ziggy29

The sticker itself costs $15, but you are correct that the rental fee will stop.

One interesting thing about talking about Robertson is that it's so much like what the Quakes had in San Jose. The Quakes had a 30,000-seat stadium built in the '40s, the home of a local college football team (San Jose State), one that has a good seating plan for soccer but is somewhat antiquated. If the stadium (which I rather liked as a life-long San Jose area resident until a couple years ago) was part of the problem for attendance, I don't see how Robertson would be much different.

Having said that, with all due respect to soccer fans, this is MLS. It's not a HUGE source of revenue like MLB, the NFL or the NBA. It's not worth breaking the bank for, as the ROI would be rather puny.

The title and description pretty much says it all. How much longer will we have to "detour" all the way out to Gessner to get on the highway?

Actually, no, it's not. Do the numbers. In addition to the super-high property taxes, we have some of the lowest apprecation rates in the country, and the highest homeowners insurance rates in the country.

High property taxes + low appreciation + high insurance rates = disaster.

And let's not forget electricity costs. Despite being the so-called "energy capital," Houston has some of the highest electric rates in the country, now at around 16 cents per kilowatt-hour. (A lot of good "energy choice" has done when all of the providers raise their rates in near lock-step.)

So even if you can buy a nice house in Houston with mortgage payments of (say) $800 on a $150,000 mortgage, you'll still pay nearly $500 a month in property taxes, about $100-150 a month for insurance and about $300-$400 a month to keep cool in the summer. These are all big reasons why Houston housing prices are among the lowest. If you combine all the monthly costs of owning a home here, it's not that much cheaper than elsewhere. The mortgage tends to be less than the combined cost of taxes, insurance and keeping cool for many homeowners.

I can see variable pricing coming into affect eventually, but I'll think they'll wait until the Katy Freeway completed to test the system out.

Also, some people are using the Westpark to avoid the Katy while it's under construction since both routes get you to uptown and downtown.

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That's a good point. It's possible that one the Katy Freeway project is completed, some of the traffic now using the Westpark will no longer need it. The unknown here is how much the Katy project will help traffic flow, and how much it will do little more than encourage more exurban development.