Reefmonkey

Well the last few board meetings have provided some good entertainment. The blood feud that has developed between SBISD board member John Perez and Texas House District 133 representative Mano Deeyala has all the high drama of a Shakespearean tragedy. Or at least the beef between Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. Perez thought because Deyala cheered him on in all his efforts to ban books and expunge humaneness from SBISD that his fellow Latino conservative and he had an unbreakable bond, that he had Mano's ear. When the Texas Leg was still in the process of deciding how it was going to kill public education and all the other board members were incredibly alarmed, Perez kept reassuring them that Deayala was going to come through for them in the end, like Little Orphan Annie assuring the other orphans her mother and father really were going to come for her, just you wait and see! But once reality settled in Johnny felt betrayed by his bestie Mano. Deayala was the only Texas lawmaker who accepted the SBISD board's invitation to come face the music over the terrible school finance result, and he got hammered, especially by Perez, who accused Deayala of making private promises to him and then crawfishing on him, and Deayala was indignant at the accusations, insisting he never made any such promises and that as a freshman rep he was powerless to sway the vote (which almost sounded like he thought that absolved him of responsibility for voting with the majority). Two days after that meeting, Perez annouced his intention to challenge Deayala in the next primary. Perez is making this very personal. After Ken Paxton's impeachment trial ended in acquittal, Perez issued a statement praising the result and blaming Deayala for Paxton being impeached in the first place: "The Texas Senate's unanimous acquittal of Attorney General Ken Paxton on all 16 impeachment charges raises a critical question: how did we end up in an impeachment trial in the first place? The responsibility for this lengthy and baseless ordeal lies squarely with my opponent, Mano Deayala, who has succumbed to political pressure from the left and initiated this months-long witch hunt." I swear, if Deayala had been against impeaching Paxton, Perez probably would have accused him of failing to hold Paxton accountable for his corruption, Perez is that invested at lashing out at Deayala. Those of you who paid attention to the Senate's vote on the charges might have raised your eyebrows at Perez's claim the acquittal was "unanimous", since the vote went 16-14 in 9 out of 16 charges, and none of the other 5 charges were unanimous either. You also might have looked twice at Perez's claim that Deayala "initiated" the impeachment effort against Paxton, since it was the Texas House General Investigating Committee who initiated the investigation against him and recommended he be impeached, and Deayala is NOT on this committee. It's hard to know if Perez just doesn't know what "unanimous" and "initiated" means, or he simply tried to get away with making factually false claims, because Perez often awkwardly misuses big words in SBISD board meetings, but he also is frequently guilty of bombast and exaggeration as well.

