Ross

16 minutes ago, trymahjong said:

 

4,017 - Total of sex crime reports reviewed.

399 - Number of forensic interviews scheduled with survivors.

1,767 - Officer visits to last known address of victims.

91,824 reviewed of 264,000 - Department-wide incident reports reviewed.

1/3 - Reports that have been reviewed within eight weeks.

3,462 - cases that have been cleared, suspended or inactivated, mostly due to no additional leads.

“The remaining reports are being investigated. Any incident will be reopened should a complainant contact us and provide additional information or evidence,” Finner said.
 

 

That very last thing made my stomach sink.....what would  it take out of a person, who had suffered the trauma of enduring rape, realizing HPD had shelved that complaint, understood that after " investigation" HPD had closed it, then finally knowing it would would be up to the victim to get it up and going again.

I think all of the sex crimes have been investigated to the extent possible. If HPD cannot find the victim, there's not much they can do unless the victim contacts them. That's just the reality of crime investigation. It's like when there are shots fired and people on Nextdoor are asking why HPD isn't doing anything, it's because without any sort of video or other evidence, there is nothing the police can do except take a report.

The paint lines look a bit...strange. They appear to based on distance from the top of the windows instead of being the same on all sides. I don't think I've seen that color scheme before, so that's at least something different.

6 hours ago, Blue Dogs said:

Why do I get the feeling that Finner will NOT survive this scandal ?

The Admiral Byng of HPD? Something about "to encourage the others"?

12 minutes ago, IntheKnowHouston said:

Several sign permits were purchased yesterday for Nalo Spa & Beauty. It's located at 1515 Studemont St, Suite 202:

• Sign site inspection
• Sign plan review

Details from the permits:

• Use: New wall 15 X 4 Nalo Spa & Beauty
• FCC Group: On premise; new sign; wall; internal light

 

Nalo Spa & Beauty is one of several tenants at 10 and Heights. The mixed-use commercial development is located where Party Boy once operated.

Sign site inspection





Sign plan review

 

We do not need images of sign permits. Just stop. You already put the essential information in text. The images just slow down page loading, even with gigabit fiber and a high end PC.

11 hours ago, trymahjong said:

I wonder what % of HPD officers engage in non beat cop/ patrol cop duties?  Could a different set of people do those jobs? A different set, vetted, set; that was trained for that sort of duty....routing calls? Answering telephone, filing, directing parking lots exits? Monitoring continuous public TIRZ meetings? We've all seen those officers. ....could that new set of people perhaps with a salary, compared to new teacher position, or just 30% of a new officer....is that something that might work?

So from someone from the outside looking in-- my quasi qualified opinion came up with....   🧐 A 3 able bodies for the price of one officer.......maybe money found thru grants or even corporations.....does any of that sort of pie-in-the-sky/outside-of-the-box sort of thinking ever take place? Does any brain storming to find a useful solution ever go on over at COH and HPD? All that talk from Mayor Whitmire of finding extra men to assist HPD sounded plausible; is that suggestion viable? Is there a certain specific  position at COH/HPD dedicated to  actual intelligent thought to finding a solution to so few officers in such a big city?  Just wondering.........

2023 Chronicle article on police staffing and some of the issues https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/houston/article/houston-s-1b-police-budget-won-t-fill-staff-18108477.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG91c3RvbmNocm9uaWNsZS5jb20vcG9saXRpY3MvaG91c3Rvbi9hcnRpY2xlL2hvdXN0b24tcy0xYi1wb2xpY2UtYnVkZ2V0LXdvbi10LWZpbGwtc3RhZmYtMTgxMDg0NzcucGhw&time=MTcxMzMxNTI5MDc2OQ%3D%3D&rid=NDhhN2ZkODktOTA0Ny00ZjM0LWEyNjgtNThhNWNkY2RlZjY3&sharecount=MA%3D%3D

Detailed FY2024 HPD budget is here https://www.houstontx.gov/budget/24budadopt/III_HPD.pdf

The budget shows 2875 patrol officers and 1357 investigators. If you assume the patrol officers are split into 7 shifts to provide 24/7 coverage, that means that at any given time there are about 400 officers on the street to patrol 600+ square miles. The real solution is to hire 1,000 or more new officers.

11 hours ago, ehbowen said:

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that as long as we reward inefficiency and ineffectiveness with more tax funds, we'll get more inefficiency and more ineffectiveness. I'm saying that we need to revoke all civil service protections and make any pensions contingent upon results and performance. Return to the mindset of the 1950s, when the objective was to keep taxes down and give the citizens the maximum bang for their buck.

The mindset of police in the 1950's was to beat up Blacks and blame them for every crime.

HPD is very short of officers. Hiring an officer costs about $100,000 per year all in, so hiring 1,000 more is another $100 million.

