Jump to content

Angostura

Full Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,241

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Angostura

  1. Angostura
    There may or may not be retail on the NE corner of Center and Silver. This is from the variance request last year: There were also rumors of structured parking for this development, but that may be a future phase.
  2. Angostura
    La Macro is back! They will take over the former Mam's space on Cavalcade.
  3. Angostura
    Please tell me they plan on cladding that raw concrete with something. Given the many examples of how concrete ages, anyone who commissions, designs or constructs a raw-concrete façade is guilty of aesthetic malpractice.
  4. Angostura
    People who don't know where they'll be living in a few years. Let's say you have $3900/month to spend on housing, and plan on staying in the same place for four years. If you have $100k on hand for a down-payment, you can buy a $500k townhouse not too far a commute from here (probably EaDo, realistically) for a PITI of $3100. Add $200/month for maintenance, water/sewer and gas, and you're at $3300. Add in the foregone interest income on your down-payment, and it's $3600. Spread your closing costs over 48 months and you're at the same $3900 you'd be paying in rent. "But what about the equity you're building?" OK. After four years, you've paid off about $30k in principal. Guess how much a 6% commission is on the sale of your $500k townhouse? So it's pretty much a wash, UNLESS you see significant appreciation in the sale price four years down the road. Now, if you can live car-free in a $3900/mo apartment, but not in a $500k townhouse...
  5. Angostura
    This part of the flyer jumped out at me. The 2.5mi radius around this site includes much of the Heights, Montrose and Midtown, and substantially all of Cottage Grove, CBD and 4th ward. The population in this area has gone up less than the city as a whole, apparently, but the median income has more than doubled. This site is basically the tip of the anglo arrow.
  6. Angostura
    We don't necessarily need grade-separated transit to reduce traffic. Every park-and-ride bus into the CBD represents 40 cars that aren't on the freeway. And having transit is only one piece of the puzzle. People have to actually choose to take it, and this will only happen when alternatives to single-occupany vehicles are either cheaper, faster, or a better experience. Adding MaX lanes on freeways, and more high-comfort buses (with wi-fi, etc.) can help with two of those, but the third (cheaper) needs to come from how we prioritize development in the city. You can't design everything for cars, and then be shocked and dismayed that people use cars to get around. Basically, it needs to be more expensive to park cars (or we need congestion pricing to drive on or inside 610). If we eliminate parking minimums, and encourage an environment in which people EXPECT to pay for parking (which is the case in the areas of the city without mandatory minimums), you get less land area devoted to parking, higher taxable value per square mile and lower vehicle miles traveled per capita (since things are closer together). The higher density will allow some people to live close enough to walk, bike or take local transit (bus, light rail) to work, and pricing parking at the cost it requires to provide it ($200-300/month) encourages transit and carpooling, which in turn reduce the number of vehicles on the freeways. Eventually, you may even get to a level of activity density to justify grade-separated transit.
  7. Angostura
    Noticed the same thing. Also, they've added a ton of glass to the original facade, and it looks like they've added a very large skylight over the atrium. It'll retain some of the original art-deco elements, but have a lot more natural light than the original. Also looks like there might be some ground floor retail (?).
  8. Angostura
    Impressive density for an area where dirt isn't ALL that expensive.
  9. Angostura
    Permit for the retail building was approved back in December. I haven't seen approvals for the automated garage, yet (unless they were re-filed under different numbers).
  10. Angostura
    People would generally say Shepherd, Westheimer, the bayou and the railroad, though the "official" boundary differs. ROSC is River Oaks adjacent.
  11. Angostura
    The site layout and "urban planning" of the project, setbacks, RoW widths, pedestrian realm, ground floor transparency, landscaping, etc., are far more important than the actual architectural details. As long as you build with zero setbacks on relatively narrow rights of way, prioritizing pedestrian comfort and with plenty of street engagement (and preferentially narrow frontages), the result is going to be pretty good whether the style is steel-and-glass modern, red-brick colonial, hill-country limestone or even timber-frame.
  12. Angostura
    The loading berth is a CoH requirement for any retail center over 10,000 s.f. Given the tenant mix, I wouldn't expect it gets too much use.
  13. Angostura
    When the end goal is that everyone who patronizes a business arrives by car, then putting parking (and lots of it) in the front, where everyone can see it makes a lot of sense. However, in a city, if every business has every patron arrive by private car, this effectively puts a density cap on the city, especially if a lot of those vehicles are pickups and SUVs, which seem to be very popular in Texas. Beyond a certain activity density (population plus jobs per square mile), car-centric development has major quality-of-life impacts. One solution to this would just be to limit density: zone the city such that we never add so much density that traffic becomes unpleasant or parking becomes difficult. If the city grows, it grows by becoming bigger instead of becoming denser. However, this runs up against a major economic problem facing most cities. The cost of providing the infrastructure required to grow bigger (roads, highways, water and sewer lines, power and phone lines, storm drainage) scale with area. But if you limit density, the property tax (where a lot of the tax revenue for the cities and counties that build that infrastructure comes from) never rises to a level of revenue per square mile to adequately pay the full life-cycle cost of all that infrastructure. In order for cities to attain a level of financial solvency in the long term, therefore, we need to achieve activity densities beyond what it feasible for a 100% car-centric development pattern. In Houston specifically, that density is coming whether we like it or not, since developers can add residential and commercial density by right. That means we want some proportion of the patrons for infill development to arrive by other means (walking, biking, public transport, ride-share, etc.). The more people do this, the better things are for the people who opt to continue arriving by car. However, if we make the built environment aggressively unpleasant for anyone but motorists, we discourage the exact behavior we need to have happen for this development not to be detrimental. If you want to keep driving your SUV to places, that's fine. (I think you should pay more for parking, but that's another topic.) However, if you want to spend less time in traffic, and less time hunting for a parking space, maybe you should support a development pattern that encourages other patrons from arriving by other means. Every customer that arrives in this development via the street-facing front door is a customer that isn't competing with you for a parking space behind the building. In short: the inconvenient parking space is more useful to you than the occupied one.
