zaphod

I love stuff like this, it looks like west LA or a suburb in Japan. The key would build like 500 more of them inside the loop*

*I don't mean this particular building, its not architecturally my taste, but I mean like the general form factor of a 4-5 apartment that has minimal tuck-under parking that's only like a 1/4 acre and replaces a house, and there could be several of these on any given block. This is the next evolutionary step after those 3 story townhomes.

This is probably a really dumb question, but do these TMC developments which are private sector oriented and not necessarily just hospitals pay normal property taxes? To the city? Just curious.

I suspect that the traffic people are concerned about there is east and west, not north or south. There is really nowhere to put such a thing that wouldn't involve condemning large amounts of private property or ruining the natural amenities that make The Woodlands desirable in the first place. The idea is a nonstarter.

38 minutes ago, toxtethogrady said:

GooglEarth has some imagery that is supposedly uploaded within the past month, and it shows all kinds of development in all directions. Most obvious new feature is the completed Grand Parkway east of I-69 and down to Baytown.

Another curious feature is a Hispanic neighborhood east of Roman Forest that appears to have sprung from nowhere and is adding trailer homes on individual plots and some new tract homes. I was unaware it existed two years ago. I have no idea which neighborhood it is, but the Grand Parkway is close by.

The latter thing is Colony Ridge. It was fairly controversial. The guy who bought all the land and built it is a libertarian of sorts and his arguments in favor of his right to build it are sound. It's just that he's going to create a concentration of like 50,000-60,000 extremely poor people a large proportion of which are undocumented, don't speak english, have no education, etc in a location that's extremely far away from practically everything. It's going to be weird. Also not a lot of long term provisions to pay for services and infrastructure.

Understandable why so many, especially in today's economy, would take the offer to buy a cheap lot and put up a trailer and DIY yourself some kind of homestead, but man, I think going forward 20-30 years that place is going to be rough.

I think the only other similar places in the US would be the deserts north of LA, where there are huge settlements of people living in trailers and it's really bleak and weird.

To save money they should close down their offices in Midtown. That would be a big space to be redeveloped that's not a ugly wall on the sidewalk.

Crime Stoppers would be a better fit for Greenspoint, I think.

The mall looks like it was pretty nice up until a few years prior to its demise.

I had a thought, it seems like nowadays the "pace of change" for places like malls is slower. Like, many malls of the 1960s and 1970s only lasted about 30 years. 30 years ago was 1992, there aren't as many dead shopping centers from 1992 around today. I wonder if the retail industry was more volatile back then, when it was a new and growing thing. Nowadays there are only a handful of major chains, a lot of malls have vanished, so of course that means what remains are regional or flagship stores operated by giant publicly traded corporations that have deep pockets.

Kind of like how when the internet was young there were a lot of different search engines and a lot of major websites and a lot of different brands of PC's and early smartphones and many of them came in a flash and vanished. Now there's just a few giant social media platforms, and a handful of companies that sell the majority of mobile devices.

That's a pretty heavy duty phase 1.  It looks like they shifted from being many small buildings to being a handful of big ones?

"Dynamic and walkable"🙄

On 4/6/2022 at 2:35 PM, Montrose1100 said:

Pools

• Everyone has one or knows someone that has access to one. Private, Public, Neighborhood, Apartment, Hotel, that's one thing I really enjoy having access to. Particularly those 2-3 weeks in August. 

So, actually there is a severe paucity of publically accessible ones outside the city proper. The HOA pools, which are residents only, tend to dominate. I disagree completely. Other metro areas usually have municipal or county run aquatic facilities.

So it's like a normal apartment complex, but with big chonker 6 story buildings. Interesting.

I feel like I am raising the dead here, but I have a similar childhood memory and associate those things with Kmart too. Also older Krogers would have the intake vents in the middle of the store that would suck up all the mylar balloons that escaped the floral section. They'd float there and spin around helplessly like prey.

1 hour ago, Paco Jones said:

This is the same developer as the Ten Oaks project, AHS Residential. 

They have an ongoing project (recently went through permitting phase, no ground broken yet) in central Fort Worth to build three individual midrise apartments and then an 8 floor garage shared amongst them

https://www.dfwi.org/go/1000-weatherford

https://www.fortwortharchitecture.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6596&page=5#entry138136

I would expect this thing in Houston would be very big with loads of units.

I love it, it kind of takes density in that area to the next level and hopefully there will be more. I'm glad its modern looking and not some "old timey heights" design.

That fedex used to be a kinko's and had a subway conjoined to it. Oh well, a highrise would be much better.

Seems like a way to just suppress wages and allow some native populations (like black males with minimal education) to continue to languish. We should be encouraging people to take these jobs by making them less awful.

Also, here is another thought. Maybe having labor get more expensive would be a way to disrupt the industry into being more efficient? Like what if houses were more modular or partially prefabricated in a factory?

https://www.economist.com/business/2017/08/17/efficiency-eludes-the-construction-industry

I actually like the typeface and color scheme. It's clean and minimalistic.

What I don't like is the light rail livery. Bring back the all silver trains

So are the towers actually happening?

That's cool!

Go figure Friendswood of all places would have infill like that.

Campanile on Minimax is one of the weirdest, kludgiest names for an apartment complex I've ever seen but I kind of love it. I mean think about it. A campanile is an Italian word for a bell tower we associate with college campuses and old world city centers. Minimax was a grocery store that went out of business.

I find it amusing and kind of cool that the name of a long defunct supermarket chain lives on just because the driveway into their distribution center back in the 1970s was a public road and got a name printed on road signs and maps. And then due to happenstance all that land is getting developed into high density residential.

Eventually it will just be the Minimax District, and I actually think that's kind of cool and they should go with it.

The downside is that inspection stations are usually very small businesses that would be easy to intimidate or they would motivated to flount the law to encourage more customers.

Most excellent!!!

I seriously hope this is a new trend where we can go beyond the 4 story donuts and go up. Think about how much more quickly that units would be added to the market and hopefully stem this rent inflation problem. Also that would be some impressive density if this was repeated.

I noticed here in Fort Worth there is a building called the Stayton which looks like this except it has these connecting corridors turning it into just one building. But really its laid out in a way that almost makes it three seperate thin buildings.

I think Houston probably does better on building public housing and social services facilities without a lot of NIMBYism, it has a lot of dirt cheap housing already too.

Another thought is that Houston is still sort of a gritty blue collar city. There's places that will hire people with a checkered past or felonies and there's slumlords who will rent to them. Unlike in the Bay Area where you have to make a ton of money as a skilled professional and be approved by the corporations that own luxury apartment properties, just to barely get by. The people with a lot of problems don't stand a chance there.