Protections for police and fire pensions are enshrined in State law, they aren't going anywhere.

How would you measure police performance while not providing incentives for them to game the system?

1 hour ago, rechlin said:

Or just restore them.  After the first two times he deleted all his photos, I started backing them up so I have all saved since October, and some of the earlier ones might be on the Wayback Machine.  Here are the photos deleted from the post you quoted, and I can provide the rest if anyone is interested (423 photos, 1.07 GB):

 

 

 

I am going to be the mean guy today. Those pictures are copyrighted, and you CANNOT store them and repost them unless you are willing to risk massive fines for infringement. Like it or not, Cityliving has absolute control of the images, they are his intellectual property, and he can stop anyone from using them without his permission. 

1 hour ago, trymahjong said:

I know it must be a mega-odious option but why is it no one ever brings up a sale tax?
not a huge increase, perhaps a fraction of a penny.

why do I go there you ask?

I'm stuck in a mindset that increasing my already high property tax, might get me more police (but HPD has always been 1uick to point out HPD police response is gauged towards the # of calls made from certain part of town-HPD/PIP is always telling me Montrose residents don't make a huge number of those calls)

but will not get me a 

=>better street outside my house

=>closing the open ditch drainage next to my crap  sidewalks,

=>Replacements for crumbling curbs, not to mention the need for more handicap cut outs at  street intersections in my neighborhood of aging residents

=>more water pressure, from the remaining 100 + years old pipes

=>better garbage and recycle pick up

 

that just the start- geez, if it wasn't for my great neighbors and the opportunity to live the myth of the Montrose-- those property taxes would drive you out of town🫤😶🧐😵‍💫

 

 

The 1% sales tax that Houston gets is budgeted to raise $865 million. That tax it at the maximum allowed by state law, so it's not going up.

We will probably see a garbage fee sometime in the near future. If it's like Dallas, that will be $35 per month. The tax money for solid waste now is $20 per month.

Water delivery is not covered by property or sales taxes, that's an enterprise fund with its own budget.

2 hours ago, Houston19514 said:

Who is Brochsteins?

Who is Brochsteins?

Houston company that does amazing wood work for commercial buildings. They've been around for decades

https://brochsteins.com/

22 hours ago, ehbowen said:

Just keep in mind that if they ever solve the crime problem, they won't have grounds to go back and demand more tax money for more police.

Same with schools.

Same with highways.

Rinse and repeat as needed.

Are you saying we don't need to pay any taxes? That crimes will magically solve themselves?

Houston is short of about 1,000 police. Adding that many would cost $100 million per year. Currently, the HPD and HFD budgets exceed property tax collections by over $200 million and firefighters are going to be entitled to over a billion dollars from the contract settlement. The City has a revenue cap that limits increases in property tax collections to the lower of 4% or the combination of population increase and inflation. Unless you think there is a few hundred million dollars the City can cut from the non-public safety portions of the budget, there will have to be a tax increase to increase the number of police and to pay for the HFD pay raises and back pay.

3 hours ago, editor said:

This is the second large company to leave Sugar Land recently.  At least that I can remember.  I wonder if there's been more.  And why.

Usually a better deal on rent. On the cynical side, another reason is proximity to the CEO's home. But, the Noble CEO lives in River Oaks, and I doubt that CityWest is easier to get to than Sugar Land.

1 hour ago, __nevii said:

Forgot to mention that even the Houston townhome structures are not detrimental for walkable urbanity: a form of mixed-use can easily take off in converting those front-loading garages into shop space. I've seen similar examples presented regarding Tokyo.

Will have to kill mandates like parking minimums, though (especially needed for the rest of the city outside Downtown, EaDo, and much of Midtown).

The existing townhomes in Midtown generally have the parking in the back, not facing the street.

3 hours ago, editor said:

I'm not sure how it would force anyone to do anything.  A landowner can still choose not to build something.  Or they can choose to build something and recoup the cost of the property tax, just like with any other building.  

As for new buildings not being needed, if that was true, we wouldn't have a nationwide housing shortage.

The part about "If buildings were economic to build, land owners would build them" is demonstrably false.  Even demonstrated in downtown Houston where a foreign government and a major oil company sit on undeveloped land just because they can afford to.  And the reason they can afford to is because it's not being taxed at its value. 

One of the empty blocks is the old YMCA location owned by Chevron. The taxes on that property are about $500,000 per year. The block immediately to the North is also owned by Chevon and the taxes are just under $7 million. Under a LVT would the tax on the vacant property also be $7 million, or would the developed lot drop to say $3 million and the vacant lot increased to $3 million?  Or would the vacant lot be taxed at $7 million and the developed lot at $3 million? The land value for both those blocks is about the same under the current scheme as $32 million, but the developed block is valued at $334 million.