  14. Angostura
    This thread turns 12 next week. This project has been on the drawing board through the housing crisis in 2008/9, the oil boom in the early 2010's, the oil crash in 2015-7, and now the recovery from that crash. Whatever this project is an indicator of, economy-driven development cycles ain't it.
  15. Angostura
    Nope. All three previously existing buildings are in the rendering. The taller, diagonally oriented building is where Braun is putting the surface parking lot.
  16. Angostura
    I assume this is something they put together during the bidding process for the land a few years ago?
  17. Angostura
    Which means GID is paying property taxes on $50M+ of vacant land. An optimist would say that it's likely someone like Hanover or Midway buys up the land and does something similar with it, but I think we should be prepared for something far crappier. Most likely: a couple of residential towers. If we're lucky they may have some GFR.
  18. Angostura
    The plat is called Buffalo Bayou Park in the variance request. This ought to be symbiotic with Regent Square. Each within walking distance of the other, and this appears to be more office/hotel focused (with a little GFR and a lot of suburban-office-park green space) whereas Regent Square has a higher proportion of retail and residential. Both this development and Regent Square are more valuable long-term if the other is built. Someday we'll learn the real reason Regent Square was never built.
  19. Angostura
    Site layout and elevations from parking variance request. The 7 large trees are already existing on the site. In addition to parking and setback variances, the project requires a variance to Ch 28, Section VI, the ordinance regulating location of hotels, as it takes primary access from a local street (Ashland) and is within 750 feet of both a church (Baptist Temple) and Hospital. Both have written letters of support.
  20. Angostura
    https://edrc.houstontx.gov/edrc/login.aspx
  21. Angostura
    Some additional details on the project are in this week's planning commission agenda. The property will have a gift/floral shop at the corner of Ashland & 20th, accessible from both 20th St and the hotel lobby. They are requesting a reduced setback on 20th for this part of the building. The pool/courtyard will be along the 20th St frontage, parking in the rear. 4 floors of rooms, 5 stories total. Most of the existing live oaks will be preserved.
  22. Angostura
    More detail in this weeks Planning Commission agenda. 6 buildings, including a hotel (23 stories), office (21 stories) and residential (7 stories w/ GFR). No details on the other 3. Two N-S streets will run through the site, between Dallas and Allen Pkwy.
  23. Angostura
    It's worse than that. Remember that, when it comes to housing, it's not a question of whether it gets built, it's a question of where. The residents of this building would generate a whole lot less impervious cover per resident (and square foot of built area) than almost any other type of development, with the exception of house boats in the ship channel. If housing doesn't get built here, it (and a lot more impervious cover in the form of roads and highways) is going to get built further north and west of here, which is to say, upstream. If nearby residents are TRULY concerned about drainage issues affecting their neighborhood, they should send RD a thank-you note.
  24. Angostura
    The theater has a parking variance, and doesn't need those spaces to meet its minimum. The cost of an externality should be borne by the party that generates it. In this case, the development isn't the externality, cars are. So the cost of the externality should be borne solely by the people who drive to the destination in question. As far as the people making piles of money are concerned, if the change in my property tax bills over the last several years are any indication, nearby homeowners most certainly belong in that category. That said, if by "the burdens of over-development" you mean that someone might park in front of my house, I feel like I've been fairly compensated. With respect to the city imposing a parking district, I'd be interested in hearing how exactly it would work. Aside from there being no mechanism in the code of ordinances for the city to do it, I don't see a way for it to be done with (a) eminent domain (which the city has no money for) and (b) a lot of work (which the city has no appetite for). Besides, I imagine if the city announced a plan to buy up a bunch of Heights parking lots so that surrounding property owners could more profitably develop their land, there'd be mobs with pitchforks and torches marching down Bagby St. Seems far simpler to just eliminate the parking minimums, and if there's any fallout over "spillover parking," allow streets to petition for (meter-less) metered parking. Go somewhere where parking is truly scarce, and you'll see that people can be pretty resourceful about efficiently allocating it.
  25. Angostura
    It means that, say, the owner of the hospital can't say that the parking lot across the street from this hotel is open to anyone who pays $5 to use it. Parking that is used to meet the minimum requirement has to be dedicated to the use that generates the requirement. There ARE rules in place that allow multiple uses to share parking in slightly more efficient ways, but only within a single development or within a single parking plan. There are also lots of pay lots unconnected to any particular development, but these aren't being used to meet someone else's parking minimum as well. And most of them are in areas that are exempt from minimum parking requirements (CBD, Midtown).
×
×
  • Create New...