Angostura

I wonder to what extent existing regulations are providing a disincentive for restaurants to move into the Heights. I'm thinking specifically about liquor licensing and minimum parking requirements. There are a lot of empty retail buildings along Yale, for example, that, absent these issues, would seem to make good restaurant locations.

I'm just glad it's Walmart building in this spot. If it were HEB, we'd probably never have found out how dangerous this bridge is.

The $18 chicken I bought there yesterday was very tasty, roasted simply with just salt and pepper.

Interesting. I wonder if you filter out the areas that are common to both stores (gen merch, checkout lanes, storerooms, etc.) and just compare the Yale Walmart to the 11th St. Kroger, how similar they'd be in the square footage dedicated to food.

Restaurant. Same owners as BRC.

The traffic issue is one of the very few levers the anti-Walmart folks have to stop this development. However, I'd have a little more respect for them if they were honest about the fact that they don't really care about the traffic itself, just the fact that what's generating the traffic is a Walmart. RUDH (and s3mh and others) have stated a preference for higher density West Ave/City Centre style mixed use development for this land. A higher density project would bring MORE retail square footage, MORE total parking spaces, and generate MORE trips daily. The report estimates the daily trip count for Walmart is 8077 of 17,792 trip total (the 16,630 value is net of internal capture, i.e. people going to multiple destinations in the same development). So even though Walmart is 70% of the square footage, it's responsible for only 45% of the trip generation. Replacing the Walmart's 150k sf with almost anything else would INcrease traffic count, not decrease it, especially if you added residential or office space above it.

Traffic report has been released on stopheightswalmart.org and it bears this out. Traffic in the area will get much, much worse after the completion of the feeder roads. The existence of the development (provided the mitigation steps are taken) doesn't have much of an impact. The study doesn't say how much of the increase in Yale and Heights traffic comes from reduction in Studewood and Shepherd/Durham traffic.

The ordinance says 67% of tracts, not of respondents. The HAHC does have the power to modify the boundaries, but even within the modified boundaries, the standard is 67% of tracts. In order to respond, the owner of the tract has to return a card (affixing postage) within 30 days of it being mailed out. Contrast this with the requirements for existing districts in which there was essentially unlimited time to get signatures representing 51% of the area. Barring some future change to this standard, historic district designations of any significant size will probably be few and far between.

This is likely to be an unintended consequence of this ordinance; it will be VERY difficult to get 67% of property owners to affirmatively support an application (granted the ordinance requires support of "owners of 67 percent of the tracts," not 67% of the land area, but still a pretty high hurdle). Anecdotal information seems to indicate that about 25-30% of property owners sent in cards to rescind their designation, and a certain percentage will not manifest one way or the other, it seems pretty clear that most of the current districts, the areas most likely to support historic designation, wouldn't meet the threshold of the current ordinance.

If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt that it is, then you shouldn't need an ordinance to protect these properties. The problem is that the ordinance also protects a lot of properties for which, for whatever reason, renovation is not economically attractive, and buyers aren't willing to pay a premium for these properties. Instead of ensuring that these properties will be tastefully restored and renovated, the ordinance is likely to result in their continued status as run-down rental properties or abandoned eyesores. I'm glad that your block doesn't have any of these. The choice isn't always between a pair of McVics and a restored bungalow. It's just as often a choice between a pair of McVics and an abandoned shack with a car on blocks in the front yard. I wouldn't cry for the builders and developers, though. There is still a lot of developable property in the Heights outside of the protected districts. There are plenty of "contributing structures" up here north of 20th that I wouldn't mind seeing knocked down. That is, once they get through with the chain link fence and the shopping carts in the front yard.

That address is residential. (I happen to drive by that stretch of 27th on my way to Home Depot.) Presumably that's Morgan's contact address for mail order inquiries. Work at 6th and Heights appears to be underway.

The Heights facade is in reasonably good condition. Try looking at them from Yale.

Can't speak to the shopping carts or the drainage, but from the renderings, it looks to me like the storefront will be virtually invisible from Yale St. I drive past this site pretty frequently, and between the contours surrounding the stone yard, and the underpass under the tracks, it's currently pretty hard to see deep into this property from the street, and that's without any landscaping. Between the pad sites and the landscaping, you'll have to look pretty hard to have your aesthetic sensibilities offended by the Walmart's storefront.

This is outstanding news. Glad to have it so close, and glad to see someone occupy that space. RM does some really special pork, so I'm exciting to see what they'll do with it. Given the cure times on some charcuterie, I'm even more excited to see what they'll be selling 12-18 months after opening.

There may be other studies in the field. I saw counters at a couple different points on Heights and on Washington on either side of Heights and Yale. A little surprising that traffic on northbound Yale was that high, since the only way onto it is from Washington (westbound) and Center St. I tend to only take it to avoid trains on Heights.

Until I read that quote in the article, I hadn't realized that HEB was looking at this site for so long. I understand that they did a focus group about a year ago regarding building a store there. Pure speculation, but this might have been a bigger space than HEB was willing to commit to at the time. The Bunker Hill store is, I think, about 128k s.f., which is probably about 20-30,000 s.f. bigger than it needs to be. I'm not sure the general merch areas are actually adding any value. It may also be that, given the expense of the new Wilshire Village location, they weren't prepared to take on another project of similar expense so nearby at the same time. If the Wilshire store would be the most expensive in the chain, the Heights store would probably be 2nd.

