SpringTX

Someone explain this to me.  So a bunch of big-shots with more money than brains get together around a conference table and watch some huckster with a PowerPoint with a grand vision of (fill in the blank).  And then somebody writes an article about it.  And people talk about it for 5 minutes.  Is that what this is?

First of all, I agree that the The Woodlands will not see a "death spiral" within most of our lifetimes.  And it's not because Exxon just moved 10,000 jobs to the area.  And it has nothing to do with location near the airport.  And it has nothing to do with The Woodlands Development Corporation and what they may have done right or wrong.  And it has nothing to do with housing values or household incomes.

It has everything to do with all those f*cking trees we have here.  Those trees!  There has to be a 100-to-1 ratio of trees-to-people The Woodlands.  Even after living here 7 years, it's just so much more damned beautiful than everywhere else.  I've been looking for 7 years for the next place I might someday move to.  I've looked all over the country.  And I can't find anything that looks prettier.

In the last few years, all the rage in architecture and interior design seems to be greenery.  I see green roofs, green walls, skyscrapers with greenery growing all over them, moss-covered bathroom mats, you-name-it.  But The Woodlands has been there for nearly 50 years.  In a zoning-less city like Houston where billboards line early every foot of I-45 and strip malls have eradicated nearly every last tree on FM-1960, The Woodlands stands out.  It's a fairy tale land.  It's a bubble.  It's a Disney World.  Even after all these years.  I'd love to hate it.  But I can't.  It's like trying to hate New York's Central Park.  You can't do it.  It connects with us on a primal level.

Looking at the new Anadarko Tower, I'm underwhelmed.  No green stuff growing on the exterior?  No balconies with covered with trees like the Bosco Verticale in Italy or the Flower Tower in France?  Do we live in a damned backwater?  We're the 4th largest city in the richest country on earth!  Why the heck aren't we blazing the trail in these new green buildings?  Why are we looking at cheap glass boxes going up around town that look like they could have been built in 1980?  And why in The Woodlands of all places?

And just when will more communities follow The Woodlands lead?  Never?  There will never be any more communities planned like The Woodlands?  We can't preserve a natural greenbelt along our roads?  We can't force home builders to keep trees before they lay foundations?  We can't have parking lots with protected strips of trees?  Why is The Woodlands the only place in America that seems to have its head screwed on properly?  After 50 years no less?  In the midst of a vibrant ecological revolution going on worldwide?

P.S. And how the heck has HAIF survived all these years?  I thought Facebook killed all sites like this.  And sorry I haven't dropped in lately.  I guess it has been about 5 years since I posted last.

(Warning: the following post contains some elements of satire.)

Several weeks ago, I was approached by a neighbor out for a jog that greeted me, welcomed me into the neighborhood, and even offered her personal assistance with some repairs!

That was a hooker.

The next-door neighbor, also a single-family home owner, has a constant stream of family members coming in and out of his house...he's also incredibly personable.

That's a crack house.

(Warning: the preceding post contained some elements of satire.)

Just kidding.

Seriously, you make a good point about urban areas being much more anonymous. As for whether The Woodlands Town Center is "true urban" or "pseudo-urban", I just have to laugh at that question - "true urban" would involve hookers and crack houses. This is "new urban", from the new urbanist movement. It may seem fake now, but it probably won't after a few years.

Happy New Year everyone!

TEA ratings for academic accountability are summarized by school district. I remember when Klein had to announce that their district as a whole scored "academically acceptable".

(Note: the following post may contain sarcasm.)

Yeah, those superintendents make WAY too much money. The superintendent of my local school district, Conroe ISD, makes $200,000.

It's not like he is a CEO of...oh I don't know, say...a $270 million organization. It's not like he's in charge of 5,000 employees or anything. And it's not like he's responsible for 40,000 customers every day. Or responsible for the oversight of building new facilities worth $200 million every few years.

Hell, anyone would be qualified for a superintendent's job. It's like flipping burgers or sweeping the streets.

(Note: the preceding post may have contained some elements of sarcasm. Let the reader beware.)

