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Studewood Mixed-Use Development At 1023 Studewood St.


Paco Jones

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Really looks interesting.

My first house (1979-1982) was right around the corner, on E 10th, one block down from Studewood. Amazingly, it's still there, amidst all the newer townhomes & mini-mega-mansions. The Heights is barely the same place any more. Great to see how it's kept its eclectic feel.

I paid $39,000, and sold it three years later for $42,000, to a friend. Felt like I had made a killing! I loved living there, the commute was great (I was working at the building we've been discussing in the Warehouse District thread), but I was getting married, and a small place, with one bathroom, and no central air or heat wasn't going to cut it.

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I like the MCM quotes on the design.  

Surprisingly good article from the Leader on how the City screwed over the immediate neighborhood on SMLS on this lot.  

https://www.theleadernews.com/real_estate/city-amends-smls-policy-after-unique-case-in-heights/article_043908f4-fae2-11eb-97b2-e7f5aa70d2d7.html?fbclid=IwAR0nft5VTYDlGAVyt8eziujRxFsk_2ckDoJI92ogEf1yAAwC00FRdNc76mU

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  • The title was changed to Studewood Mixed-Use Development: 1023 Studewood St.
  • 5 months later...
  • 4 months later...
On 8/17/2021 at 12:41 PM, Texasota said:

poor babies.

Wow can't disagree more with a comment here. 

We did the same thing in our neighborhood. We went door to door, collected signatures, presented our case to the city and after quite a bit of effort, passed Minimum Lot Size in our area. It was not an easy endeavor. I can't comprehend or even imagine the anger these residents must be filling.... This is so wrong on so many levels that the city is allowing this. This would cause a lot of people to doubt any zoning law trying to get enforced. 

 

Edit: rereading the article, the guy is exactly right. Newer ordinances should supercede older ones. "Sovereign said in an email this week he thinks newer Special Minimum Lot Size ordinances should supersede older ones, in part because there is a greater threshold for having them rescinded than there is for implementing them in the first place. The older block ordinances require at least 51 percent support from impacted property owners, according to Zorrilla, while the newer area ordinances require at least 55 percent support."

 

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Minimum lot size areas never should have been allowed to include lots on Studewood, and they never should have prevented replatting for non-residential purposes.

Excluding any kind of commercial use is anti-urban, backward thinking, and I'm glad this (pretty good looking) development was able to find a loophole.

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6 hours ago, Texasota said:

Minimum lot size areas never should have been allowed to include lots on Studewood, and they never should have prevented replatting for non-residential purposes.

Excluding any kind of commercial use is anti-urban, backward thinking, and I'm glad this (pretty good looking) development was able to find a loophole.

It shows the city sided with developers over residents in the area. And there's a lot of residential on Studewood already so if residents want it, they should be allowed to have it.

Developers have a lot of tools at their hands to get what they want and residents should have some sort of tool too... And that's called zoning laws. 

Nice try with backward thinking and anti-urban argument... The truth is your silencing the voices of the people that live in the area and allowing people who have power and connections to get what they want. 

I spoke to my neighbors last night about this troubling fiasco that happened. There are a few odd exceptions here but the city made a very bad call. We filed for Minimum Lot Size near White Oak Music Hall to save our homes here and it's good to confirm that it looks like the same cannot happen where we are. 

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53 minutes ago, Triton said:

It shows the city sided with developers over residents in the area. And there's a lot of residential on Studewood already so if residents want it, they should be allowed to have it.

Developers have a lot of tools at their hands to get what they want and residents should have some sort of tool too... And that's called zoning laws. 

Nice try with backward thinking and anti-urban argument... The truth is your silencing the voices of the people that live in the area and allowing people who have power and connections to get what they want. 

I spoke to my neighbors last night about this troubling fiasco that happened. There are a few odd exceptions here but the city made a very bad call. We filed for Minimum Lot Size near White Oak Music Hall to save our homes here and it's good to confirm that it looks like the same cannot happen where we are. 

I think zoning is exclusionary by nature and we live in a city so individuals on a specific block should not be able to dictate what goes a on a busy cross street.  

We all pay taxes into the same pot so why should some people have more of a voice than others in how the city develops overall? Rich people should not be allowed to use minimum lot sizes to preserve large chucks of land in a city that is trying to densify. 

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You didn't file to "save your homes". Your homes were never under any threat. You're upset about what one of your neighbors is doing. Which is fine! But this is an example where I think a slim majority of homeowners in an area has too much power over what the minority can do with their own property. 