Is the thought that Chevron would build a 40+ story building on the empty lot? Who would occupy that space? Or would we get another 5 story apartment building?

I suspect that Chevron would just pay the taxes on the vacant land and leave it undeveloped.

1 hour ago, editor said:

I think more "alleviate" than "resolve."  I don't think there's a magic bullet for solving the problem.

An interesting idea that is very old, but I only learned of recently, is changing the way property is taxed.

Instead setting the tax based on the improvements on the land, the government taxes the value of the actual land.  Here's a Times article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/business/georgism-land-tax-housing.html

Here's the upshot:

---

 

“Blight is rewarded, building is punished,” he said in a recent speech, repeating it over and over for emphasis.

The refrain is a windup for Mr. Duggan’s scheme to fix the blight: a new tax plan that would raise rates on land and lower them on occupied structures. Slap the empty parcels with higher taxes, the argument goes, and their owners will be forced to develop them into something useful. In the meantime, homeowners who actually live in the city will be rewarded with lower bills.

…

The notion that land is an undertaxed resource — and that this distorts markets in destructive ways — unites libertarians and socialists, has brought business owners together with labor groups and is lauded by economists as a “perfect tax.” And yet despite all that agreement, there are just a handful of examples of this policy in action, and none in America that match the Detroit proposal in scale.

An LVT would force land owners to build buildings that are not needed and that would not produce enough income to cover the costs of the development. If buildings were economic to build, land owners would build them.

52 minutes ago, editor said:

I just noticed today that UH/D did it next to its new building:

The Apple Maps image makes it look like a detention basin, but going by on the train today I could see that it's athletic fields.

It looks like it's actually both a detention basin and athletic fields. That's much like the Timbergrove Sports Association fields off of East TC Jester/ The fields sit a couple of feet below the surrounding area https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7968899,-95.4219177,295m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu

The Sunnyside site was a landfill and had an incinerator for many years. It is already a polluted site that cannot be easily remediated. Using it as a solar farm is an excellent way to use a brownfield site.

2 hours ago, Buy-U-City said:

After the terrible destruction of a 4000 ac. solar farm by a massive hail storm in Needville Tx, hopefully it's DEAD. Nothing environmentally friendly about that incident. The toxins leeching into the ground water from all the busted panels is a horrible nightmare.

What toxins are leaching into the ground water in Needville? Modern panels have minimal amounts of toxic metals and chemicals. And no, it's not a horrible nightmare.

10 minutes ago, Specwriter said:

Highrise, I assume you are referring W. T. Carter the lumberman who developed Garden Villas where this park is located. Again, assuming you are not referring to the country western singing and songwriting family or the family of the former president (Billy was a bit of a character I'll admit 😀), why is the Carter family considered infamous?

Here is a link to the history of Garden Villas. I owned a house there in the 1990s on Sims Drive. https://www.gardenvillas.org/history-of-garden-villas.html 

Here is a link to the Texas Transportation Archive article on William Thomas Carter, Jr. https://ttarchive.com/library/Biographies/Carter-William-T-Jr_1926_New-Encyclopedia-of-Texas.html

Somewhere in my files I have a photocopy of the original Mexican land grant given to Stephen F. Austin wherein he conveyed 3200 acres, which included present day Garden Villas to Henry Prentiss in 1833.

Images of land grants are available from the General Land Office website at https://s3.glo.texas.gov/glo/history/archives/land-grants/index.cfm

The GLO site says that the Prentiss grant was 4428.4 acres, which implies Prentiss was granted a full league of 25 million square varas. English field notes for the grant https://cdn.glo.texas.gov/ncu/SCANDOCS/archives_webfiles/arcmaps/webfiles/efns/1-152.pdf

Image of the grant, in Spanish from 1833 https://cdn.glo.texas.gov/ncu/SCANDOCS/archives_webfiles/arcmaps/webfiles/landgrants/PDFs/1/0/2/8/1028887.pdf

Railroad Commission map of the grant(The RRC GIS site is the best tool I've found for seeing the outlines of land grants) https://gis.rrc.texas.gov/gisviewer/ There may be some conflict with other grants, but that happened a lot. The last vacant pieces of land created by errors in surveys were not identified until the middle of the 20th Century https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/land-vacancy I've seen a correction to a land grant to one of my ancestors in Jackson county that had a 300 acre conflict with an earlier grant. That was identified in the 1940's, long after my ancestors had sold the land.

2 hours ago, __nevii said:

I feel like street-design is a big culprit. Not sure why many areas of Midtown are "one-way traffic", that effectively makes them multi-lane stroads: granted, having a single point of traffic to worry about is not as difficult for a pedestrian compared to a Westheimer-type outside Beltway 8 situation ... but still.

And Midtown is actually an extension of the original core grid: the car-design must have been a retro-fit.