I was listening to Houston Matters this morning, and they were talking about the “Houston Arrow”, this area of Houston that starts out about Highway 6, and runs between I-10 and US-59, where the “head” of the arrow encompasses a large part of the western part of Houston inside 610. This arrow can be consistently seen when you color code zip codes and/or superneighborhoods in the Houston area for things like median income, median home values, percent of college graduates, percent of white residents, and even things like rates of childhood asthma, locations of waste facilities, facilities that handle hazardous chemicals, etc. The guests on the show included a writer who had published a four part series on the Houston Arrow for a social/environmental justice NGO called the One Breath Partnership, and he referred to the series a lot, and encouraged people to read the series for more information, which I did (each part is pretty short). Both the Houston Matters discussion and the articles focus on what a symbol this arrow-shaped area is for the inequity in Houston. I detected a strong “eat the rich”-flavored insinuation that the people in this predominately white, upper-class stretch of land had somehow nefariously concentrated wealth and power, putting their thumbs on the scales to make sure the City of Houston invested in them at the expense of other areas, and made sure undesirable features like chemical plants and waste facilities were redirected to other parts of the city. I found this analysis myopic and ill-informed. First I couldn’t help but note that a significant portion of this arrow is composed of land that isn’t actually IN the City of Houston. It’s governed by the City of Bellaire, the City of West University Place, the City of Southside Place, and the Memorial Villages, all independent cities that were incorporated long before the City of Houston’s boundaries grew to encompass them. At the time they were incorporated, they were mostly surrounded by farmland, not the urban sprawl that now surrounds them. The City of Houston had no legal right to dictate what kind of housing, or what types of businesses were put in these municipalities, nor did these municipalities have any control of what happened outside of their boundaries. Even the parts of the Arrow that are in the City of Houston simply benefit from their proximity to the politically independent enclaves. The Uptown/Galleria area, for instance, was originally farmland that had the good fortune of being sandwiched between Bellaire and Hunter’s Creek and Piney Point. Next, a lot of the mapping variables, like concentration of facilities that handle hazardous chemicals, waste facilities, and even childhood asthma, have nothing to do with wealthy white people in the Arrow keeping this out of their communities; our petrochemical facilities are located in the southeast quadrant of the Houston area to be near the Port of Houston and on the bays where tanker ships can steam right up load and offload, and minimize the cost and needed infrastructure of land transportation like rail and HC routes. And it makes logistical sense to locate waste facilities close to the industrial facilities that produce a lot of waste. The western part of Houston is nowhere near the bays. And it doesn’t take a degree in epidemiology (which I don’t have) or environmental science (which I do have) to understand why childhood asthma rates might be higher near refineries than elsewhere. All in all, the authors of this series spent too much focus inside the Arrow looking for moustache-twirling machinations, when they should have been looking at what has been happening outside the Arrow for the past 70 years. While the enclaves governed development within their boundaries with the quality of life of the community members in mind, the City of Houston took advantage of the Municipal Annexation Act of 1963 to expand rapidly for tax revenue purposes, with no strategy that involved urban planning, no zoning, etc. COH neglected infrastructure expansion and actively resisted making mass transit grow with the city. In parallel, Houston Independent School District grew to become the massive, ungainly, underperforming and embattled district it is today, also neglecting people in its newer outer territorial acquisitions for a long time. In the meantime, Spring Branch Independent School District, which not coincidentally makes up most of the “shaft” of the arrow, managed to maintain its high academic standards and reputation because it remained a manageably sized district. These massive, sprawling urban school districts like HISD, Dallas ISD, and Los Angeles United School District, are simply way too big to be efficient or avoid corruption. And bad schools, low property values, urban blight, and endemic poverty are a vicious cycle. Again, pointing the finger at areas that maintain a high standard of living through conscious planning as exemplars of “inequity” while ignoring the lack of competent planning and management of the “unequal” areas outside them is so wrong-headed. https://onebreathhou.org/houston-arrow/1-up_and_down_on_richmond/ https://onebreathhou.org/houston-arrow/2-a_home_for_the_ruling_class/ https://onebreathhou.org/houston-arrow/3-from_porches_to_townhomes/ https://onebreathhou.org/houston-arrow/4_moving-beyond-maps/

That's where they always have been most heavily concentrated (I lived in midtown from 2000-2004). If they seem to be more conspicuous recently, that may be due to TXDOT kicking them out from under certain overpasses TXDOT owns the land under.

Homelessness is definitely NOT worse. The Coalition for the Homeless does a census every year, that includes both people living on the streets and in shelters, and the number last year was less than 3,200, down from over 8,400 ten years ago. Houston has actually received national attention for the success of its program to address homelessness, and over the past decade has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. The program started with Anise Parker, but Turner deserves a lot of credit for keeping it going and expanding and adding onto it.