I have mixed feelings about minimum lot size areas. At a minimum I think a 55% threshold of support is too low and restricting replatting is a mistake. But I definitely don't think they make sense on a street like Studewood. The presence of some single family homes doesn't change the fact the Studewood is a major corridor, and prioritizing a few detached single family homes over every other type of home (and business!) is obscene. 

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It's the exact opposite on all the points you guys stated. 

It's not so the rich can protect their homes. I'm on the Northside and it's to protect lower income Hispanic residents who can be priced out of their area by developers looking to make a buck on multiple townhomes on a single lot. 

And of course it's to "save our homes." That's not explicitly written in any document but it preserves the single family nature of an area if the residents care about such things. Some in an area aren't willing to commit to a historic designation because of the overhead it brings so this always felt like just one step below it, a compromise for residents. 

Look, you guys may not like residents having a voice and like to see all the new fancy commercial development come in. I get it. But zoning is the only thing some people have in a city with zero zoning laws. 

Most of you guys probably live in areas that have HOAs that offer your own protection. Us innerloopers don't have that luxury. 

Four homes were bulldozed before this was replatted for commercial use. It's not like this was commercial and the neighborhood fought to then make it residential. If you guys don't like these zoning laws, then what prevents developers from completely bulldozing the rest of the Heights (if they didn't have historic designation). Just turn the Heights into a commercial mecca right? 

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I have never lived someplace with an HOA and doubt I ever will. 

You are conflating "saving our homes" with "preserving the single family nature of an area". Those just aren't the same thing, and you've made no effort to explain why "preserving the single family nature of an area" has any inherent value, especially an area that never was completely single family. Even putting Studewood aside, most pre-WWII neighborhoods were built as a mix of single family homes, duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, and shops. They were built that way because that's how you build a self-sustaining neighborhood. That's how you ensure that people at different financial means can all afford to live in the same neighborhood. 

In an environment with rapidly increasing property values, all these kinds of zoning restrictions do is artificially restrict the supply of housing and price out a lot of the same people who, in the past, would have moved to the neighborhood. Look at the neighborhoods that do have historic district status. Buying a modest house in Heights East or something is no longer realistic for most people. At least the historic ordinance doesn't regulate use though, so you can still open a shop, cafe, or restaurant. And at least we have garage apartments. 

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3 hours ago, Texasota said:

I have never lived someplace with an HOA and doubt I ever will. 

You are conflating "saving our homes" with "preserving the single family nature of an area". Those just aren't the same thing, and you've made no effort to explain why "preserving the single family nature of an area" has any inherent value, especially an area that never was completely single family. Even putting Studewood aside, most pre-WWII neighborhoods were built as a mix of single family homes, duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, and shops. They were built that way because that's how you build a self-sustaining neighborhood. That's how you ensure that people at different financial means can all afford to live in the same neighborhood. 

In an environment with rapidly increasing property values, all these kinds of zoning restrictions do is artificially restrict the supply of housing and price out a lot of the same people who, in the past, would have moved to the neighborhood. Look at the neighborhoods that do have historic district status. Buying a modest house in Heights East or something is no longer realistic for most people. At least the historic ordinance doesn't regulate use though, so you can still open a shop, cafe, or restaurant. And at least we have garage apartments. 

Totally agree with this, near northside was much more commercial in the past with small scale multifamily than it is now. Many of the structures used to be duplexes that were later turned into single family by just taking down a wall. "Preserves the single family nature" is much more sinister than it sounds and it meant to keep anyone else away and restrict supply dramatically raising prices as what has happened in other places like California. 

Most of us here I imagine live in the inner lope btw*

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3 hours ago, Texasota said:

I have never lived someplace with an HOA and doubt I ever will. 

You are conflating "saving our homes" with "preserving the single family nature of an area". Those just aren't the same thing, and you've made no effort to explain why "preserving the single family nature of an area" has any inherent value, especially an area that never was completely single family. Even putting Studewood aside, most pre-WWII neighborhoods were built as a mix of single family homes, duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, and shops. They were built that way because that's how you build a self-sustaining neighborhood. That's how you ensure that people at different financial means can all afford to live in the same neighborhood. 

In an environment with rapidly increasing property values, all these kinds of zoning restrictions do is artificially restrict the supply of housing and price out a lot of the same people who, in the past, would have moved to the neighborhood. Look at the neighborhoods that do have historic district status. Buying a modest house in Heights East or something is no longer realistic for most people. At least the historic ordinance doesn't regulate use though, so you can still open a shop, cafe, or restaurant. And at least we have garage apartments. 