+1 What's so galling is that there is already a mechanism to do exactly this. You can petition the city for minimum lot size and minimum building line restrictions on a block by block basis, and all you need is 51% of your neighbors' consent. Something like 160 MLS applications have already been approved.

What dictates the size of the parking lot isn't the size of the anchor, it's the size of the development. CoH requires a certain number of parking spaces per s.f. of residential space. So whether the breakdown is one 150k s.f. store, or a mix of 70k, 30k, 20k, 20k and 10k, the size of the parking lot will be the same. The only way multi-level parking will be built on this space is if the return on additional retail space is higher than the cost of building a parking structure. Currently, in this part of town, it isn't. (There are two retail developments on White Oak, one at Heights and one at Oxford, that are basically empty, and have been for some time.) No matter what goes into this development, there will be ~700 surface parking spaces.

Absent the 380 agreement, they'd most likely forego: - Restoration of the bridges over the bayou on Heights and Yale - Addition of turn lanes on Heights and Yale at Koehler and I-10 - Esplanade improvements They'd also probably revert to absolute minimum on landscaping standards. The advantage to the city of the 380 agreement is that it's the only leverage they have to influence certain parts of the development. For example, the city COULD deny the Koehler variance request, but all that would accomplish is to prevent Koehler from lining up with 2nd St at Heights. If the city wants changes like reduced lighting impact, increased landscaping, multi-level parking, or changes to the facade, the only mechanism they have is to use the 380 agreement as leverage.

I'm inclined to agree with this. It looks a lot like parts of Uptown Park, parts of Highland Village, and the development on the SE corner of Kirby and Alabama (also Ainbinder, I think). I think part of what people criticizing this as "typical suburban development" would rather see is multilevel parking. However, the cost of land in this part of the city doesn't really justify it. Surface parking typically takes up ~320 sf per parking space. Dirt in the Heights generally goes for around $30/sf, which puts the value of a surface parking space at around $9600. The cost per parking space of a multi-level garage is typically about 2X this amount. So, in order for multi-level parking to make sense economically, land costs would need to be about double what they are now. Outside of downtown, there are very few parts of the city where land costs >$60/sf. The only shopping areas inside 610 with multi-level parking that immediately come to mind are Rice Village, parts of Highland Village, the new part of River Oaks S.C. (at Shepherd and W. Gray), and the Costco on Richmond @ Weslayan. I suppose you can add West Ave to this list if it ever opens (I assume some that not all of the parking is reserved for residents.) The new Whole Foods on Waugh, the existing W.F. on Alabama, and Central Market all have exclusively surface parking, and they haven't been criticized for it. Recall that the minimum number of parking spaces per s.f. of store space is dictated by CoH ordinance.

It's hard to say. Depends on two things: 1 - How the feeder road extension affects the stretch that goes under I-10 2 - How the improvements to the bridge over White Oak Bayou are executed. Let's not overlook one of the advantages to Walmart being the anchor tenant: if HEB had been the anchor (something I would have preferred), it's unlikely that Ainbinder would have felt it necessary to any improvements at all to the Esplanade and the bridges.

Given the way the ground is countoured in this area, especially around the stone yard, and the location of the pad sites, the Walmart will not be at all visually intrusive from Yale (if it's visible at all), at least during daylight hours. I was also pretty happy to hear about the restoration of the bridge over the bayou on Heights. I'd love to see that bridge appropriately restored.

Renderings and site plan are here: http://washingtonhei...renderings.html I'm a little confused, as I thought that the entire area bordered by Yale, (the new section of) Kohler, Heights and the RR tracks was part of this development. The site plan and renderings above only show the NE corner of this area being developed. Is the rest of this area owned by someone else?

But the Heights doesn't want sustainable urban development. The pre-requisite for walkable neighborhoods is population density. Heights preservationists HATE densification. Try building a townhouse (or, god forbid multi-family) in the Heights and look at the wailing and gnashing of teeth that results. Look at the uproar that resulted from building single-family houses on 3300-sf lots at 15th and Rutland. I know of no truly walkable neighborhood anywhere in the world that has a population density as low as that of the Heights. As to the site in question: who the hell is going to walk to it? There's no access from the south; there's a stone dealer, a bayou, a freeway and several blocks of commercial and light industrial sites between the site and anything residential on the north; and there isn't much to the east but a cemetary and the railroad townhouses on Heights. It's hard to justify 25 acres of walkable retail to serve the few dozen single-family homes between Yale and Shepherd. But even if someone WANTED to put 25 acres of walkable retail here, they couldn't. CoH setback and parking requirements pretty much outlaw "sustainable urban development" within our city limits. Like it or not, there's gonna need to be 600-700 parking spaces on this site no matter what gets built there.

Like I said, it'll be a pretty small minority. I'd bet that 80% of people won't even realize that the places along Heights are the same development as the Walmart, and in a few years, even most of those that do won't care anyway.