Here’s my prognostication for the future of of Spring Branch, especially the revitalization along Long Point. I would not recommend buying any real estate in any area zoned to SBISD for at least the next two years, and would sell any you already have now. I think values in the district are at or near peak, and growth is about to stagnate, values may even start to decline, especially north of I-10 where they’ve been regentrifying. The reason for all this comes down to the future of SBISD. The schools are why houses here have always commanded a significant premium over those in neighboring areas zoned to HISD. But between the Texas Leg’s devastating hit job on public school funding and district leadership taking a really bad turn in the last 12 months, SBISD is on a course to go downhill fast. All schools in the state will be negatively impacted by Austin’s shameful and deliberate starving of public school funding, but SBISD has unique vulnerabilities that mean it will be hit especially hard. SBISD is a small district and it’s one of only two districts that is both majority low income AND has such a high property tax base that it’s a Recapture district, meaning it has to write a huge check to the state every year to be redistributed to poorer states. This year that bill was $87 million. SBISD needed the state to increase the allotment by $1,000 per student just to keep up with rising costs to due inflation and other increased expenses, and it looks like the legislature will only be given them about $90 per student. The following is an excerpt of an email Superintendent Jennifer Blaine sent out to parents in the district: What Blaine doesn’t mention in the email is that SBISD is already hemorrhaging good employees both because the supply of teachers, etc. is so tight and so many districts can afford to pay more and are luring them away, and because the SBISD board’s recent focus on moral panic culture war issues like CRT, gender identity, and banning books is chasing existing staff and potential new hires away. It doesn’t help that the district has been making national headlines for this hysteria, like its recent decision to cancel a field trip to see James and the Giant Peach. There are no official numbers on how many employees the district has lost and why, or how many more won’t return this fall, but when district boards get into banning library books, teachers flee. Resignations were up 18% overall in Texas last year, but after Keller ISD’s board pushed to remove books about gender identity, teacher resignations went up 59%. After Granbury ISD pulled over 125 titles from library shelves, teacher resignations in that district shot up 115%. Between the SBISD board’s new extremist bent and the superintendent saying they’re going to have to lay off a fifth of their workforce the year after next, a decent teacher would have to be crazy not to consider taking a higher paying job at a more financially and culturally stable district. And when good teachers leave, districts go downhill even when they’re not financially strapped. SBISD already has a divide where the richest parts south of I-10, who control the school board, make sure south of I-10 schools and neighborhoods get prioritized over the more mixed areas north of I-10. If all this rezoning and consolidation they’re warning about happens, I guarantee middle school and high school feeder patterns will be gerrymandered to protect the south, and it’ll be de facto segregation in the district. The people zoned to Memorial probably think this won’t affect them, but it likely will in ways they haven’t anticipated. For instance, Cornerstone Academy is an unzoned school of choice middle school north of the freeway, and it is one of Spring Branch’s shining stars. It’s an in-district charter school, enrollment is kept at about 300 students, who get in via lottery but have to maintain grade and conduct requirements to stay in. Many wealthy Villagers will send their kids to private school if they don’t get into Cornerstone. This is one of these “choice and specialized programs” Blaine said would need to be cut. The School of Choice that used to share the sparkling new campus with Cornerstone has already been shut down. Likely this campus will become a zoned middle school and an older campus will be shut down and moved there. The Villages will weather the next few years with mild stagnation in property values, probably. West of the Beltway is more likely to see some sales volume and sales price decline. North of I-10 will very likely see significant property value decline and a reversal of its revitalization/regentrification trajectory like that happening along Long Point and Westview.

Right but the point is coordinating to avoid these issues means the Astrodome couldn’t be used while NRG is being used, and so fixing up the astrodome wouldn’t fix the problem that we are short one venue for concerts whenever NRG is being used for something else. I’m not a huge fan of Hidalgo but she’s been in office for 4 years, and the Astrodome had been sitting and rotting for 20 years before she took office, so I’m not really sure it’s fair to lay all this on her narrow shoulders.

But turning the Astrodome into another concert venue, you’d still have the issue of sports games and the rodeo. Look at the parking situation and traffic snarl around NRG when Taylor Swift came to town. No way you’d be able to have a major concert at the Astrodome take place on the same night as a Texans game, let alone during the rodeo. Even a smaller concert not along the lines of a Taylor Swift concert wouldn’t work happening there alongside those events, and for smaller concerts you do have other venues like the Arena and the Bayou Music Center.

