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Heights Swim & Social Club At 1435 Beall St.


Orang Bodoh

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I have mixed feelings about this.  I appreciate the grassroots effort, but wonder whether this is even feasible.  Also, I worry that it will be too expensive and exclusive.  There really isn't an acre to be found in Heights proper that wouldn't draw big real estate players.  They would have to go out to Shady Acres or even further out west of White Oak Bayou/TC Jester.  If you have to get in the car to go swim, why pay for a club when you can go to the YMCA for a fraction of the cost?  And why not direct this energy into improving existing City facilities?  Love and Stude Parks have pools that could be really nice with some improvements.  Moody Park is huge and has lots of space to do just about anything.   

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IIRC, a city-wide family membership to the YMCA is around $100/mo. Westside is around $300/mo. Both of these come with a lot more than just a pool. 

 

If you price membership at $80/mo, 6 months/yr (~$500 per family), you need ~600 families to cover the OpEx, plus $7500 in CapEx per family (which would probably be some mixture of cash and debt). I think they'll struggle to get this to work unless the land is donated (or acquired at significantly below market price).

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  • 1 year later...
On 7/6/2017 at 6:28 PM, Angostura said:

If you price membership at $80/mo, 6 months/yr (~$500 per family), you need ~600 families to cover the OpEx, plus $7500 in CapEx per family (which would probably be some mixture of cash and debt). I think they'll struggle to get this to work unless the land is donated (or acquired at significantly below market price).

 

So, I guess this is moving forward, though apparently not without some controversy. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Pool-debate-dividing-Heights-community-group-13453316.php

 

And it looks like they did get the land for free (well, in exchange for a new roof for the lodge).

 

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The organization behind the Heights Swim Club has disbanded and is not going to be involved in running the swim club at the lodge.  The swim club at the lodge will be run and owned by the lodge.  Behind the scene, there are some of the same faces involved from the Heights Swim Club at the swim club at the lodge.  The Heights Swim Club was never able to find land that would make all its members happy.  The opportunity to put in a pool at the lodge came up and the Heights Swim Club worked out a deal to transfer their members to a new swim club at the lodge.  From there, all kinds of fussing ensued.  To fully appreciate the ruckus, I give you The Amazing Dolcefino:

 

https://vimeo.com/303762659/d0198b22fc

 

 

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Except, as far as I understand, the swim club is a separate entity from the lodge, as not all lodge members will have access.

 

The 360 charter members pay in $6000 each, which is $2.16M, which is apparently enough to cover the construction cost of the pool and other facilities. The lodge cedes what looks to be about an acre-and-a-half of land, plus, presumably, access to the parking lot, which is another acre-and-a-half. Even without the parking, it's something like $3M worth of dirt. In return, the lodge gets 360 new members and a new roof.

 

Seems like it would have been cleaner to sell the club the 3+ acres the lodge owns on the other side of Beall St., but then the charter members would have had to find another $6M or so.

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