editor

As luck would have it, this is my neighborhood! And I would have no objection to a public hygiene facility replacing any of the surface parking lots. That's far closer to the "highest and best" use for the space than another stretch of asphalt. [Citation needed]

Chicago has a lot of rules governing new skyscrapers. And contrary to the hyperbolic claims of real estate developers — they keep getting built. Funny, that. The city's Department of Transportation has added some new rules (Traffic Demand Management) for new developments that are near train stations. Some of them are kind of interesting. I've only briefly scanned the rules, but these are parts that caught my eye: The goal is not just to reduce car ownership, and the use of personal cars, but to also reduce the reliance of ride-hailing like Uber and Lyft Rules restricting free parking. This was already a thing for office towers, but will not apply some other buildings, including retail. In some cases, employees may be able to "cash out" the value of their office parking space. Meaning, they can get money on their paychecks if they don't use a car to come to work. Prohibiting apartment and condo buildings from including parking in the rent, which was pretty common already. I used to pay $380/month for a parking space at Aqua. But condo buildings more commonly included a parking space. Companies may be required to subsidize the cost of transit passes. A bunch of companies already do this in Chicago (mine did, and still does), so I'm not sure why this is necessary, unless it's fallen out of favor, or they're making it mandatory. Which is part of the next point: Mandatory marketing of transit alternatives. The buildings and companies almost never tell their employees about transit subsidies and other programs. They will now be required to encourage people to use the programs. On-site day-care for employees, which I remember being a big thing in the 1970's in New York, and even Enron did it here in Houston, but I guess it's not as widespread as it should be. On-site car sharing services. Chicago already has ZipCar and Avail, but maybe it's not as widespread as it used to be the last time I lived there. "Micromobility" strategies, like subsidizing gym memberships near the office, so people don't have to drive to go to the gym after work and then drive home. "Micro-transit" — meaning the office building organizes van pools. Some of the big skyscrapers already do this (Michigan Plaza, Prudential Plaza), but those are with massive buses because they're massive buildings. This will encourage smaller office buildings to do it with vans and cars, and to build designated pick-up and drop-off locations. Mandatory bicycle amenities (bike kitchens, public tool kits, showers, etc) Building must be constructed with parking levels that can be converted to other uses. Some Chicago skyscrapers have been converting their parking garages to office and residential space for the last ten years or so (900 North Michigan Avenue, Water Tower Place) as people realize that cars aren't worth the hassle in a big city. Now, parking areas will have to be designed with this in mind. As someone who has lived in Chicago on-and-off over the last 20 years, it's been my observation that CDOT has become very forward-thinking. It understood decades ago that it is a transportation department, and not a cars and asphalt department, even though transit is handled by other entities. It was converting street parking spaces into parklets and outdoor dining spaces for everyone to enjoy years before COVID made it fashionable in other places, realizing that public space is not the best place to store private property. Few of these policies would work in Houston (though, if I wasn't WFH, my company would cover my Q Card). But it's interesting to see the direction other cities are going, especially as Houston starts to become more dense and downtown becomes more mixed-use.

I was in a hurry, so I didn't get a chance to take a picture of the plaque.

May 27:

There's a plaque next to it. OCRed version: THE MEETING by Aec Interesni Kazki "The Meeting" is a mural about the war in Ukraine and the promotion of peace (United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16). War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. The world has become more unstable and fearful since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Houston made clear statements in support of Ukraine and has decided to suspend its Sister City relationship with Tyumen and its long-standing partnership with Moscow until free and open dialogue can resume. This mural, created by Ukrainian artist Aec Interesni Kazki and curated by Street Art for Mankind (SAM), is dedicated to the thousands of Ukrainians who lost their limbs from exploding shells in the war. It features, in the unique surrealistic style of the artist, a son with missing parts, returning home to his welcoming mother. At first sight, the modern scene looks like a celebration (glass, positions, etc.), yet a deeper look opens new interpretations with the bullet, or the misplaced futuristic body parts. For this young man, the healing is made all the more difficult with the continued fighting. The piece is part of the second series of the Big Art. Bigger Change. murals produced in May 2023 in Downtown Houston. It was made possible thanks to the drive and generous support of the Houston Downtown Management District and Harris County Precinct One. Special thanks to the Icon Hotel and Verde Communities lIc for donating their wall.

I had the ham/egg/Gruyere/leafing things bagel at Fifth Vessel this morning. Can recommend.