I don't agree with many of your posts but this one makes sense.

 

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Once an area starts being proven up for commercial purposes, it's hard to stop the flipping of passive-income-producing residential properties to directly-income-producing business.  The burn rate of viability for that ecosystem is higher but the risk/reward metabolism is higher too.  
 

So it's not just Triton who is conflating them [edit:  that is, linking neighborhood 'character' redefinition to housing stock stability and tenancy] -- the free market also conflates the signals that link those processes.


We don't love urban growth boundaries, but NAFTA legislation made Texas towns and smaller counties struggle to compete against Mexican labor while a few of the richest Texas cities have been able to place more economic bets and get more of them to pay off.  Is that to those cities' credit?  Was it their competitiveness and resilience?  Or is it a steep new fiscal slope on the playing field that has funneled labor and jobs inside the metropolitan areas, just as a costly change to windstorm laws (or a hard urban growth boundary) would start to artificially funnel them away from us regardless of our fundamental business competitiveness?
 

So in my view y'all are not talking past each other at all, because Texasota too talks about pre-WWII neighbors and blended "missing middle" housing.  They then had a range of both de jure and de facto limitations on participation in the free market for real estate, limitations which mostly don't socially control our viral CRE [edit:  commercial real estate and how it's financed, permitted, developed and marketed to investment managers and investors, as well as to architects] now.  You each are referencing states where the market plays second fiddle to social expectations of what a city should be like.  In other words, y'all agree that when the market was held in check, neighborhoods could be self-sustaining.  The fact that some of those social checks were predatory and discriminatory doesn't negate the general point:  outside, nonmarket checks could and did override the bidding and sale that was internal to the market forces.  
 

Compared to the participants in those prewar neighborhoods, we have relatively more red tape but less cultural legitimacy for boxing in the market forces in favor of the vernacular these days.  Those we do have, we often ask to play second fiddle to the price dynamics that are given us by the market.  For instance, pity even the poor preacher who shares a meal with the homeless; he's not respecting them but enabling them to avoid bettering their lot (by getting off the street and into the housing market).  The example is not the point; I only illustrate my impression that Houstonians have arrived at mainstream endorsement for the theory that unfettered market math will slice up reasonable shares of a steadily expanding risk/reward pie when we allow that pie reasonable authority to stretch most other social contracts, preferences, priorities, so that it might benefit everyone as long as possible.  The free market can also efficiently slice up a pie that is not changing in size.  Unfortunately neither of those theoretical states exists.
 

When factors are instead speeding up or slowing down, and additionally both affect and depend on nonmarket externalities, the price information doesn't efficiently price in those feedback loops (and therefore people's real decisionmaking priorities), which is part of why the discipline of economics has been taking such a 'psychological turn' in the past couple of generations  --  to try to stop their hypotheses from generating policies that produce real-world nonsense.
 

The bottom line is this:  the question is whether self-sustaining neighborhoods are actually possible in a free market. Has it been shown that they practically exist in an unchecked market anywhere outside of the utopian test tubes of indefinite growth on the one hand and an indefinite local steady-state balance on the other?  If that's where the free market allows self-sustaining neighborhood processes to continue, then that's a big oops for a city of pragmatic can-do people.  If we're hitching our wagon to a longterm misconception it's not good news for Houston.

 

thanks for reading and considering!

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Sorry, that was too harsh.

I do think you wrote something that reads like it was designed to be completely incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the specific academic sources you are, and that always drives me crazy. I think the purpose of writing is to maximize understanding, and this does not remotely do that. 

I've read through your post a few times, and I am genuinely unsure of what point you're trying to make. 

Is it possible for self-sustaining neighborhoods to exist in a free market? Well, yes. Traditional/historic 19th and early 20th century examples developed in market a lot freer than the ones that exist now, even in houston.

The issue with this specific building is whether something that explicitly subverts the "free market" has an effect worth that subversion. I'm no libertarian, but I do believe that government regulations are only defensible if they serve a genuine public need. I recognize that not everyone will agree on what qualifies, but we should at least be able to discuss the actual impacts and intentions of a regulation rather than just falling back on cliches or unsupported statements.