Oh, you're 100% right, and that's the pathetic irony. The conservative SBISD board members, Chris Earnest, Lisa Alpe, Caroline Bennett, and John Perez are all true believers, they believe in public education....they just want that public education to conform to their conservative Christian values. When they were running for office and had people like Bettencourt, Huffman, and Mano DeAyala patting them on the back and cheering them on, saying "you fight that fight against CRT and gender identity," they didn't realize these seasoned politicians were playing them as useful idiots in their long game to tank public education. And it starts with using hysteria over moral panics like CRT and gender identity to push for "school choice." “School choice” and voucher programs have always been a Trojan horse extremists have been constructing with the intent to siphon funding from public education to force it to collapse. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, the architect of the strategy of elevating critical race theory from an obscure graduate-level academic theory into a major conservative talking point, said in 2022 “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” The strategy has always been to sow distrust of public schools by manufacturing outrage over lies about schools “failing” and “indoctrinating” students. Once enough people bought this Big Lie to be amenable to voucher programs, the decreased funding would make the “failing” part a self-fulfilling prophesy. Once public schools were truly failing anyone who could afford to put their children in private schools or homeschooling would have no choice but to do so, and public education would diminish in significance in American society. Earnest, Alpe, Bennett, and Perez are all shellshocked. Perez especially, this guy thinks he's the smartest guy in any room, and in every board meeting, just about every third sentence he's reminding everyone that he's an engineer, he thought these guys in Austin were his friends, he kept telling everyone "just wait, you'll see, Mano [DeAyala] is gonna come through for us," like Little Orphan Annie telling the other kids in the orphanage that her parents were coming back for her. And you're absolutely right, they don't care about north of I-10, which makes it that much more disgusting when they shamelessly talk about how Austin doesn't understand how unique Spring Branch is, that we're only one of two Recapture districts that's majority low income students. I'm cheering on that lawsuit, but mostly I'm just hoping their buffoonery doesn't tank property values in the next two years, so we can cash out when our youngest graduates and move back into town.