Can someone explain the use of the word "trill" in this context? Is this a rap music term? When I see "trill" I think of Star Trek alien worms that burrow inside of other aliens with spots on them: I suppose you could make burgers out of trill worms, but I also supposed that's not what this rapper is going for.

Yeah, that's always the hard thing with mentally ill homeless people. It's hard to stay on your meds when you don't have a safe place to keep them, or a regular life schedule/alarm clock of some sort to keep you on track. And there's a certain level of mental illness where you're no longer mentally capable of taking your meds reliably. In some cases, you only need to miss one dose and you're done for. Just this morning, I saw a middle-aged woman standing in the middle of Fannin Street shouting at imaginary people. As noted before, downtown's vagrancy problem doesn't seem to be about homelessness so much as it is about drugs and mental illness. In decades past, people who couldn't stay on their meds would have been brought to state-run places to help them get back on track. I don't know what the situation is in Texas, but in Illinois, funds for mental illness were gutted by a series of governors of both parties in order to balance the budget. Then they congratulate themselves in front of the TV cameras while services for poor and desperate people get worse. I've seen a nice lady in Midtown who sits down with homeless people on the street and helps them with their medications and other things. She's of sounder constitution than I. I think I'd give up. She really is amazing. Stunningly beautiful, and kind as the day is long. She could be a beauty queen or a runway model in Paris or any number of other things, but she seems to spend her free time sitting on the sidewalk with Houston's least fortunate, charging their phones and doing more than her share to make other human beings feel human.

Unfortunately, it is seen as perfectly normal in a lot of places in America. And it's terrible.

I'm always dismayed when I see so much un-landscaped public space. For example, the medians and sidewalk areas (called "margins" or "parkways" in other cities, I don't know what the term is in Houston). Too often they're just dirt and some developer laid irrigation pipe over it and walked away. I wish there were neighborhood gardening clubs or other groups that could get permission to tend to these areas; especially the city-owned ones. And when I see the bill every month for water drainage, I wonder how much lower it might be if the city put more effort into ensuring fallow space was properly vegetated.

I'm ok with the named in the titles because people know names more than they know addresses, so it makes it easier for people who aren't regulars to find things. I'd rather have the additional overhead of changing the titles than make it harder for someone to find something they're interested in.

Grumpy old men gotta grump.

Or Houston could do what other cities do: Make it easy for charities to help the homeless with their hygiene. In some places I've lived, if a church provides bathing facilities for the homeless, it stops getting a water bill. Easy peasy.

A lady got mugged this afternoon around 2pm right by the Fendi store. There's usually a guard near there, but the perp must have been watching for him to wander away. The lady was knocked to the ground and the guy took her purse.

I just saw one blow through the red light on Milam at McGowen. Good thing I hadn't stepped into the crosswalk yet. Are these fully self-driving, or is there a human inside helping it screw up?

Oh, how awful — human beings who want to be clean! We should definitely make their hygiene worse. That will totally solve homelessness! You know the homeless sleep in the streets, don't you? By that logic, we should get rid of all the streets. And I saw a homeless guy in the park the other day. We should shut down all of the parks! The solution to vagrants bathing in the fountains isn't to remove the fountains. It's to give people a better place to bathe. Municipal bathing facilities have been around for as long as there has been plumbing.

Is "urbanist shopping district" the new "lifestyle center" which was the new "strip mall?" I don't think that the River Oaks District has any advantage in security over the Galleria. It's open to the street, and anyone can walk in. The Galleria literally has doors that people have to go through to get in. The problem is that Simon is too cheap to staff the Security department properly. There should be a security person at each door. There was a note in the Chronicle a couple of months ago about the city sending more HPD officers to patrol the Galleria. The Galleria is private property — it shouldn't have HPD on patrol. It should hire enough of its own security to do a good job, so that taxpayers don't have to fund its security, and HPD officers can work where they're needed more. As for the tug-of-war I mentioned, it's not speculation. I know someone who was involved with the process of a high-end overseas brand trying to decide between Houston and Dallas.