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I forgive you and yes, I also agree that you went needlessly below the belt  :P

A self-sustaining neighborhood is not something I was trying to rant about.  I simply take it to mean a neighborhood that is able to repair its building stock…

— unlike a neighborhood that is losing investment via failure of its products and services; or through redlining policies that deny mortgage investment; or through a shortage of new resident replacement as neighbors age —

…and also to mean a neighborhood that doesn’t export its density.

For a concrete example:  services provided to West U or to River Oaks homeowners, from lawn care to law and accounting, have been provided by both upper-middle-class young professionals and by the working poor who are housed in other neighborhoods; the desirable character will stop coexisting with a desirable range of local service offerings unless it either uses space within Fourth Ward, the Montrose and the Heights, and finally places like Gulfton, Denver Harbor, Eastwood and Magnolia Park, to satisfy its housing needs, or tears down parts of River Oaks and West U to invest in denser building stock.  
— Because it was a premise of this thread that the character of the self-sustaining neighborhood would not significantly be erased, I take that as given, and I am fine with local trade, except that to overly rely on paying other neighborhoods can include needing them to absorb things our neighborhood regards as threats to its self-sustenance.  If that has to go somewhere nearby, then we cannot be a bunch of self-sustaining neighborhoods, since in this model of neighborhood investment processes, the buck is still stopping somewhere that needs to keep erasing its own sustained character qualities.  It might still be a good economic model for a tournament but not for families’ place to live.
 

Within these options, then, a neighborhood can try to attract surplus investment for as long as possible through economic success — in which case almost every building will eventually be replaced with greater density due to increasing land value — inevitably changing its character.  
Or the neighborhood can attempt to resist any runaway success, and in that case investment will either begin to dwindle compared to nearby neighborhoods, or it will still grow more desirable and some other neighborhoods will have to take up its slack.  

 

The successful 19th and 20th century examples you cite may have developed that way, and still be fine-grained residential/commercial neighborhoods at this time, but what paths will allow them to keep self-sustaining?  Thanks for thinking about it publicly together.  My essay was a point of departure to explore what that question is really asking, if you will.  
What actual issues are forming the levels (or limits) that in fact need to be understood before we can do something?  It’s pointless to do something if we don’t know that it levels out the desired path and makes it easier to remain on such a path.  Have the lessons of those 19th and 20th century successes shown us anything lasting — or mostly kicked the can down the road?  Or were they offroad?
That is a form of clarifying one’s understanding which my comment saw as its goal, but not a form of ranting or of salesmanship — not an essay to tell the public what idea they should now be sold on.  I apologize for doing a poor job of communicating that and for making it a frustrating use of time.  I do know Houston’s worth the effort to constructively converse about this, so that non-mental action is as effective as possible.  To whatever extent I HAIF in the future I’ll try to do better.

Edited by strickn
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I just thought it was noteworthy that the minimum lot size push ultimately got rolled by this development.  Every time a developer wants to take a big crap on a neighborhood, everyone jumps in with the chorus of "we don't have zoning" and then wags their fingers at residents for not getting minimum lot size.  This time, they got minimum lot size and still got rolled.  

Homer Simpson Never Try GIF - Homer Simpson Never Try You Tried Your Best GIFs

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  • 2 months later...
  • The title was changed to Studewood Mixed-Use Development At 1023 Studewood St.

How does the Heights manage to attract all these beautiful buildings? Almost every building that goes up in the Heights has unique architecture. Wish this would spread to other parts of Houston; the west side of town is in desperate need of anything other than a strip center. 

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On 9/1/2022 at 11:21 AM, Amlaham said:

How does the Heights manage to attract all these beautiful buildings? Almost every building that goes up in the Heights has unique architecture. Wish this would spread to other parts of Houston; the west side of town is in desperate need of anything other than a strip center. 

Money and style. People move to the Heights because they have money and want a certain aesthetic. Developments that can deliver attractive, unique, and fun architecture will attract more traffic and make more money.

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1 hour ago, jmitch94 said:

Money and style. People move to the Heights because they have money and want a certain aesthetic. Developments that can deliver attractive, unique, and fun architecture will attract more traffic and make more money.

The Heights definitely has style and people moving there for that aesthetic make sense. However, I wouldn't necessarily say money is a factor. For example, Rice village is in the heart of one of the most expensive zip codes in the state yet it still looks outdated even with their "remodel." The rest of Kirby outside the UK district also looks outdated and filled with nothing but strip centers. Same goes with the galleria area with exception of Post Oak blvd. Same with Montrose, the only thing that feels updated is Montrose Collective. I really hope the rest of Houston can eventually catch up to the Heights.

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