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editor

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  1. editor
    Does anyone see a way this can end up improving things? Or are we looking at Main Street Market all over again?
  2. editor
    I noticed a couple of weeks ago that parking lot was closed and locked. I guess now we know why. And I guess that if it's no longer earning revenue, construction shouldn't be too far off.
  3. editor
    I do the same. But I think at least part of it is that people are used to turning there, and it's been my observation that No Left Turn signs across Houston are often not very prominent in size or placement. Here's Westheimer at Avalon Place, where a few days ago I sat behind someone trying to make an illegal left turn. (I didn't honk this time because someone was between us.) If someone is making a left turn from the left lane, they're not looking for the No Left Turn sign all the way over on the right sidewalk. The geometry of the curbs should be some indication that this isn't a good place to turn, but there should be more to it than that. Whatever good citizen placed those cones on the sidewalk when the Apple Maps car went by knows it's a problem, but those cones were long gone by the time I was there last week. It's just part of the Houston ethos: "Ah, that's good enough." No, it's not. There should be a No Left Turn sign on the little concrete island along with a Do Not Enter sign facing southwest. And if that doesn't work, we should get all Washington, D.C. with it:
  4. editor
    Thinking about it further, I think the only reason I discovered C&D is because I was traveling more slowly on 11th Street, instead of blowing past it without noticing, as I had the previous few years. That said, the 11th Street bike lane project isn't perfect. Someone should have come up with a way for people to make left turns at the Heights Boulevard intersection. I think that's one of the biggest factors sending unwanted traffic roaming through the neighborhood.
  5. editor
    I thought this was a really weird article when I read it. It basically parrots the greenfield real estate development lobby's assertion that it costs too much to convert office buildings to residences. I think blanket statements like that are silly because each building is different. I really respect Gensler, but this doesn't line up with reality. There's a successful office → residential conversion literally two blocks away from Howell's office. An uncharitable interpretation of the quotation is that perhaps Gensler's Houston office is simply not up to the challenge, since so many other firms around the world are doing this very successfully. Across America, there are already many hundreds, if not thousands of office buildings that have been converted into residences. It's not a new trend. In 2003 I lived in a 25-story 1925 skyscraper that was converted to residences in the 1980's. And there were a dozen others in the neighborhood. Even in Houston, this isn't something new or exotic. There's at least half-a-dozen of them downtown, both new and old conversions. Yes, it can be hard. But it's not universally hard, as professed by people who make money from plowing under the prairie to build bland beige bungalows out to the horizon.
  6. editor
    I kinda like the design, too. It would be nice if it could be made into a centerpiece of the park, like as a community center + Museum of Houston + tourist information center + gift shop.
  7. editor
    Yes, downtown needs more parks. It also needs more buildings to replace the surface parking lots. But there's plenty of under-utilized space for both. Parks are a magnet for residential and other development. So much so that big real estate development companies will actually build their own parks adjacent to their skyscrapers (both office and residential), and then give the land to the city in order to increase the value of their commercial properties.
  8. editor
    Pretty much every city I've lived in has had a mayor who pledged to make it a "bio-tech hub." I don't follow this space, so which ones have actually succeeded so far? As for profit-driven vs non-profit, I don't think that's much of a factor anymore. The non-profits have learned how to monetize their inventions and discoveries. A lot of universities make millions from licensing and other deals. Heck, Google started out as a Stanford University research project.
  9. editor
    Anecdotally, I have switched from shopping at the hardware store on Westheimer to the hardware store on 11th Street ever since the bike lanes went in. I prefer the calmer, safer 11th Street to the chaos of Westheimer. As a bonus, it's nice to not have to worry about making a left turn out of the parking lot onto a four-lane speedway anymore.
  10. editor
    I took the democratic way out, and voted for someone else.
  11. editor
    The Star has a pool like that — down a deep concrete well. It's not appealing to me. Some people must not mind it because it gets a lot of use. But the noise echos up and reverberates off the concrete and glass amplifying even normal use into an awful racket. Then again, I once lived in an apartment building that had a pool in a dark basement, and it only had a six-foot ceiling so unless you were in the water, you had to stoop. Thinking about it now, it was creepy as hell. But I didn't seem to care at the time.
  12. editor
    I noticed that Dignity Church had its electronic marquee all lit up with "Thank you Mayor Whitmire!" for a while.
  13. editor
    I e-mailed the former District I councilman four times, and received precisely zero responses. Hopefully the new one is more responsive.