As far as I can tell, Houston was laid out with wide right of ways for streets before cars became ubiquitous. I've seen sources that say that started with the Allen Brothers, who wanted wide streets to make commerce easier.

I think the downtown/Midtown streets became one way in the 1950's, but haven't been able to confirm that yet.

Just sent an email to the Mayor pointing out how much safer 11th is now, how there will never be enough police to keep traffic under control(HPD could write 500 tickets in one day, and the next day the speeders would be out in force again). I also said that the opposition comes from people who are mad that they can no longer drive like maniacs. I also do not believe for one second that HFD has to use other streets. Someone is lying about that.

2 hours ago, Buy-U-City said:

I know of way to many folks that commute from Clear Lake to the Woodlands or Katy; or from Kingwood to Sugarland etc. The suburban work center concept has been a complete flop IMO and created miles of infrastructure maintenance headaches. The issue is cities growing and sprawling beyond all comprehension. Houston, with a metro population of 2 million back in the 70s was so much more enjoyable and easier to get around than today. I have family here I seldom see because it's such a draining chore to get to them. Things felt closer knit back then. I'm a native boomer, and my glasses are very much rose tinted.

It was far worse trying to get around in the 70's and 80's. Traffic was heavier and the drivers were worse. During the late 80's it was easier to get around for a while, because the city was dead after the oil busts.

The people driving from Clear Lake to The Woodlands could move if they wanted to, but they don't. They like where they live, they like their jobs, and the commutes are just something they tolerate.

Dallas is also the city that destroyed old businesses by deciding to rezone them out of existence without compensation. I expect the drive through to be closed, followed by closure of the entire restaurant and then redevelopment into trendy places that the nearby residents can't afford.

5 hours ago, __nevii said:

City living is more about smaller purchases in more frequent store/shop visits, so the concerns that you bring up are mostly moot:

• The whole concept of "large bulk purchases" comes precisely because of the isolated nature of post-WWII single-family suburban buildouts: even a simple trip to the grocery store is an arduous drive, so you HAVE to buy all the bulk stuff that you can in order for the supply to last longer until the next trip.
   
• Some of the stuff you bring up (like the pounds of mulch) naturally get less use-cases in a more urbanized setting anyway (or the use of it is less individualized, meaning that no one individual has to worry about such purchases).

 

Precisely why we need to axe parking minimums all over the city. Removing that burden will allow development in "narrow street" areas like Heights to be even more "context sensitive." The recent Livable Places did some great work in terms of "middle housing", as well as addressing driveway structures (i.e. such that there are less driveway curbcuts destroying the previous street parking)  ..... but relinquishing the remaining useless rules throughout the city would assist a ton in preventing the issue of cars in "streets too narrow for them."

Heights was one of the original "streetcar neighborhoods" in Houston: we're going to have to build that back.

 

We live inside the loop.. We have a 1/4 acre lot and live within a few blocks of Kroger. We still use the car to shop for groceries.  Anything to do with the yard is going to require a car. I've known a few people who tried to live without a car in Houston. One managed pretty well, but he was a coworker who was literally a rocket scientist, but was absent minded. He never learned to drive. All the other gave up after a month or so. The other issue is getting to and from work. Unless your office is downtown, public transport is tough. When we lived in Midtown, I had to take the bus to Bellaire for work for 6 weeks after TS Allison flooded my car. 6 block walk to the bus and it dropped off across the street from my office. It turned a 10 to 15 minute commute into 45 minutes or longer. Why would I not use a car for that?

8 hours ago, TacoDog said:

The only reason someone would need a car to access their home is if the only entrance to the home was a weird garage door that opened for cars but nothing else. You don't need access to your home via a car. If you did, people who utilize other means of transportation could not live there, which is just untrue. 

If your property doesn't have a place to store a car, you end up relying on on-street parking. If you live on a street with lots of people in the same situation, you may not find a parking spot near your place, and have to park a block or two away. Or you have access to a parking garage but it's a block away from your home, same situation. To say you need a car to access your home is simply untrue.

To say you need access to your home via car isn't true at all, it's just a convenience thing. The point @mollusk was making was about how often the streets are being used for certain modes of transportation should dictate how we allow the street to be used, the same argument people are making about the bike lanes on 11th St. If no thru-traffic is being used on a street, and it's local residents only, then we could convert the street into a glorified driveway for those residents only. 

You've obviously never bought 400 pounds of mulch. Or a month's worth of groceries. Or anything else in quantity. The issue in the Heights is that the streets were laid out when people had one car at most. So the streets are narrow, the driveways are narrow, and some people are jerks about how they park.

My great grandparents lived on W 17th from about 1910 to 1919. The had a car, since my great grandfather was a car salesman. So cars in the Heights isn't a new thing.