It will not likely turn "ghetto" because they've got an HOA and are likely to hang on to it. HOAs are hated by some but I say live in an area with people who don't take pride in their surroundings and you'll be wishing you had one, and that scenario is one that Houston will see more of in the future, whereas suburban HOAs can prevent some of that.

This is a planned community. It will definitely be hard to turn ghetto. Especially with the upscale homes they'll build.

("Did you know Bridgeland has less density (number of houses per set amount of land) than any new development in town - this means that more land is set aside for open space, parks, recreation, etc. Also, the street layout to me is truly remarkable and invigorating. On the thoroughfares, no houses back up to it, leaving a huge row of ugly fences everywhere. Also, on the collector streets, houses are only one side of the street, and often on neither side, putting all of the houses in smaller groupings (of 20-40 lots) helping to make much more of the community feel that many (including yourself) often talk about.")

Excellent information, h2obuff, especially about Bridgeland. I didn't realize it was being planned that well. It definitely sounds like "The Woodlands but without all the trees". If I worked at HP/Compaq or thereabouts, I'd be first in line to buy in Bridgeland. Master-planned communities retain near absolute control over development within their boundaries, and with the wild and dangerous real estate game of Texas, that's the kind of protection other communities would kill for.

Stop the economic growth, control the population, and keep cities at a moderate, functional size.

If we don't keep growing economically and population-wise, China will become the world's largest economy. As a nation, we don't want to be #2 in anything. So we got to keep cranking out the puppies and the profitable-but-poorly-made SUV's. It's a matter of national pride.

Sorry, I needed to catch up on this thread...

99.2% of homes in The Woodlands are the same types of homes you'll find in the other Houston suburbs (ie. Spring, Klein, Cypress, Katy, Kingwood, etc).

Is this true about the older sections of The Woodlands as well as the newer sections? In the older sections, there's all kinds of Life Forms Homes and Jerry Kirkpatrick homes and all kinds of other custom-built homes.

My God, that's disgusting!! More banal crap even further from the core of the city. I might understand a decision to live in such mediocrity if one works in that area (within 2-3 miles from home). But, otherwise, why perpetuate this type of sickening sprawl??

I'm sure the type of person that will actually want to live in this will drive their "SUV" (please say with a strong southern drawl to get maximum effect) spitting "chewin 'backy" out of the window as they suck gallon upon gallon of fuel and spew ozone-causing pollutants into the beautiful 290 corridor! I'm gonna go throw up...

I'm going to start a new thread about sprawl for you.

Is that the builders' fault?

I wasn't thinking about the builders. But we can start a new thread under Real Estate if you want to continue this interesting discussion. You make a good point about the competition on the sellers' side, but I wonder just how efficient the real estate markets are in Houston.

Question: If these subdivisions have no perceivable value, then why do people buy homes there? Without a gun being pointed at their head? To me, that seems to indicate that somebody values them.

Not to take sides in the debate going on (which I'm not following), I just wanted to focus on the particular sentence quoted above, because it touches upon a philosophical point which has been on my mind from another thread.

Let's say a community gets built which is just plain senseless and would poorly suit anyone who could afford to live there. Would there be any demand for this community?

1. People have to live somewhere. There are only so many houses. In theory, if all the builders in a town made crummy houses (like the Model T Fords all painted black), people would still have to buy them.

2. There are only so many houses on the market at any given time. If all the good ones get snapped up, that leaves only the bad ones for the late birds. If you buy in the late summer or early fall, for example, you may be looking at the "scraps" that have been "picked over".

3. If you're in the market to buy a home, you usually have a narrow window of opportunity before you're forced to make a decision. If that window closes, you're forced to sign a 12-month contract on a rental unit and put your stuff into storage.

4. If a real estate can "sell" it, that doesn't mean that it actually provides any value to the buyer. It just means that the buyer perceived value at the time of purchase. The buyer and his family may have been better off living in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass. There is no eOpinions.Com for the real estate market (of which I am aware). From my experience, real estate agents aren't always exactly honest.