  14. editor
    More changes: The new system has a better spam detection, so new users no longer have to be manually approved. If you've signed up, but never been approved, sign up again, and it should be an automatic process now. I added a block to the posts pages showing Similar Content. It's based on tags, so if a post has no tags, it won't show up. Not shown if you're on a phone. I added a block to the posts pages showing Trending Content. Not shown if you're on a phone. If you're not signed in, there's a sidebar block for logging in or registering. I updated the Location profile box to read “Location/ZIP Code” so that people understand they don't have to give their exact location. And if you don't want people to know where you are, you can still leave this blank or just lie about it. For those of you who use Apple devices, I can set up HAIF to allow you to log in with your face or fingerprint. It takes a bit of work to do, but I'm considering it because it allows someone to register with Apple's Private Relay service that keeps their e-mail address private. Change is coming to the user ranks. Instead of only getting points for posting, people will be rewarded for posting quality content. More information to come.
  15. editor
    For posterity, here is the metal plate between the two buildings: Beneath those buildings is something of a maze, so I'm not always sure which one I'm looking up at. I'm sure some person smarter than me and tell which photos are the belly of the new building and which one is the old building:
  16. editor
    Actually, I just came here to apologize for my reply. It was unnecessarily bitchy. Addressing your reply to my reply, the streaming apps are included in the ratings. There's a popular notion that if you're listening to something on a phone or a computer that it doesn't count, but listening that way you're actually more actively, precisely, and thoroughly tracked for ratings and other purposes. From the ratings link above, you can see the most popular streams in Houston are: 25. KHCB-FM/Houston 28. KHCB/League City 29. KILT/Houston 30. KKHH/Houston 35. KHMX/Houston I was also surprised to see an HD subchannel on the list: KLOL-FM-HD2 is tied for 35. What is it about KTRU-LP that you like? Is there a particular show, or do you just like turning it on for a bit of random variety? I do that with KPFT. I don't always like what I hear, but I almost always hear something that is new to me. Most of my radio listening is out-of-market these days. When I do listen to Houston stations, it's most often KUHF-HD2 (a rebroadcast of classical KSJN-HD2/Minneapolis), or KUHF-HD3 (a rebroadcast of alternative WXPN-HD2/Philadelphia). If I'm in the car, it's either KKHH (AC The Spot), or KEYH. KEYH is a weird thing. It plays 70's and 80's hits, but because it lost the land under its transmitter, it's only running 100 watts — down from 10,000. So, hard to hear in most of Houston.
  17. editor
    Ossim. What does that have to do with this topic?
  18. editor
    Why wouldn't it? Churches are pretty well known for doing things for the public good. And I disagree that it needs a parking lot. There's a perfectly serviceable mostly vacant parking garage across the street. Leasing parking spaces during off hours and weekends is incredibly cheap. Especially in Houston, as evidenced by the surface lots nearby charging $2 to park.
  19. editor
    Nice to see billionaires doing good things with their money. So many modern billionaires talk about how they're going to give it all away before they die, and then all they do is set up giant charities emblazoned with their names and let the funds trickle out a bit at a time. (*cough*Bill Gates*cough*) The world already has plenty of charities. If you're going to give your money away, just do it. Give it to one of the established charities that has the experience and infrastructure and scale to make use of it. Don't make it a big PR dog and pony show. That's not charity. That's vanity.
  20. editor
    The only thing I can hope for is that when the Pierce Elevated comes down, the parking lot can be converted to a park, as well. You're absolutely right about the comparison with Jackson Square. That would be great.
  21. editor
    https://radioinsight.com/ratings/houston-galveston/ For those of you who don't follow radio, Houston is market #6. KODA/Houston (Sunny 99.1) is #1, which is not unusual. KSBJ/Humble is #2, which doesn't surprise me too much since it puts so much into traditional advertising. McDonald's and Coke didn't become huge by not advertising. I haven't followed Houston radio in 20 years, so KRBE/Houston being 15th was a big surprise to me. It used to be the dominant station in town. I wonder what caused the wheels to come off.
  22. editor
    Wow. That's a lot more parking lot and a lot less "public gathering and tribute space" than I expected. I've seen convenience stores bigger than that. Though I guess a surface parking lot is an appropriate "tribute" to Houston. Looking back at the PDF, I guess I should have noticed that it's just a patch of grass with some pavers and a ramada in the middle next to a cinder block wall.
  23. editor
    The noise depends a lot on what kind of windows and insulation your building has. I know people who live downtown who are tremendously bothered by the noise. Others in other buildings not far away say they don't notice it that much. Most of the noise is on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights when the various caravans of noisy people roll through downtown. It runs from about 7pm to 3am. There seem to be several types of caravans: 1. Middle-aged people on motorcycles. 2. Younger and older people on pimped out bicycles. 3. People driving souped-up cars from the 1970's, and pick-up trucks from the 1990's. 4. Urban hillbillies on motorbikes and quads. 5. Douchebags with those new muscle cars that sound like an explosion when they're started at 6am. To me, all of them are just small people shaking their tiny fists in the air desperate to let the world know they exist. Especially the muscle car group who don't realize that's not the engine making all that noise — It's a speaker. It's quietest downtown during major sporting and other events because of the stepped-up police presence.
  24. editor
    Thanks!
  25. editor
    Source?
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