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woolie

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Everything posted by woolie

  1. woolie
    Baby steps.
  2. woolie
    And you didn't take a picture? It'll be a few more months before I go back over there...
  3. woolie
    I drove by it today. From a distance it looks OK, but up close, eh.
  4. woolie
    None, at least not in the US. But you could relax the term "profitable" to mean "maximum ridership return on investment." We'll get 10 story blocks soon enough. 4 stories became 6, and 6 will become 8 or 10. Density drives taller buildings.
  5. woolie
    I was making a reply on my phone -- harder to proofread myself. Meant to say something like "industrial district" or "oil field." Not "utility district" which is a specific legal entity. And there are plenty of valid environmental concerns, enough that I'd look somewhere else before settling down in an active drilling operation. Especially in an exurban development; this whole thing just sounds fishy to me and is making my corruption sense tingle.
  6. woolie
    Gonna have to call bullshit on that one. I don't know how many people will want to live in a utility district in the middle of nowhere, with active drill operations out your bedroom window. They're building a couple hundred units, which will probably head straight to foreclosure. You shouldn't be so naive to believe what developers say. If that's the best TOD you can post for Dallas, I'm sure as hell not missing much here in Houston http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/04/in-addition-to-apartments-cypr.html
  7. woolie
    Vancouver, San Diego, SF, etc. also have massive amounts of natural beauty and amenities that probably make a smidgen of a difference in COL. Houston is for all intent and purposes a flat, featureless floodplain.
  8. woolie
    In another discussion, I was wondering about the demographics of Cinco Ranch. Allow wikipedia to summarize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinco_Ranch,_Texas#Demographics (CDP is census designated place)
  9. woolie
    This is a pretty easy question to answer. Houston already had lots of skyscrapers. It doesn't have lots of 4-6 story apartment blocks. Travel to other cities, and outside the US. Houston is building density, and the rail system is right on schedule.
  10. woolie
    I'm going to drop out of this conversation, because it's just going to become "your neighborhood is shit." Although I love these conversations, this thread isn't the right venue. I'll just make my point more explicit before I leave, and that is that the idea of a pure free market for real estate is a fiction. The value of a property is deeply entwined in the level of public investment made in an area. It's the real history of any city. The reason any of this dirt has value is infrastructure, and the communities around it built for decades on the back of yet more infrastructure. It's my opinion that high density uses should be clustered together to maximize infrastructure investment.
  11. woolie
    No, there's no shame involved. It's just a choice I'll never understand. I don't like sitting in traffic, and I don't care how many fake gables my house has. I get bored in totally homogenized places.
  12. woolie
    Yes, you've just explained how the government builds freeways. It levies a tax, gets additional funding from other agencies and other taxes, then elected officials get together and direct an agency to put together a plan, then after environmental studies and public comment periods, it's built or enlarged or whatever. Total 100% free market. I believe you.
  13. woolie
    Hahaha, I'll write a reply after I finish laughing. Yes, the free market that built this 64 lane freeway. The invisible hand of the market set all the rebar and poured all the concrete. I wonder what the net tax flow from the loop to Katy is.
  14. woolie
    Yes, but that's Dallas. Isn't their system much more commuter rail-oriented anyway?
  15. woolie
    20 more blocks of this would be great.
  16. woolie
    The whole thing should be federally funded. This is exactly the kind of counter-cyclical infrastructure stimulus people talk about. Construction costs are much lower during a recession and it puts people to work. I guess it's probably too late now.
  17. woolie
    Dallas has buildings?
  18. woolie
    It's a beautiful building. I intend to go see the inside this weekend.
  19. woolie
    The freeway is a single point of failure. Putting streets a mile apart was probably not a good idea.
  20. woolie
    Nice building, but these belong inside the loop. I guess someone forgot to close the gate and all the horses got out?
  21. woolie
    I'd love to move to a downtown condo, except for the outrageous $/sf cost and maintenance fees compared to a townhouse a mile away. I'd probably have to downsize by about 50%. Also, I'd have to sell my current house and unlikely that is going to happen in this shitty market. But yeah. At least, for others, it would make great residential rentals
  22. woolie
    Construction to begin later this month. http://www.bisnow.com/real-estate-hou/2012/04/11/cranes-rise-across-houston/
  23. woolie
    I'm not sure I've ever encountered any of these thugs. There are plenty of people muttering to themselves and guarding their plastic bags, but I've never felt threatened. Only assault has been the smell of urine.
  24. woolie

    113 Gray St.

    woolie replied to DrLan34's topic in Midtown

    This is a reasonable development. Would prefer it to be larger, but at least it preserves the street facade, and doesn't use the entire block.
  25. woolie
    I'm just imagining 30 years out. Habits and tastes change. Los Angeles in 1980 is pretty different than Los Angeles 2012. It's well established that you can't just keep expanding freeways; you get less for your money with each round. Houston isn't geographically constrained, but every mile further out adds minutes to the amenities, job centers, etc. And these things are the products of the concentration of human capital, the reason and essence of a city in the first place. Eventually you'll get far enough out and disconnected enough from Houston that you might as well save money and time and live in a much smaller city. So eventually car transportation hits a wall (or even just a very steep hill.) Effectively this will cause prices to go up as a rationing mechanism (real estate prices, time spent in traffic, congestion pricing, toll roads, etc.) This will accelerate a cycle (already well underway) of changing land use patterns, and you get to a point where it's self reinforcing (people naturally want to protect their investments!) Use the clone stamp on these new 6 story apartment blocks a couple hundred more times and you start to get some real density. It's not like it hasn't been done in other car centric cities before. The climate isn't as awful as people make it out to be; people will walk when the infrastructure exists, it's a pleasant experience, and socially accepted among their peers. NIMBYs are a just a transition state. The heat of a reaction. But not the final product. The incentives ($) causing the changes they complain about are powerful enough to win in the end (See: Ashby.)
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