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Office & Retail At 2204 Austin St.


phillip_white

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17 hours ago, phillip_white said:

I just noticed they cut down the oak tree that used to be next to the telephone pole. 😢

I thought a city ordinance was passed a few years ago that forbids developers from cutting down mature trees on the ROW.
Of course, if it was on private property there's probably little or no action the city could have taken.

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  • The title was changed to Office & Retail - 2222 Austin St.
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I wonder what's going on with this project. They were making good progress, then all of a sudden nothing. I have noticed a car has been parked on the property at times, which I'm assuming is hired security. Hopefully that's a positive sign. 

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On 1/9/2023 at 5:38 PM, phillip_white said:

I wonder what's going on with this project. They were making good progress, then all of a sudden nothing. I have noticed a car has been parked on the property at times, which I'm assuming is hired security. Hopefully that's a positive sign. 

An employee of the GC had the gate open as I was driving by. They confirmed the project is stalled, but didn't mention the issue. Construction will be moving forward when it's resolved.

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16 minutes ago, j_cuevas713 said:

I hate when highway access is a highlight of the property

I agree, but it's unlikely to change soon for business-to-business advertising.

But yeah, it's a stroad mindset.

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1 hour ago, editor said:

Stroad?  I didn't find it in my dictionary.  A combination of strange and toad, or a typo?

It's a portmanteau of street and road. Popularized (to some extent) by Chuck Marohn the Strong Towns organization.

Basically posits that there is a thing, for which we might as well use the term "street," and another thing, for which we might as well use the term "road," and that most North American urban planning and traffic engineering have collapsed the two into a dangerous, expensive, and ubiquitous hybrid that we might as well call a "stroad".

Marohn (a former traffic engineer) differentiates the road/street dichotomy from the heirarchical approach (access/collector/arterial/highway) by focusing principally on function and purpose, rather than traffic volume capacity.

The platonic ideal of a street is a place - a platform for building community wealth. A successful street is likely to be filled with all sorts of traffic-slowing activity, be it shopping or dining or kids playing basketball. The traffic engineer's goal here should be safety and universality of access; automotive speed and throughput should not be considered priorities. Some of the world's best streets don't permit any cars at all.

The platonic ideal of a road, on the other hand, is a high-speed connection between two places. Funnily enough, these also don't require cars. Some of the best roads in the world are railroads. But it might be best for our purposes to think of a rural Farm-to-Market or interstate highway.

Where it gets dicey is when we try to combine these functions by developing our arterial roads into our primary commercial spaces (or designing our primary commercial spaces like highways). We end up with stroads (think all of, but especially western, Westheimer) that are not particularly nice places to be but are also not particularly efficient roads. 

Thus when a building advertises to businesses by trying to come off as both an appealing place and a place suited to high-speed car traffic, it is exhibiting a stroad mindset.

But you're better off reading Marohn's Confessions of a Recovering Engineer than my explanation.

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14 hours ago, 004n063 said:

It's a portmanteau of street and road. Popularized (to some extent) by Chuck Marohn the Strong Towns organization.

Well, now I feel a bit foolish, because I've seen that word a thousand times before, but somehow didn't recognize it this time.  Thanks for the clue-by-four!

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On 4/18/2023 at 5:57 AM, 004n063 said:

Still not in love with the design (wish it fronted Austin or Caroline instead of Webster, for one thing), but man, it is nice to know that it won't just be a half-comstructed mess forever.

It's a long narrow, piece of property, an Insurance company owns the property/building facing Caroline St. They had no choice but face it toward Webster St. and I'm glad they put the parking behind the building instead of in front of it.

unklvNr.jpg

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19 minutes ago, hindesky said:

It's a long narrow, piece of property, an Insurance company owns the property/building facing Caroline St. They had no choice but face it toward Webster St. and I'm glad they put the parking behind the building instead of in front of it.

unklvNr.jpg

I think that's the most important thing. The parking is in the back and pedestrians don't feel like an afterthought for the neighborhood. I actually like the design though. 

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