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woolie

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Everything posted by woolie

  1. woolie
    Are you trying to tell me real estate investing has no risk? Wow, talk about entitlement... It just blows my mind that people willing to go to the mat in every other instance to protect the concept of "Property Rights" have an abrupt change of heart when someone legally exercising their own property rights impacts their neighborhood. You can't make this stuff up. I don't usually lose my cool, but this whole situation involves levels of hypocrisy I couldn't have imagined. They want a truly hands-off city government, except where they need the nanny state to protect/artificially inflate their investments. They don't want zoning, except for their neighborhoods. Crazy. "Quality of life" issues, sure, ok. NO ONE could have possibly imagined -- the thought was too far fetched to ever pass -- that a nice neighborhood in the middle of the city, with huge developments all around... would ever attract the attention of high rise developers. It was beyond their ken. I used to think people rich enough to buy into these neighborhoods were business savvy enough to understand risk. Anyway, I just got back from lunch. We drove down Sunset, and there were dozens of signs posted in the median opposing the Ashby high rise, complete with the big scary cartoon. Like the billboards -- if these people are concerned with the "visual integrity" of a neighborhood, they have a strange way of showing it.
  2. woolie
    24h Traffic count on Bissonet here was 17k+ in 2001. 250 units are going to cause the Apocalypse? Wah wah wah... cry me a river. Protection of privilege...
  3. woolie
    This will fill in some holes the skyline has from certain angles. It's nice. I'd still love to see more 10-story mixed use structures, though.
  4. woolie
    I'm a big leftie on almost everything else, but zoning just makes my skin crawl like nothing else. Good quality housing at affordable prices is a human rights issue... and as far as I can tell, the main purpose of zoning is to artificially constrain the market to increase property values of those with enough political connections... and not foster the highest and best use of a property.
  5. woolie
    Every surface lot in the CBD is an insult. Someone should add a page on the wiki with a count of surface lots, and a countdown to zero.
  6. woolie
    At one point in the past, people bragged about Houston having condo towers in the middle of (rich, white) single-family neighborhoods. This isn't terribly different from the towers in River Oaks. I think people are underestimating the traffic that Bissonet carries already... it's probably not going to be a major issue. There is already significant commercial development in the area, it's not quite as pastoral as people are claiming. Zoning is a terrible beast that must be slain every time it emerges from its lair...
  7. woolie
    I wish the developers all the luck. I think protecting property values is BS, at least when the structure is a high-quality, high-dollar building like this. But here's a hint for all the people who would like to live in 1950 forever: cities change, neighborhoods change, you don't have a deed on the character of a neighborhood.
  8. woolie
    The structures of all 9 floors are going to be build immediately, just not finished on the inside. This is what the 2016 date refers to.
  9. woolie
    I support all tall buildings that have potential to bring out NIMBYs. I just love watching hypocrites in action.
  10. woolie
    Well, at least it isn't the TyTN.
  11. woolie
    ayelite, another 20 story in my neighborhoods.
  12. woolie
    This was never a development anyway. It's always been purely a land-hold. Their plan was to resell it down the road to a "bricks and mortar" developer. The renderings are 100% marketing fluff.
  13. woolie
    I personally think 'green' would be several blocks of 5-10 stories, mixed use, spreading out the density more to help create the 'critical mass' of residents and area that serves as the anchor of a new urban district.
  14. woolie
    Yeah, sounds about the same as COVAD/Speakeasy. Although, I'm curious, as ICMP is a layer below port abstractions and doesn't use them Personally, my dream is about a hundred blocks of 6 story mixed use downtown/midtown. I'd take it over a dozen 600 footers. One can dream, no?
  15. woolie
    COVAD?
  16. woolie
    PV is extremely expensive and has a low capacity factor (it only produces electricity part of the time, and peak electricity an even smaller amount.) You'd be looking at a min. of 5x grid costs, and you'd still need to purchase from the grid for the majority of electricity use A wind turbine could provide enough electricity for a building, but you still have to deal with low capacity factor (about 30%), so most of the electricity would still be from the grid. If you wanted to just offset the electricity use of the building in renewable generation without providing actual direct power to the building, it'd be simpler just to place it outside the city where the wind is strong and have it just contribute to the grid. I'm not sure there's any potential geothermal energy in the area, not enough to generate electricity anyway. You could use passive geothermal as a heat sink to help reduce HVAC costs. In the same way you could use solar water heating to reduce gas costs. Not to sound like I'm not for green building; I am, but I think expectations need to be realistic. I want contained systems. I want conservation. I want to phase out natgas and coal power and replace it with wind and nuclear. I think the best opportunities for green building in Houston are mostly in regard to site specific design and insulation techniques that reduce the need for A/C, which is one of the main components of power use that could be reduced in a reasonably simple way. What someone referred to above is a gray water system. A second wastewater system is built to separate out reusable water (bathtubs, sinks, washing machine, etc.) from toilet water. The water is minimally treated or allowed to settle. Then it's used for yard purposes or whatever. But personally I think even having grounds that need watering in the first place is completely contradictory to any environmentally based design. It's like people who live in 3000sf houses in Kingwood on quarter acre lots who think they're environmentally responsible because they drive a hybrid SUV to their job. Completely miss the point. Anyway... I'll stop my thread derailment.
  17. woolie
    Natural gas is expensive electricity. Combined-cycle would be too large/complex for a single building, so it'd probably be just regular turbine, at half the efficiency (twice the fuel costs.) Your residents would strangle you after the first electricity bill. It would probably be several times the cost of grid electricity. If on the other hand, you mean switching over from grid to on-demand generation via diesel generator, this is a standard system hospitals, data centers, etc. use. In this case, your residents would strangle you when they realized the premium it added to their condos w.r.t. to the small benefit. Even then, it wouldn't be fast enough to switch over before all the computers in the building shut down. You'd have to add a very expensive Uninterruptible Power Supply system for that. And if you want to offer datacenter grade electricity, start adding in various line conditioners, triple redundant generators, etc..... I think there's a reason this doesn't exist in residential buildings It'd be cheaper just to give a small UPS system to each tenant for their computers. My building has backup generators, but only because extended loss of electricity would be catastrophic. People could lose their entire life's work.
  18. woolie
    ho ho ho.
  19. woolie
    $3000 for the camera and $300/mo for webhosting... ouch
  20. woolie
    I love those, and admire them all the time (like 3 blocks from my house.) I'd buy one if it were anywhere near something we could afford.
  21. woolie
    I can name a thousand buildings in Houston I only wish had the quality of MCM "blandness."
  22. woolie
    Don't be disingenuous.
  23. woolie
  24. woolie
    I've always loved this building. I have a few pics, somewhere...
  25. woolie
    It's pretty pedestrian, actually. Aggie is just a term for a TAMU graduate. If you want to give it a more colorful flavor in your mind, try to imagine it as the Texas Illuminati. Basically, Aggies give preferential treatment to other Aggies in hiring, promotions, awarding contracts, etc. Think "good ole' boys network." It's also somewhat of a military society, very rigid and focused on power structures. In some ways you can imagine an "Aggie Ideology," somewhat like neoconservatism. I find the whole thing pretty boring, and the whole Aggie creed just makes me tired and Applied to architecture, the myth is something like this. TAMU is an engineering school, that produces architects who are competent engineers but completely void of any vision or artistic ability. The UH architecture school is much more theoretical and interested in the study of architecture itself, with less an emphasis on building and engineering. UH architects have a reputation for being good dreamers but bad at execution. or so I've heard... Also, don't have to go far to find a typical Aggieism, even in this thread. Look at the TAMU demographics and it'll be obvious why.
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