5. Sellers have cost margins that must be covered or they simply can't sell. If you haven't built much equity in your house, or if you have unpaid home equity loans, you can't sell for much less than you owe on the house. Or you have to reach into your pocket at closing ("upside down"). If you don't have savings or convertible assets, you'll let the house sit on the market for as long as it takes until a buyer comes along who will pay the break-even amount.

6. Once you buy a home, you can't return it. And you usually can't sell it someone else for at least a few years. So you learn to live with it the best you can. It's amazing what people will put up with if they have no choice.

7. When people shop around for a house, they don't exhaust all options. There is always something potentially better that remains unseen. No one has the time to look at hundreds or thousands of houses. People are lazy. Many buyers look at fewer than a couple dozen houses, all in the same couple neighborhoods, before they decide to buy. Many buyers don't even use the Internet. Some buyers buy on homes that they've seen on the Internet...without ever actually looking at them in person.

8. Homebuyers aren't always that smart. The criteria they use to buy homes often has no bearing on what value the home would actually provide them in real life. Some buyers must have a fireplace. Or must have a white house with columns. A lot of it is emotion. Emotion is the strongest influence in making any decision.

I work close to the West Belt and I-10 and he works at the West Belt and 59.

Based on a my high school geometry, I calculated the shortest commute for both of you. I have one word: "Alief". Think about it.

If you work at HP/Compaq, this will be the place to live.

And there's always hope that the Grand Parkway, once completed, will see new employment centers spring up along it within commuting distance of Bridgeland. Since it'll take 20 years to build out Bridgeland, there's plenty of time.

I like the 30% greenspace intentionally left undeveloped. It's prairie terrain, but that's a heck of a lot better than asphalt and hardiplank.

Hopefully they'll use a variety of custom builders and achieve a variety of rich architectural styles. Cinco Ranch generally has the reputation of bland architecture.

When we were looking for a house in The Woodlands last year, I fell in love with several Life Forms houses in our price range in Panther Creek and Cochran's Crossing which were built in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The "woodsy craftsman" style as described here, and the way it "melds into the landscape" is just awesome. But after long study and consideration, here's what we found:

* If you like the "woodsy craftsman" style on the exterior, then you're going to be very disappointed to find bland, undstinguished interiors. You'd almost expect to find wood paneling, wood beams, and other craftsman touches on the interior - but you'll find no such thing. The properties we looked at didn't even have wood floors.

* As noted earlier, Life Forms have been dogged by a terrible reputation for being poorly-built homes. One of our criteria was a well-built home.

While a Life Forms wasn't right for us, I still think they're awesome.

Now, if you want to talk about Jerry Kirkpatrick custom homes (if anyone knows what those are)...

Magnet schools. Just like the inner city. The only thing that I can see SISD doing with any positive effect at this late stage in the game is introducing magnet schools. This year, they're opening their first magnet high school (the Wunsche Academy). It'll be interesting to see how this works out. It sounds like it'll be very simple at first, but we can hope that they'll continually refine it to meet the needs of the middle-class residents in the district who want a decent education for their kids.

The "Tier 4" program was SISD's substitute for magnet schools for a long time. But it wasn't enough - it didn't provide a "holistic" solution for a teenage middle-class kid's life. There was too much exposure to violence (from the "general population" as they're called). Virtually all extracurriculars were out of the question. So kids didn't build any sense of community; they were scattered at various private programs and activities after school. Some of these private activities cost almost as much as private school tuition. And these private activities simply brought these kids in contact with kids from private schools and from other school districts (mostly Klein ISD). Which exacerbated the lack of enthusiasm, lack of caring, and lack of pride in the Spring ISD schools by these middle-class kids.

Spring ISD needs magnet schools that draw a number of middle-class kids, give them a great education (comparable to what they could get in Klein ISD or at a private school), have a safe environment for them, and cater to their middle-class values with a sense of community and school pride through participation in extracurricular acitivities and school functions and having parents volunteer and so on.

The crime statistics based on zip codes bear what I stated as fact (not just in the 1980

("What I would've loved to have seen was a classical European (German)-architectural style shopping center, which would fit in well with the forest as well as linking it to the cultural past of the area which was settled by German farmers back in the mid-1800's.")

