years, said Jeff Eckert, the Dallas-based head of U.S. agency leasing at real-estate brokerage JLL. Older buildings have been losing tenants to the new competition. “We like to develop in Texas,” he said. [...] Austin saw a lot of new office construction over the past seven years, as developers rushed to cash in on the city’s emergence as a corporate hub. All those new towers are now competing with older buildings built in the 1980s and ’90s. When some construction projects delayed by the pandemic finally opened, developers found that demand was less than they had hoped, partly because of remote work, said Christopher Rosin, an associate economist at Moody’s Analytics. Although Austin’s office towers are busier than those in other cities, physical occupancy is still more than 40% below prepandemic levels, according to Kastle. Austin’s office-vacancy rate was 24.2% in the third quarter, according to Moody’s, up from 12.9% in the third quarter of 2019. Houston’s vacancy rate has also surged in recent years, but for different reasons. The city’s economy depends on the energy sector. A crash in oil prices in 2014 caused demand for office space to crater, helping push up vacancy from 14.9% in late 2014 to 23.5% in late 2019. Since then, it has increased to 26.4%—the highest among 79 markets, behind only the much smaller Charleston and Dayton, according to Moody’s. At Houston’s 4.5-million-square-foot Greenway Plaza office complex, an appraiser recently cut the estimated value by more than half to $425 million, down from $1 billion in 2017, according to Trepp data. The complex was 34% vacant as of September, up from 12% in March 2022.
  20. KirbyDriveKid
    I considered even the completed vision of this building to be a blight on the area, and I am very worried by the prospect of leaving this uncompleted husk in the center of one of Houston's best areas, but let's not get too carried away in our grief. To view this as an omen of Houston's collapse, we would have to decide that the financial difficulties of one developer (who is designing some of the worst high rises I have ever seen) demonstrates that Houston and Phoenix---two of the nation's fastest growing urban areas---are somehow doomed. That seems like a stretch. Let's be normal sad and not irrationally and apocalyptically sad.
  21. KirbyDriveKid
    Wow, we are picky nowadays. I'm skeptical this gets financing, but if it does I will 100% celebrate this lot's Wachovia branch to 36 story highrise glowup. Maybe I'll even dance a little jig on the Beck's Prime deck.
  22. KirbyDriveKid
  23. KirbyDriveKid
    Amazing! As with Colombe d'Or and the Montrose Hanover, though, it is bizarre to me that in a city as sprawling/unzoned as Houston developers place high rises immediately next to one another... Still very excited, though! As the name suggests, I have always been a Kirby stan, and the medical office building was such a disappointing addition to a block with a ton of densifying potential. I also wonder whether/hope they will site the residential portion toward the east/back of the lot to avoid directly blocking both building's views (somewhat like what the Colombe d'Or did).
  24. KirbyDriveKid
    Biggest thing I missed when I moved north. Houston is just so *green* year round. People talk about how the extra sunlight down south helps the mood, but they sleep on how signs of natural life are pretty important too.
  25. KirbyDriveKid
    I find this so depressing 😢. What a heinous parking garage. Like God saw the absurdity of the Ashby protests and decided to curse us with this actual nightmare highrise our sins.
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