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H-Town Man

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Everything posted by H-Town Man

  1. H-Town Man
    Houston isn't built on sand, it's built on clay (with some sand), which fluctuates over time and is a more serious problem for roads and building foundations. There's a reason landscapers put sand under paving stones when they want them to stay put. I think the places out west that have sand also have bedrock, which is even better. All the rainfall doesn't help either. Makes the soil expand and contract.
  2. H-Town Man
    The Cosmopolitan is like the short guy who shows up at the park to play basketball with the other guys and just won't take the hint.
  3. H-Town Man
    I agree about the Vatican (and I am Catholic), and Rome in general. The 90th baroque church with plaza and fountain in front, and statue group inside the fountain, makes you want to puke. I guess I'm trying to keep A&M from becoming its own Vatican. I do think D.C. is tasteful though, especially as there's just the one grand mall, and it's not terribly grand, in fact sort of modest and spare. I've always loved taking visitors to A&M and seeing how they react to all the symbolism and lore. It really makes an impression on people.
  4. H-Town Man
    That is an impressive list of allees you've been to. So... can an allee be overused? Like if there are half a dozen of them at the same college campus, including two crammed into a small park mostly used for tailgating? Do you really think that I'm attacking the Aggie ring and what it stands for? As for the comparison to Nuremberg, no, not pseudo-fascistic, just grandiose and overdone - which should have been pretty clear from my post. To me, the Aggie ring works just fine as simply a ring. It's quite powerful and doesn't need its own monument. Let the ring itself be the monument. You seem to interpret my criticism as antagonism for the school and its traditions. It's really the opposite. Things are cheapened by being overdone.
  5. H-Town Man
    The athletic program has an arms race for facilities and that's what this is helping. I don't know of any arms race for parks that is affecting academic rankings. The UT campus has plenty of dingy areas, in fact the whole campus has an overall dingy feel, not too different from the Berkeleys of the world, where a little dinginess almost seems like a status symbol, a "we're too great to care" attitude. This is in a part of campus that is not really visible to prospective students other than athletes. As far as Nuremberg, yeah, the grand allees of trees culminating in a giant Aggie ring or grand stadium entrance feels very Nuremberg. Not that I am against allees... the allee of trees approaching the Administration building or between the clock tower and the Academic building are properly majestic and meaningful. The allee along Military Walk with Sbisa framed at one end and Rudder staring down the other end is starting to get a little forced but the effect still works to a degree. But an allee culminating in a giant Aggie ring is just pure bathos. The device has been overused. And who is the statue in the rendering that will be staring down the other allee? Who have they not made a statue of yet? D.X. Bible? John David Crow? Gene Stallings? Sherrill? Slocum? I shudder to think - but wouldn't really be surprised - that it is part of Fisher's extension package?
  6. H-Town Man
    I guess I'm the only one who liked the place as it was. If you needed a place to go on Main Campus that was informal and low key, to have a private conversation with someone or read a book outside without a thousand people looking at you, Spence was it. I also liked the pull-up bars. I guess there is Research Park but you have to drive there and it doesn't have the same feel. I also don't think this will do anything to make us a Top 10 university. The purpose is to increase the palatial feeling around Kyle Field and it will do that. Feels like Thomas Kinkade and Albert Speer collaborated on the design.
  7. H-Town Man
    They were smart to hire Lake Flato as the architect for the events facility. Overall the park seems grandiose, with pointless allees, monuments in search of meaning, and a vaguely Nuremberg parade grounds quality. In other words, just right for the new Kyle Field.
  8. H-Town Man
    Have there been many other examples of new projects having underground detention in Harris County?
  9. H-Town Man
    Just incredible. I'll admit I was skeptical of this thing at first, but the crow tastes good.
  10. H-Town Man
    Would love to know the financing situation/timeline for the hotel. Probably won't know anything until it happens.
  11. H-Town Man
    Paywall... so it says they're starting half of the Industry Building this fall? Does it say anything about the hotel? Can you paste text?
  12. H-Town Man
    Wow.
  13. H-Town Man
    Ah yes. I saw that about the TDLR registration, but it was TLDR.
  14. H-Town Man
    So the buildings for Parcels C and D are underway, correct? Any others?
  15. H-Town Man
    Thanks for that map, I just wasted an hour.
  16. H-Town Man
    It could be that a lot of their clientele are opposed to the expansion so they thought the optics of a protest would look good.
  17. H-Town Man
    Tell me about the thousands of 100-year-old oil wells in Midtown? I didn't know there was an oilfield there.
  18. H-Town Man
    That day would have been a lot worse if it were inside a tunnel, though.
  19. H-Town Man
    Yes... and I've been pointing out why I think our situation is different than St. Louis and Detroit, and why what happened to them probably won't happen to us.
  20. H-Town Man
    Is the mayor the only local leader? Most white people in the Houston metro live outside the city limits; their local leaders are the county commissioners and congressional representatives. I think that seeing county leadership change from Republican to Democrat and getting into things like opposing major transportation projects because they displace minority homes is something that gives white suburbanites the feeling, "This is not my county anymore." There are still some Republican congressional representatives like Crenshaw, but some notable districts like the 7th Congressional have switched over. These positions played a huge role over the years in championing the "suburban paradigm" of being pro-highway, anti-rail, anti- "big government," etc. (Think of John Culberson's role in the Katy Freeway expansion and opposition to rail.) I get the feeling some of you think I'm saying things that I'm not saying, viz. that any of this is good or bad. The only possible bad I see in this for Houston is if there is a loss in investment to the area, as has happened historically in other "white flight" places. White people tend to control a disproportionate share of investment dollars. But I don't see this happening at this point for some of the reasons mentioned.
  21. H-Town Man
    Is it really not clear? White people are majority Republican. When they see the politics of elected leaders change, they are more likely to think it's "not their city/county anymore" and leave. This is how it has played out in other places. I do think that a relevant factor that the statistics don't show is the mixed-race component of the population, especially people who are maybe half-white, half-Hispanic. This suggests that, even as the white population dwindles to 30% and below, they are not as likely to shift from slow-speed white flight to fast white-flight (as happened in St. Louis, etc.) because they do not feel as outnumbered. Although they only constitute 33% currently, it probably feels more like 40-50% because of the number of people whose appearance and culture are quite similar.
  22. H-Town Man
    That looks like stagnation to me. Metro area post-2010 experiences its biggest employment boom since the early 80's and white population barely increases. I would predict that this decade, without another boom, it will decrease (maybe substantially), especially now that most local political leadership has switched to Democrat. I'm curious whether the definition of the metro area changed at all between 1990 and 2010. Were Waller and Austin counties part of it in 1990?
  23. H-Town Man
    Not enough money in healthcare...
  24. H-Town Man
    You posted a link that had percentages, which showed the Anglo percentage plummeting. Then you added your own calculations, but admitted you thought some of them were wrong due to changes in how things were measured, how surveys were done, etc. You asked me for a link for what Klineberg said and I gave it to you, then you opined that he was misquoted or taken out of context (!). Now you have fallen back on the old Houston 19514 trademarks: The LOL, the winking smiley face, and telling other people to lighten up, as if all your frantic internet searching and homemade statistics were done so lightheartedly...
  25. H-Town Man
    Nice edit to your post! Of course, I only threw that in a parenthesis as anecdotal coloring. This is all-out war for you, isn't it?
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