I think this is a refreshing idea, and I think it would look pretty cool.

My only thing to add to it would be that the original German architecture in this area was, as you say, farmhouses and so on. So it may be tricky to integrate stylistic elements of the rustic/old-fashioned German farmhouses with something on the scale of a modern shopping plaza...but I think it could probably be done. I think it would be fascinating to see whatever the result was.

I've heard of a few preserved historic German places in Texas. These could definitely be used for design inspiration. I think I've heard of several churches, for example. I think they're west of here, maybe closer to the Hill Country. And of course there are some farms preserved in this area.

Back in the early 1980's the body count coming out of the Gunspoint area was tremendous. There was even a cop kidnapped and later found burned to death in her vehicle. Then it was over run with gangs not shoppers, heck there was more stealing than buying. Needless to say after that reputation got foothold it was down hill from there. Hence the big public relations campaign in the media to change the image. I chuckle everytime I hear it. Like I would want to shop in Watts. Heck the only reason anyone from the outside came there to shop was there was no other place to shop. (1980's)

I heard somewhere that Compton is actually what was Watts, and they just changed the name, for image purposes that you describe. I had always wondered what had happened to Watts. Maybe they need to change the name of Greenspoint. Maybe to "Wattspoint", for example?

What map and mode of transportation are you using, man? ;-)

Willowbrook is 9.4 miles from Greenspoint (not 20) and it would be crazy out of the way to go from one to the other by way of FM1960.

Deerbrook is 15 miles from Greenspoint (not 22).

The Woodlands Mall is 16.7 miles, not a 25 minute drive at most times of the day.

I measured using FM 1960 and I-45 in both directions. MapQuest showed Beltway 8 as the fastest way, but I didn't think a typical Sunday driver to the mall would be using the toll road. I could be wrong on this, though. Is there a non-toll way to get from one to the other that is faster than 1960? I didn't see an obvious one. Having lived in the area for years, 1960 is the road we always used to and from Willowbrook and Deerbrook as well.

As for I-45 from Greenspoint to The Woodlands, maybe we're talking 20 minutes instead of 25 to Greenspoint. It takes me at least 10 minutes just to get from 1960 to Woodlands Parkway. Maybe traffic is worse on weekends, or maybe you drive faster than I do.

I don't see growth in the 90k to 150k span (an accurate description of the perponderance of the new housing being constructed) or for that matter the renovation of the Cityview set of apartment complexes a few years ago as much of a reason to think that Greenspoint is experiencing a rennaisance of any sort. There shouldn't be much hope of future price appreciation within these new subdivisions; I see them as the Sunnysides of tomorrow. Moreover, office construction in the immediate vicinity is stagnant.

Pasadena Town Center is a good example of what investors in retail properties should avoid. They have a heck of a lot of vacancies, are about to lose Dillards as one of their anchor tenants, and lost the Mervyn's across the street as a shadow anchor. Its population and household base grew substantially from the 1990 to the 2000 censuses and is among the Houston area's densest areas, but still failed to generate the kind of sales volume necessary to sustain a mall. Meanwhile, several new strip centers have been built along Southmore and a few others have undergone significant renovations; most of them have done very well.

When it comes down to it, adding lower-middle-class and lower-class households to an area causes a boom in strip center construction but does nothing for the regional malls. The reason is that strip centers have lower operating costs per square foot and don't need the kind of sales volume per square foot to sustain them--they're cheaper and do a better job at matching the needs of their customer base.

All that said, if Greenspoint can leverage its convenience to the large population of office employees by, for instance, building in better pedestrian connectivity between it and the office buildings lining Greenspoint and Northchase Drives along its eastern periphery (and they'd have to be very creative, doing a very good job), then they might be able to induce more customer traffic. But I'm talking about things like shaded, possibly enclosed and air-conditioned pedestrian walkways with bidirectional mechanical conveyor belts, like in many large airports. That'd be a huge boost to their lunchtime traffic...but you all know...the benefits have to outweigh the costs, and the costs would be pretty substantial.

