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jgriff

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Everything posted by jgriff

  1. jgriff
    I didn’t misunderstand that and I am too. I was supporting your position. Montrose is too expensive for single family homes. We neee development like this.
  2. jgriff
    I see it as exactly the opposite. They have the power to get concessions from developers because of stupid rules. No telling what else they are getting with this power. Stupid rules that they can enforce if they don’t get their way benefit them. Most people won’t voluntarily give up power like that. I bet it can get you invited to some nice parties. They do use this power for good sometimes though. They got a developer near my house to upgrade our sidewalks and road. I’ve always believed in following the rules to the letter though. Giving an entity power to make exceptions to those rules invites corruption. If the rules are bad they should be changed and enforced consistently. Otherwise we are not a society of laws, we have a ruling class instead.
  3. jgriff
    Isn’t the land worth about $3-4mil an acre in this area? Traditional single family homes on large lots would only be for the rich at the land prices we have in the area now. Many people seem to think being against development is akin to looking out for the little guy but in reality it’s the opposite. Without development like this more and more people will be priced out of Montrose. The single family bungalows in Montrose are mostly land plays now whether the owners and renters know it or not. I suppose we could hope for an economic crash, that would save a lot of the old houses.
  4. jgriff
    I disagree. As long as the development doesn't pose an immediate physical danger to the nearby residents. If they want to put a raging tire fire on the site I might have a problem with it. Also, that kind of thinking is what gets you sky high rent. The planning commission is a bunch of dummies, the market knows better. Edit: I'll take part of that back, a planning commission aren't necessarily dummies. They will do what's best for themselves and anyone who they are friends with.
  5. jgriff
    That lot is owned by someone else who has different plans for it. If you're talking about the Northeast corner, the last I heard it was owned by the Aga Khan foundation. This development is probably going where it is because the developer owns or has rights to develop on the lot. They can't just randomly pick anywhere in the city to build, they have to build on their own property or on property the owner has given them the rights to develop on. They could attempt to buy the property or gain development rights but that might be prohibitively expensive. Bottom line, the owner of this lot wants to make some money and this is how they've decided to do it.
  6. jgriff
    Many older people in the petrochemical and oil industry don’t want to live or work anywhere near downtown. I currently work for a company in Westchase. I tell people all the time that working downtown is much better, they look at me like I’m from Mars. All they know about the inner loop is what they see on the few weekends when they visit. They sit in traffic on Westpark for hours every week and complain about “downtown traffic”.
  7. jgriff
    I feel like some kinds of retail will be OK but I see no reason to ever set foot in a Wal-Mart or maybe even a Target again. One of the unintended effects of the internet may be a sudden lowering of land value in CBDs. When people no longer need to go to work a lot of them will leave the central city. The urban revival that’s happened over the last couple of decades may suddenly end. I seriously am hearing talk from our C-Suite of asking a large portion of our company to work from home. That’s a company with 80,000 people. It has me worried that the investment I made in my home inside the loop may have been a mistake. Hopefully the full financial effects of this I’ll be felt after I’m dead.
  8. jgriff
    I agree, I’m very interested in how this will play out also. I just don’t see much need for new office space in the future. Communication technology has become so easy to implement and so ubiquitous that I’m starting to really see large effects on our office presence. Just in the last year much of our building has been hollowed out. We haven’t let people go, there’s just no reason for them to come to the office anymore. We don’t even get up to walk down the hall, all business is taken care of via IM and telepresence technology. I’m in control of the floor plan for about 40 peolple. I’m asking the ones who don’t come to the office anymore to give up their space to save us money. Maybe I’m reading too much into this but I can really see a future where traditional office buildings are a rarity. There may come a day when 50+ story office buildings are a thing of the past or at least very rare. I can work just as well from my couch as my office already. I would not be surprised if I stop going to work almost completely within a year. If we don’t lower our real estate costs this way our competitors will and they will put us out of business.
  9. jgriff
    I live in the area and drive by this site twice a day on my way to and from work. Kirby is not near as bad as Shepherd and neither are bad at all compared to the poor souls who live in Katy, Surgarland or the Woodlands. Traffic is really not much of an issue if you live in upper kirby or river oaks. You never have to drive far and can Uber to just about anywhere worth going for $7 and they show up at your house in under 5 minutes.
  10. jgriff
    I worked for a client once from Saudi Arabia that was obsessed with showing his structure in cities around the world to compare it’s height to landmarks. He had me place it next to the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, etc... wasted thousands of dollars of his company’s money. The running joke around the office of course was that he was obsessed with it for anatomical inadequacies. He was a smart man and very nice but had such a childish attitude about height of buildings.
