woolie

The fact is that we live in the most walkable, easily accessible neighborhood in America's fourth largest city. We have the best access to mass transit and freeways. You cannot have a walkable neighborhood in the middle of everything and not have people walking around.

Montrose is much denser and more walkable, and altogether more pleasant.. But also much more $$$. Everyone on this side of midtown is here because it's a great neartown location, but moreso because it's comparatively cheap. So let's at least take a step back and realize that the reason it's cheap is because of the concentration of homeless/transients and their services in the area. I wonder why the realtors don't put this on their flyers?

Anyway, sure, we'd like to get rid of the homeless once we live here, but if it was already completely gentrified, the majority of us wouldn't have been able to move here in the first place.

Midtown has rail. Washington won't for at least a decade.

This has been another installment of easy answers to contentious questions.

I could've sworn that the plan was to make them back-to-back. Maybe I only thought that because it was logical.

I remember the original renderings when the Mercer was announced -- it did have them back to back instead of side to side. This side to side rendering is new to me.

Whoever suggested dismantling HP, then spreading outwards in a shockwave of radical deconstruction had a great idea. This city isn't salvageable, probably best to tear it down and start over. Once everything to the beltway is gone and Allen's landing is once again a mosquito infested swamp, once all evidence of human habitation in this place has long been erased from history, then this failed 170-year experiment in speculative real-estate can be forgotten, and at last the great rebirth of Houston can begin.

Key Maps books don't have full support for KML. I doubt they will any time soon.

I spent enough time in the sticks during the first 18 years of my life. Not in a hurry to get back. I rarely leave the loop.

38 bucks for a Key map, or 10 bucks EVERY month for GPS service on my phone? Yeah, Key maps are still worth it.

I've had Gps and google maps on my blackberry and now iPhone (on which I type this) for several years at no cost above base data rate.

Couldn't live without it.

Niche, peak oil isn't about running out of oil in an absolute sense, it's about the cost increasing enough (through supply/demand but also carbon taxes) to have significant impact on how people use it. Enough to make transit-based commutes more attractive, even if one could technically still afford $8/gas to fill their SUV and drive 80 miles a day.

I take the train to the TMC from Midtown. It's faster and cheaper than driving and parking.

But yes. No one will take transit unless it's quantitatively better than private auto (as it is in my case.) And Mosaic is an amateur job on a shit site. I know better than anyone on this forum because I lived on a property adjacent to the site for 4 years.

Niche is thankfully a reality-based participant in these discussions, but I think that he sees urban vs. suburban as merely an aesthetic choice, instead of something that will ultimately be driven by more concrete factors as the suburbs (and the lifestyle choices they represent/require) become less sustainable and more expensive. American cities are going to be dragged into a more urban future, with or without consent. I think it's wise to start planning for this new reality now, while it's relatively easy to do so.

I think it's boring and too short. But at least it's taking up blocks.

Nice to have this kind of business, but often complicates parking at Cali's... grumble, grumble...

There is a fortune cookie factory?

I'm a little late as always. I think the proportion of renters vs. owners has increased recently (two houses on my block that were owner-occupied are now leased out.) But it's still the typical midtown mix of young professionals.

My wife and I have lived in the Baldwin Park area for about a year now. Actually, this is the quietest, nicest area of Houston I've lived in so far, in 7 years inside the loop. The homeless are of course irritating, but that's life in the city. Actually I find the homeless/panhandlers in the Montrose area *much* more aggressive, particularly at Kroger's. The flop houses and homeless services will probably relocate in the long term anyway due to cost increases.

The minerals exhibit is always great. Here's some I took earlier this year.

Nice rendering. Looking forward to watching my gentrif... er.. develop to its best and highest use.

That's, right. Hope it away, Obamaphile.

Your sig is intolerable, btw.

I'm a blackberry addict as well. There's nothing special; most of the websites (wunderground, chron, khou, noaa, etc.) are usable on it. HAIF has a low-bandwidth text-only mode that is usable.

But the cell network might crash except for low-bandwidth applications like SMS. So don't count on it working.

I was thinking, they need to make a big budget disaster movie about a massive hurricane in the gulf and title it "Cone of Uncertainty". Why hasn't it been done before?

Everyone hunker down and stay safe! I hate hurricane chaos.

disaster movies always portray events that can't be anticipated or forecast in advance.

htownwx, are you millwx on dailykos?

I don't drink alcohol. Call me Dr. Spock.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohxdvio9n2Q

On a more serious side, prayer has a real opportunity cost that people should consider before counting on their thoughts to affect the path of a hurricane.

Midtown/Baldwin Park area.

I haven't decided if I'm leaving for Dallas or not yet. My house is open floor plan with no windowless spaces.

For those who want to estimate how far this puts Ike from your house, here's a nifty little GPS calculator.

The most important desktop program ever made, Google Earth, has a feature to measure point-point and polygon path distances.

2. For future reference, since it's clearly too late now, does anyone have any idea how I would go about boarding up an Urban Loft? 8-foot window. Metal frame. Metal house. I have puzzled over this since Rita and never come up with a solution, besides window film. Maybe I should have gotten window film.

I, too, am in total oh ____ ____ ____ freak out mode.

If you're referring to the Urban Lofts town homes, they are most certainly not metal structures. Only the siding and roof covering is metal. I know because I'm sitting in one right now. In fact, I'm about to climb up into the attic to check for roof braces.

Even if I was able to get the plywood to board up my windows, I can't think of any reasonable way to put a board a 6x6 window on the third floor.

I'm a homeowner in this part of town nowadays.. hopefully I'll stay here long enough to realize any gains from these big apartment buildings being laid down on the superblocks.