Spring Branch ISD seems to be imploding lately. In a matter of less than a month’s time they have had two high profile situations that have raised serious concerns about SBISD’s ability to remain a highly rated district. In the first situation, Superintendent Jennifer Blaine and other high ranking individuals in the district, as well as the board members, have been flooding district families' inboxes imploring them to reach out to the state legislature, warning them that if the state doesn’t raise Spring Branch’s per-student allotment by $1,000, the following consequences will occur starting the 2024-2025 school year: Senators Paul Bettencourt and Joan Huffman have called the district’s claims “scare tactics” meant to “distract parents from how the school district is managing their local, state, and federal funds like their recent hiring of Austin lobbyists.” https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/23778251-press-release-senator-joan-huffman-and-senator-paul-bettencourts-response-to-misleading-statements-made-by-spring-branch-isd-leadership/?embed=1&responsive=1&title=1 The second situation is Spring Branch canceling all school field trips to see Main Street Theatre’s production of James and the Giant Peach. SBISD received nationwide and international negative coverage over this. This decision came very soon after a mother gave a rambling, incoherent tirade claiming the performance had characters “in drag”. This mother is a frequent flyer at SBISD board meetings’ public comment periods, always spouting fringe right wing anti-CRT, anti-trans rhetoric, and attacking one of the more moderate board members, a Methodist pastor. The district should have known her complaint wasn’t credible, but ever since the the board was taken over by a majority of super-conservative trustees that ran as anti-CRT and anti-trans candidates in 2022, there is such a culture of fear among district employees that they fold to any complaint related to the board majority’s pet issues. After all the overwhelmingly negative publicity the decision brought down on the district, the district finally issued a statement where they claimed the decision was not based on Gerland’s comments, but unnamed teachers and parents had raised concerns about “movements that could be perceived as suggestive in nature that took place during the performance.” Criticism of the district’s decision has been fierce. David DeMatthews of UT’s Department of Educational Leadership was particularly scathing in his assessment of how Superintendent Blaine handled the situation: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/town-square/2023/05/01/450546/spring-branch-and-the-giant-peach-the-reaction-to-the-cancelled-field-trip-over-cross-gender-casting/ To demonstrate how obsessed the new SBISD board is about culture war issues: In the midst of this crisis over Spring Branch’s financial sustainability, the board also discussed pulling out of the Texas Association of School Boards. This itself would have financial implications for the district, because it gets significant discounts in items like insurance, legal services, etc. Leaving TASB would raise costs for the district. So why was the board considering it? Because TASB’s guidance on transgender students wasn’t conservative enough for the SBISD board, and TASB didn’t distance itself from the National School Boards Association after NSBA sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to investigate the increase of threats of violence against school boards. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. I’m not sure how many people outside of Spring Branch were paying attention to what has been going on there before the James and the Giant Peach fiasco, but things are really bad there. Major crackdowns on teachers and students’ self-expression. Pretty oppressive new rules on what kind of décor teachers can have in their classrooms, what they can wear on their persons, like no rainbow pins on lanyards, etc, no pronouns in their email signatures, etc. Pulling books from libraries and teacher’s classrooms has been a big priority. The Newberry Award winning book New Kid is an example of a book that was challenged. The board passed a new policy that made it easier for parents to challenge books, and more heavily weighted parental input into the decision on whether a book is pulled or not. But then other parents started challenging all sorts of books to prove that the process was flawed, the board got furious and just started reviewing books themselves. Even books that have not been through any kind of review process have been peremptorily pulled, there are entire rooms at schools filled with pulled books. And board members have started going after vendors and threatening to cancel their contracts because they don’t like their perceived politics. They’re going after everyone from Blue Willow Bookshop, a beloved mom and pop store that has brought wonderful authors to speak at SBISD schools, just because Blue Willow’s social media is pro-inclusiveness and anti-censorship, to Scholastic, the national company that runs book fairs. There are also other reasons SBISD's political/cultural climate might not be appealing to open-minded, educated families looking for a place to move to.The Villages, the areas zoned for Memorial High School, are where the most rabid conservative trustees and their ardent supporters come from, and unsurprisingly, the climate there is incredibly racist. There is an entire section of the bleachers at Memorial home football games that yells racist and homophobic epithets at visiting school players and band members, has for years, and the administration hasn't done a thing about it. It's a school that has events like this: https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/thug-day-at-memorial-hs-called-out-for-racist-undertones/285-d076395c-f07b-4a0b-a087-aa4b28fa4eeb I see things going very badly for Spring Branch ISD over the next five years. Spring Branch is already having trouble recruiting faculty and staff. Classes like high school chemistry are running at as many as 60 kids per qualified teacher, who divides him time between two classrooms, with a student teacher pinch hitting for him in one when he’s in the other. Candidates are turning down job offers both because SBISD’s pay is not competitive and because they see the district in turmoil. When school boards go hard right on these culture war issues, teachers quit. Since Keller ISD’s board pushed to remove books about gender identity, teacher resignations went up 59%. After Granbury ISD pulled over 125 titles from library shelves, teacher resignations in that district shot up 115%. And now if SBISD staff think they might be laid off when other districts are scrambling for qualified applicants, well, I’d be looking for a job right now if I worked as SBISD. Teachers and staff will be signing their contracts for next year over the next month or so, will be interesting to see how many don’t resign with SBISD by the deadline. People pay the premium real estate prices and the premium taxes in the Memorial area for the SBISD schools. When schools can’t hire decent teachers, their performance and reputation goes downhill fast, and property values in the area follow, and it’s a self-sustaining process of decline. Now you have a district that is publicly on the brink of financial meltdown by its own characterization, you have teachers not wanting to work there because they don’t know if they’ll have a job there in a year and they can make more elsewhere, where they won’t have to fear their every word being scrutinized for “woke” leanings. Pretty soon you’ll see a mix of parents pulling their kids from public school because either they’re concerned about the declining educational performance, or because they are the kind that buy into the Moral Panic over CRT and gender identity, as well as people not wanting to move into a district with a national reputation of being small-minded, reactionary, and a local reputation of being financially unstable. That’s going to drive down the Average Daily Attendance used to determine funding, as well as drive property values down, that will only worsen SBISD’s financial woes, further drive down performance. I remember how in the 70s and 80s SBISD went from being a top-regarded district to second-rate pretty fast; teachers and administrators fled the district for growing districts in the suburbs, they had to close two high schools, Spring Branch High School and Westchester High School, and Northbrook High School went from a decent high school to the low-performing school it is now. I remember in the late 80s my parents thought about moving closer into town and considered buying a really nice house south of I-10, zoned for Memorial High School, but decided to stay in the far suburbs because they were worried they’d probably have to fork out for private school if they moved into SBISD. I see that fate repeating itself for SBISD this decade.