Thanks for the good post. Based on what you're saying, it sounds like the Greenspoint Mall is NOT headed for any sort of recovery.

When I went there, I saw people that seemed nothing like the stereotype that Greenspoint was poor.

Did you go there at lunchtime on a weekday? Allegedly the office worker crowd is there at those times...but when the sun goes down, or on weekends...

there are thousands of 100k to 150k homes being built within 5 miles of greenspoint mall. these homes are south of 1960, north of the belt. there are neighborhoods east of veterans memorial and west of aldine westfield. all of these areas are filling in closer to greenspoint. it is easier and quicker to get to greenspoint than to deerbrook or willowbrook. i believe that there is demand for this project or it wouldn't be going forward.

Yes, but I would amend that slightly to say that all those homes are mostly in the 90k to 110k range.

also, i didn't see anywhere that it is intended to be upscale as desirous and springtx have said.

If we're talking about a bigger/expanded "low-brow" mall (which is what Greenspoint already is), then I see where they're going.

There is just too much competition from the Woodlands (Mall, Market Square, Pavilion, etc.) on 45, Deerbrook Mall on 59, and Willowbrook Mall on 249. Inside the Belt people are not rich enough to support an upscale development.

Willowbrook is 20 miles from Greenspoint: at least 30 minutes' drive, or more if there is traffic on 1960. I think the overlap of the market areas for Willowbrook and Greenspoint is relatively small.

And the same thing with Deerbrook Mall; it's 22 miles from Greenspoint: just under 30 minutes' drive.

The Woodlands Mall is about 25 minutes away from Greenspoint. But it's targeted to an entirely different demographic than to what the current Greenspoint Mall is targeted.

For all those new residents coming into the areas near I-45 that Bachanon mentions, Greenspoint is 10 or 15 minutes away. While many would describe those residents as "urban", and the 1960 corridor as "urban" retail to serve them, that only goes so far. All walks of life and all income levels need a shopping mall, if nothing else than for holiday shopping and movie-going.

Currently, the Greenspoint area has one of the highest concentration of low-income, high-density apartment complexes in Houston. But these new subdivisions going in that Bachanon mentions, these are lower-middle class families. We're talking about a lot of foreign-born folks, primarily Hispanic but also Asian. We're talking about blue collar workers and nurses and so on. While they're not upscale, they're not ghetto, either. It'll be interesting to see if the Greenspoint Mall is able to successfully transform from a ghetto mall to a lower-middle class mall. It'll be interesting to see what it looks like. Maybe it'll look like a mall in Pasadena, for example.

So here's the critical question: do shopping malls need a high percentage of shoppers from their surrounding neighborhoods for the ultimate success/survival of those malls? If so, then an upscale mall will never be in the cards for Greenspoint...as long as the residential areas surrounding it are some of the poorest in Houston. If not, then they can hope to pull upscale shoppers from others locations.

I don't think the suburbs needs to be downtown. Some of us like things clean, plastic, and shallow. I say that in semi-seriousness. Let the surburbs be the suburbs. Downtown isn't far away if you want to experience both. I think most Houston residents get to experience both inner-city city and suburbs on a semi-regular basis. We're talking about only a 30-minute drive from one to the other.

"town center" encompasses the mall, market street, the riverway, etc.  its borders are i-45 on the east, lake woodlands on the west, woodlands parkway on the south and (i think) lake front circle on the north.

also, the population of the woodlands is closer to 90% white (unfortunate imho, but a better percentage than formerly mentioned).

next time you visit the woodlands, start out at the homefinder center.  it is right off of woodlands parkway, westbound, before you get to grogan's mill.  they have huge models of the development and town center and free maps.

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I stand corrected. What I was describing as the "town center" is actually the new Market Street area.

Maybe the population just SEEMS 98% white. It's a true fact, though, that 97% have had plastic surgery of some kind.

Toronto. It's been a few years since I've been to their downtown, but theirs seemed to be extremely clean and free of vagrants. Calgary didn't look bad, either.