Nate99

The morning view down Capitol...

I didn't mean to imply that institutionalization was the answer, just that it's not even an option until they do something worse than chronically ruin others' property. A reasonable expectation might be to use sites like what the city proposed, but it's not enough of a draw because it has some restrictions and/or they can't get cash for drugs as easily. Seattle, Los Angeles, Vancouver (BC), and San Francisco have provided varying levels of housing and that just attracts more people away from the Aldines and Cloverleafs across the US and Canada. One can live quite cheaply in all kinds of places if you don't cause trouble, but access to drugs is fairly limited off in the sticks, and it's even harder to panhandle to the wildlife. There are better/safer options already available for these people, but they can't hold it together long enough to use them. The secured dorm model is the shelter model that we have, and these people don't want that, unless you want to relax the rules, which I don't get the impression is at all workable, but maybe there is a middle ground. Peripheral personal experience and reading anecdotes are really all I have to go on, but I get the impression that people may end up in shelters for a short period of time due to bad luck, but unless they press that bad luck with addiction or mental health issues, they find somewhere to subsist off the streets, and there are a lot of resources to help people do that. If these programs are successful but overwhelmed, by all means, lets do more of that. But in the other case, it can be a full time job of a couple of people to keep just one person with addiction and/or mental health issues from harming themselves. That's a ton of resources, and the more resources cities use to provide accommodation, comparatively, the worse the local problem seems to get, and that's just easy economics. It's another one of those "hearts and minds" type issues that I think you have to fix over generations, but the drivers that land people on the streets seem to be getting worse, not better. As you point out, prison is very expensive and not at all proportional to the crimes committed, but literally crapping on the city is something I would start making compromises to individual liberties to address, but anything can be abused. No easy answers when people have nothing to lose. Maybe there are more success stories out there, lots of different cities dealing with this in different ways.

Would that perhaps be a design feature intentionally scaled the way it is to keep a car that has inadvertently (or otherwise) jumped the curb from getting through to the glass and further on to the tunnels below? The planters would need to be thick enough to stop something heavy moving fast and the gap between them and the columns would need to be sufficiently narrow.

Sorry, that was a private joke to myself, I should probably keep such things private. The press release-ish verbiage describing the food halls use the precise phrases "chef driven concept" and "local bar talent" with such regularity, I infer a lack of self-awareness on the author's part. It reads like boilerplate.

But what about local bar talent?

I knew about that thread, but the parking lot has been operational for some time now, figured I would start a new one if this meant something else was happening mods may choose to merge if they like.

Corporate preference, I would guess.

Not even sure they are real at this point, but those lights are seriously bright.

Anyone have better permit-fu skills to see what's going on here? Best I could see was "Site work for parking lot 2012 IBC" (applied for in February), but it appears that the lot is closed, the kiosk was ripped out, and some drainage whatnot showed up (culverts and corrugated big diameter plastic pipe.) If it were to remain parking, I can't figure how/why it would need additional drainage, but perhaps around the perimeter.

One more from across Milam. You can see the trees poking up from the tunnel level.

Turner is a failure on so many fronts, but I will give him and the city one qualified bit of credit in trying to eliminate the campsites via an ordinance some years back. Apparently a judge found a constitutional right to camp on public rights of ways, so the city stopped enforcement. It appears that they threw in the towel after the judgement though, so my credit stops there. The idea was part of a larger effort to move these camps away from downtown to minimally restrictive sites with a few basic services to keep the spread of disease to a minimum and keep downtown's trajectory as a place that the rest of us, from dish washers to CEO's, actually want to be. "Affordable housing" and people living in underpass campsites do not belong in the same discussion. It's hijacking one visible emotional problem to serve another, completely separate issue. People that can not manage the most basic parts of a social compact are not a subsidized apartment away from benign, but apparently we can't legally institutionalize them or clear out their filth until there is some definitive public health hazard. There are dozens of private charities in Houston in addition government services that these people are not utilizing. As pointed out, cities with better climates and more generous public services have the problem far worse than Houston, we might want to use that as a marker for our next steps as a city. Panhandling every day around busy pedestrian areas nets enough cash for their addiction/self-medicating on occasion until they are either arrested, taken to a hospital or tragically die on our streets. This is not compassionate and it's not "grit", it's shameful. One case in point...

Cool find! It reminds me that the Federal prison that takes up the next block up Texas was likely build when that part of DT was the absolute dregs. Now that would be an ambitious hotel conversion project, but one with a built in kitschy marketing angle. .

Maybe Response is saying you can't scale back from nothing. Pretty easy to mentally confuse amusement concepts up in this end of town, hard to imagine that there would have been one, much less two (or three or four, depending on how you count). Good that the water park seems imminent, hope that it is very successful.

They're really closing in on completion here, they have furniture in the lobby already.

Still think something like this could be net beneficial if planned and executed appropriately, but that's a giant if. This latest round of flooding in Kingwood stinks to high heavens with a lot of suspicion on work around a new development outside of KW proper in Montgomery County just to the north of Elm Grove. The rainfall rates last Friday and this Tuesday were horrendous, but not unprecedented. Not sure how accurate/speculative any of this is, but here's a summary of what happened in Elm Grove. https://reduceflooding.com/2019/05/09/elm-grove-looks-for-answers-and-doesnt-have-to-look-far/?fbclid=IwAR1ClS0zJtGHCkmxgGmZ5LrpD5vlV_6HXIT9Zmq1NP2TOhBy2xRw-Ke259Q The issue here was insufficient storm runoff/detention capability, during Harvey, it was the river/lake rising. Seems like some civil engineering needs to happen either way. Oh, and while you're at it, how about adding an exit or three that doesn't get cut off during an emergency. Bridging Kingwood Drive to Huffman sounds like a good start.