I don't think this is that far out in left field, especially given all the growth in the Katy and Fort Bend areas in the last two decades. One could make the same arguments against a third airport in the DFW area, ("who would even serve it? Southwest and AA would be out"), yet McKinney is making its GA airport a third commercial airport for the DFW area: https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/10/12/mckinney-weighing-its-own-commercial-airport-as-alternative-to-dfw-love-field/ https://www.fox4news.com/news/mckinney-airport-open-house

Bush and Hobby have both been expanded so much (and so much more expansion for Bush to come), I sometimes wonder if there isn't justification for a third airport? Los Angeles has LAX, John Wayne, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario and San Bernadino, I think Houston could swing a third Given that most of the Houston area's growth has been to the west and southwest, it seems that would make the most sense. Upgrading one of the existing reliever airports into commercial service, as a small hub or nonhub, at least for regional jets. The best candidate would be Sugarland Regional Airport, good facilities already, room to grow, and good quick access to I-69. West Houston Airport, off Highway 6 north of I-10 would be another option, but downside to this airport is it's a bit landlocked, you practically have to drive through Bear Creek Park to get to it, and I wouldn't want to try to expand it, because undeveloped land around it is Addicks Reservoir.

Ah, okay. Sounds like you're very well informed about what's going on at IAH, I've lived in Houston all my life, and lately it feels like I don't know IAH at all anymore. Last week I flew a United Express out of B terminal, after security I went to a big new area I had never been in before, where they had all the people flying out of several gates wait together, and then when it was time to board your flight then you were allowed to go down an escalator to a long hall at tarmac level that had multiple gates. Definitely felt like a somewhat temporary solution, all exposed cinderblock. I wouldn't be surprised if IAH is running out of gates, and would resort to airside buses, at least temporarily, until they can build another terminal. I'm curious what the limiting factor ultimately will be for IAH's growth - will it be not enough land for new terminal buildings, not enough runway to handle more flights, or air traffic issues?

By "remote terminals", does that mean airside transfer?

Indian Lodge closed this month for a major renovation project, isn't expected to reopen until January 2024. It's weird because it closed for a big part of 2017 for what was called an "unprecedented" renovation (although at only $1.5 million it's hard to imagine it being all that extensive). I haven't been since 2016, so I didn't see what was done (I also heard they were going to be doing a major revamp of the Black Bear, the onsite restaurant around that timerenovating the dining room, adding outdoor seating, an entirely new kitchen. Although recent looks at their menu shows the same choices of food that was always so bad whenever I ate there before. TPWD website provides no details on what the 2023 renovation will entail, which is realy frustrating for an historic, publicly owned facility, not to have some more details of what's being done to it, some renderings of what it will look like when it's finished.

I'm tempering my excitement, based on some things I've read in multiple outlets: "will cater to families with young children" "wow even the youngest theme park goers" "specifically designed to inspire fun for families with young children" "'The them park will be sized for a regional audience,' the company said, adding that the park's look and feel will also be noticeably different from Universal's other offerings." "Although scaled down from traditional theme parks, Universal ensures that it will 'still carry the same quality as Universal’s other larger resort destinations.'” I also read something somewhere last night that it will be more affordable, and designed for people to spend a shorter amount of time there, like even less than a full day. When I first heard the announcement I started imagining Islands of Adventure, but between all the emphasis on the smaller size and young children, now I'm imagining Hanna-Barbara Land*. *For younger Haifers who might not know, very briefly in the 80s (like a little over a year), Houston had a theme park called Hanna-Barbera Land based on the characters of Hanna-Barbera cartoons - like the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, the Smurfs. It was very little-kid oriented, I was like 8 when it opened and I already thought it was rinky-dink compared to Astroworld. If you want to get an idea of how small the park was, imagine Splashtown (or Six Flags Hurricane Harbor Splashtown or whatever they call it now) up in Spring, because that is the exact piece of land Hanna-Barbera Land was on. Oh, and this was way before my time, but in the early 70s, Houston also had a Busch Gardens, that lasted all of two years. Except this one was no where near the size of the Busch Gardens in Williamsburg or Tampa. You could say it was "sized for a regional audience."