I think vagrancy seems worse in downtown and Midtown because numerically, there are far fewer non-vagrants than there were before so many people went work-from-home. It's a ratio thing. Also, I think it seems worse because there's fewer people who are "homeless" and more people who are just junkies. The city seems to be doing a good job of moving people who want housing into housing — the actual homeless. But most of the vagrants I see downtown aren't people who are too unfortunate/poor to afford a place to live. They're people so blitzed out on drugs that they don't care if they have a home or not. Protip: No shoes is a sure sign of an addict. You can sell a pair of shoes for a week's worth of fentanyl. Another sign is hygiene. Yesterday I saw a guy bathing behind the bushes of the Chase bank in Midtown, using the lawn sprinklers as a shower. That's a sign of someone who works, but has a super-crap job, like the homeless guy who sweeps the parking lots at the Chevron and Walgreens. Homeless because he's poor. Not homeless because he's drugged-up and face-down in his own filth. I sometimes wonder if there's a drug dealer right near the intersection of Main and Rusk, because worst of the the vagrants seem to pass out there. And while I'm not a drug user, I suspect that when a junkie gets some new drugs, he uses them immediately rather than going somewhere else to imbibe. I know there's a dealer who works Main Street between SoDo and the SuperGhettoMart on the corner of Lamar. He's approached me twice. But something else is going on at Main between Capitol and Rusk.

Three Keys is open. It actually replaced, not supplemented Greenway Coffee. Word around the food court is that Greenway's lease expired, but no one is sure if it jumped or was pushed. Strangely, Three Keys operates in the opposite direction as Greenway — the ordering area is now the pick-up area, and the pick-up area is now the ordering area. This is actually an improvement. Greenway was always counter-intuitive because instead of having the front of the joint face the building entrance, you had to circle around to the back. Reducing friction is key to getting new customers. The baristas are unusually eager (for Houston) to serve, which is nice. The one I spoke with said that it's been a roasting company for years, and this is its first retail location. I will do what I can to help it out, but I already drink at least six cups of coffee a day. The Three Keys menu is a little brief. Perhaps it will expand when it gets settled in. I'm not sure I was supposed to take the menu, but here it is: Also new (to me) is Carol Kay Cafe. I know nothing about it other than it occupies the space that was once occupied by a place that didn't have physical menus, and if you brought a book with you to lunch instead of a telephone, they looked at you like you were from Mars and refused to serve you.

You're not wrong, but you're also outdated. It's not 1990, or even 2010 anymore. The number of journalists in America — especially in local newsrooms — has plummeted. I'd be surprised if the Chronicle had even a quarter of the number of reporters today that it had in 2000. When I was in television, a 30-minute local news program in a market the size of Houston would have at minimum: two field reporters, two writers, a producer, an associate producer, an executive producer, and an intern or three. Today, it's very often just one field reporter, a producer, and maybe an executive producer shared with other shows. It's so bad that the anchors in Houston are even running their own TelePrompTers. That's why they have one hand on a black knob all the time. People complain about the poor quality and lack of local news, then instead of spending 71¢ a day to support local journalism they choose to get their "news" from social media because they think it's "free." Well, you get what you pay for. Enjoy the world you made.

Nope. I was walking to Walgreens today and just happened to notice it. Sorry to deflate any conspiracy theory you might be forming. If it's not running, it's not working. A car that also doesn't start 24/7 can also be described as not working. That Houston Center photo was taken at 9:00am on a weekday. I don't consider a water feature that runs from 11:54am to 11:57am every other Thursday to be a fountain. Also walking around today: Dead fountain. Partially working fountain, but good to see the spigot working for the first time in years. I guess that's progress. Dead fountain. Amazingly working fountain. This has been dead for years, then was working on-and-off. This is twice in a row that I've walked by and it's working, so hopefully this one can be considered a success. Dead fountain replaced with a bowl of dirt. Dead fountain. Dead fountain. Dead fountain. Dead fountain. Dead fountain replaced by a bowl of flowers. Dead fountain. Dead fountain. Dead fountain. Dead fountain replaced by a bowl of weeds. It's a shame about those fountains that have been replaced by bowls. Some of them used to be baseballs with water flowing out from under them. They were made to look like giant baseballs crashed to earth. They were supposed to line the street all the way down to the baseball stadium. While looking for an old photo of the baseball fountains, I came across this picture. I'd forgotten there used to be a fountain in front of Chase Tower: I think the El Paso Energy fountains are gone, too. But I'm happy to be corrected about that: I also forgot that there was a fountain on Milam between Rusk and Capitol: I haven't been over by the bayou in a while. Does this one still flow? For some reason when I put in "fountain," my computer sent this back. It must be psychic, because this has a fountain today (working!) that wasn't there when I took this picture: The computer search for "fountain" also popped up lots of pictures I took of Sesquicentennial Park, but I'm not going to post those here. That would only embarrass anyone who believes that downtown Houston doesn't have a problem with its fountains.

Nope. Not working. Also not working, but Midtown, not downtown. I did see two seemingly refurbished Cotswold fountains today. So I guess that's something.

After mass, Saturday, May 27th