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20 hours ago, Angostura said:

The walkability of a neighborhood is pretty tightly correlated with the average parcel size within it.

....continuing the street grid from the other side of Sawyer, into parcels with, say 25 to 50 feet of frontage each, exempted from setbacks and parking minimums.

20 years later, you would have had a neighborhood within a 10-minute bike ride of downtown, filled with half-million-dollar townhouses, small mid-rise apartment buildings, and street-level retail, and you could grow it west and south as other warehouses came on the market. This is basically how the Heights came about (except greenfield instead of brownfield.) But in a world where it's pretty easy to finance a huge multi-acre development there's not much reason to develop in this way anymore.

 

so to increase walkability, in addition to minimum lot width, you'd also have a maximum lot width?

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Minimum lot width needs to go away or at least be reduced. I believe the minimum lot width for non-residential lots in Houston is 50', which is absolutely absurd and totally at odds with this kind of traditional commercial development. You can get around it with variances, having retail on corner lots, or a single lot with multiple tenants of course. 

But it's the kind of development restriction that strikes me as pretty arbitrary and totally at odds with what the City should be prioritizing. 

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most deed restrictions will have 50' minimum width as well, including a 5000sf minimum lot size. mainly because up until 1999 this was a city ordinance. in 1999, they allowed the deed restrictions to be adjusted to have lot sizes less than 5000sf for residential.

reviewing the deed restriction for my neighborhood (which was updated in 2017 to keep people from running air BNB) the 50' width, and 5000sf minimum still exist.

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13 hours ago, j_cuevas713 said:

So the city hasn't even considered changing the minimum width? 

Probably no more than its considered doing away with minimum setback requirements and parking minimums, or curtailing deed restrictions.

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On 5/19/2021 at 10:52 AM, samagon said:

so to increase walkability, in addition to minimum lot width, you'd also have a maximum lot width?

I don't know if there needs to be a maximum width, but if you plat at 25-ft or 33-ft frontage and sell lots individually, a lot of development is going to happen on one or two-lot parcel. 

 

On 5/19/2021 at 11:16 AM, Texasota said:

Minimum lot width needs to go away or at least be reduced. I believe the minimum lot width for non-residential lots in Houston is 50', which is absolutely absurd and totally at odds with this kind of traditional commercial development. You can get around it with variances, having retail on corner lots, or a single lot with multiple tenants of course. 

But it's the kind of development restriction that strikes me as pretty arbitrary and totally at odds with what the City should be prioritizing. 

Yes, at least for uses other than single-family residential, minimum width is 50 (or 60) feet. Recall that a typical downtown or EaDo block is only 250 feet between rights of way. So you can never really have more than 5 different façades on a given block face. Add in the 5000 minimum size for non SFR reserves, and the most different façades on the block face around the corner is three. 

 

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2 minutes ago, BigRed said:

Had no clue a HD was going there. Am I nuts - this seems odd for the area, no?

I think most were disappointed when we found out but I'm sure the Home Depot will be well received. Movie theaters and office buildings aren't in much demand nowadays.

 

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On 10/1/2021 at 9:50 PM, hindesky said:

I think most were disappointed when we found out but I'm sure the Home Depot will be well received. Movie theaters and office buildings aren't in much demand nowadays.

 

Yup, with Covid and a good amount of people working from home, it's no wonder that home renovation is such a big thing right now..

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