  11. jgriff
    You CANNOT get accurate height data or compare heights with a reasonable degree of accuracy from a rendering. Perspective matters too much. With the right perspective you could make a 2 story house look taller than Chase Tower.
  12. jgriff
    What’s happening there?
  13. jgriff
    I’m not sure that just because the dog park floods that it is in the wrong location. The entire park is where it is because it’s a huge area of land that’s not developed and is not privately owned. Think about the reasons for that. Could we have a park this size in another location? How about we move it 1/4 mile South into an area that floods much less often and buy 124 acres there? Kick all the people out of their houses and pay several million per acre. I think cleaning up the flood debris will be cheaper in the long run. The flooding is not a suprise. The park was designed to flood. The dog park was redesigned this time to be more resilient.
  14. jgriff
    The fire destroyed my wife’s nail shop. She’s not happy. It also damaged the Steinway store.
  15. jgriff
    I wouldn’t think so. The fire was not near this construction site. It was across the street and a block West.
  16. jgriff
    Those predictions came true in the 80s. Many lives were ruined. If you happened to be the wrong age it would have seemed to you like Houston crashed and never recovered. My grandparents bought in the wrong neighborhood and lost a lot of money. It could definitely happen again, in fact I'd say it's almost certainly going to happen again. Choose where you buy carefully, think about how the neighborhood would look if Houston had 15% unemployment. The company I'm working for is currently in the process of sending all our work to India and China. We are literally training our replacements and handing over our technology to them. Another company just down the street is so desperate for work they are designing a facility for a Chinese engineering company who will then take the design and compete against them with it. Their choice was "take this project or shutdown the company". They'll do this last project and then shutdown. Other countries we work with have protections in place to keep this from happening. Saudi Arabia absolutely does not allow this. When we do work for them we have to buy into a local company, use local staff and train them. We are so fascinated with "free trade" that we don't even make an attempt to get a fair deal. The rest of the world just screws us over again and again.
  17. jgriff
    You are correct. We're already losing much of the petrochemical industry to India, China and South Korea thanks to people in our government who believe in the free market so much that they don't even want to negotiate on trade, they just give it all away. Electric cars will ruin the rest. Fortunately this will happen after I'm retired or dead. If I was in my 20s I'm not sure I'd invest too much of my life in Houston. I might rent instead of buying. If there really is a switch to renewable energy Houston will stagnate, house prices will drop and crime will rise. I love the city and it's been very good to me but I'm not sure about it's long term future. It could easily go down the same path as Detroit.
  18. jgriff
    I can see the need for a grocery store downtown. I don’t see a need for Target. Target is the store I would go to if I went to a big box store. I’m not going to Wal-Mart or Costco. I now only go to a store like this about half a dozen times a year. I get almost everything that’s not perishable from Amazon. I don’t care if it’s more expensive, it’s more convenient. I’m not sure how stores like Target are going to survive much less expand. I have 1-4 packages from Amazon delivered everyday and almost never have to visit a store.
  19. jgriff
    I have to stop coming to HAIF so much. Complaining about 2 high rises being too close together and implying that zoning would fix this “problem”? That post made the world a dumber place. Sorry to be rude but sometimes you just have to call stupid out.
  20. jgriff
    Sounds expensive. To tell you the truth I'm more inclined to make the drugs legal and give them all the money that we'd spend on these programs. Then the problem will solve itself.
  21. jgriff
    How do you make people who sell drugs and/or beg for a living and live on the streets go away? The cops don't care about this area. I've seen drugs being sold with cops sitting in a car just a few yards away. The cops will care when the people in the neighborhood care. That might happen if more people who have standards and don't believe standing on a corner and drinking from a brown bag are valid lifestyle choices move to the area.
  22. jgriff
    You're just an elevator ride from the illicit drug bazaar that surrounds the bus station too.
  23. jgriff
    That doesn’t look like highland village. Looks like you’re on Post Oak near Whole Foods.
  24. jgriff
    He’s right. I’m rich and live near downtown. I sure appreciate all the tax money making my property worth more. All those incentives go to rich developers who build luxury apartments for the non-poor people. If we can get more rich people living downtown the property values will go up more. It’s a win-win for rich people. Rich people pay almost all the tax though so we deserve to reap more benefits.
  25. jgriff
    I walked by it yesterday. Seems to be no activity on site.
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