TheNiche

It's a plain box with token ornamentation on the side. Had they scaled up the ornament and made it the whole building, that'd have been fitting for downtown.

We've already been over this. See post #667.

Well, manufacturing & aeronautical jobs. This plant in Sealy only dealt with ground-based vehicles. All the same, this sucks.

Nope, the rail system will be pretty distant from this location. And I can say from a first-hand inspection that this building was demolished because it was just so far gone. It should've been condemned years ago as a hazard to public safety.

No. That makes you a fag. Nigg*rs, wiggers, white trash, douchebags, and fans of the "hardcore" music scene are all a subset of general faggotry, however each subculture is mutually exclusive of the others.

Toyota Center is owned by the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, which is a political subdivision of the State, the County, and the City. It wouldn't make much sense that they'd sue the City or that they'd sue the City and not the County.

Yeah you do. For your convenience, I've translated your PC-ridden rant into something intelligible. See below. A ghetto is a neighborhood, not a person. You're obviously describing nigg*rs. Just come out and say what you're already thinking. Add to your calculus that rents went up to the point that many lower-volume "ordinary person" bars couldn't make it, and I have to agree with you. The presence of nigg*rs scares off honkies, especially pussified white males with penis envy and/or white guilt. It's white flight, plain and simple.

You go ahead without me. Have fun.

If soccer promotes violence the world over and you go to soccer games the world over, then is that an admission on your part that you promote violence? I'm not inclined to take someone seriously that promotes violence.

I agree with you that municipalities and counties shouldn't be compelled to outbid one another for the privilege of having a stadium built there...but that's just the way it is. If we won't pay, some other city most assuredly will. Professional sports leagues have it all figured out that their presence is a valuable commodity. And it is. Let's be honest, the Dynamo are a relative bargain for the subsidy that they're demanding. We should pay it. We should also be lobbying our representatives in Congress to restrict corporate welfare paid out by states and municipalities (whether to lure a new distribution center or a new sports team)...and to crack down on sports leagues when it becomes apparent that a monopolistic franchiser/franchisee business model is really being run much more like a cartel. Enlighten me.

I'd say that that depends mostly on whether asking rents come back down to pre-2004 levels as the economy starts to recover.

The Cullen location was supposed to be torn down and the site redeveloped. Obviously that's not going to happen any time soon.

Office tenants don't care about vacant land unless they're going to use it for parking.

Bear in mind, when I'm referring to site-specific factors, I'm not side stepping any issues. I'm talking about issues that affect what a developer can reasonably bring to market on an individual parcel of land that is being offered for sale and that is being considered as a prospective acquisition by a developer. I'm not talking about a district, a neighborhood, a submarket, a city, or anything broader in scope than just that one...particular...site. If a variance needs to be gotten, Dallas is an easy town to get one in. The developer then consults with an architect, who provides structural, density and cost assumptions. Those figures get plugged into the underwriting and market analysis as assumptions. And only once the characteristics of the proposed development are known can an appropriate market area be drawn. Use Firefox.

If terms such as "site-specific" or "variance" are beyond you, I'll be happy to provide definitions.

Developers will take site-specific "special circumstances" into account as part of their underwriting. Tenants do not. Market analysis is tenant-focused and to that end, submarket definitions are as well.

Yep, and I explained why from the vantage point of someone who's been there and done that. I win. Go away.

Wonderful, then. He delivered the Soviet Union it's version of Vietnam and had the good faith and foresight to try to line up aid for Afghanistan. And in between being a kick-ass statesman, he knew how not to be a stick in the mud. This is a guy whose passing deserves some reverence.

Red, it's called a variance request. And we ARE after all talking about DALLAS. Everything is for sale there. Oops, I've said too much.

No doubt there are dismal failures where interventionism is concerned. I think that our support of Israel was probably the most profound failure of the 20th century on account of that it isolated us from the rest of the Middle East. But...sometimes interventionism works. The Monroe Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the post-war occupation of Japan, and the Korean War come to mind as honest-to-goodness long-term success stories. There are also instances where early intervention might've been beneficial; we probably should've backed Iraqi revolutionaries after the first Gulf War, for instance. I'm not sure that Charlie Wilson can be pegged for the lack of good faith exhibited by Congress towards post-war Afghanistan. For that matter, I'm not clear that Congress as a whole could be held at fault for the specific outcome. Sure, they set the stage. But they (and the military) were operating from a different paradigm, one in which threats to the U.S. were largely from organized political and military entities, particularly from the Soviet Union and other communist countries. It's not that terrorism didn't occur from time to time, just that it was a relative nuisance.

You wouldn't want to try to lump an office submarket where buildings tend to be small, low- or mid-rise, and often have surface parking with an office submarket where most buildings are highrises with structured parking. Different kinds of structures appeal to different kinds of tenants. Think about how this works out in Midtown Houston as opposed to Downtown Houston. There are hotels and residential uses in both Downtown and Uptown Dallas, however there is definitely more residential in Uptown. Not sure how that would impact the office market, though. The discussion to this point has largely focused on office buildings, and the definition of submarkets varies by land use.

Star of Hope housing is immediately adjacent to Minute Maid Park. Doesn't seem like a nightmare situation to me. Now, Congress Street at Chartres Street, that's another matter altogether...and there isn't even housing there. Or a stadium. Seems to me that the Dynamo would use their bully pulpit to make sure that the area around their stadium is safe and clean. You should embrace that. What investors? Where are they moving in? What kinds of restaurants and businesses are they bringing? The reports might signal an influx of club owners for all you know. ...or the reports might be unfounded rumors.

There are plenty of good reasons for breaking out smaller submarkets if you're a purveyor of market data. A client of Grubb & Ellis, for instance, may want to cite the Uptown stats only if they're trying to sell a building in Uptown, or cite Downtown plus Uptown stats if they're trying to sell a building Downtown. These aren't the only submarkets where tricks like that work, either. I've seen them applied to Greenway/Uptown locally. Another thing to consider about such firms is that submarket boundaries are legacy issues and can be a real hassle to change; you typically only see that happen if there is a major upgrade in technology. Of course, these firms are merely secondary sources to developers, lenders, investors, management companies, brokers, appraisers, consultants, etc., who generate their own analyses to suit their specific needs. And generally speaking, you can be assured of bias in favor of their clients' interests, whoever that happens to be. For instance, an underwriter for a bank will look at the data more cautiously than would the underwriter for a mortgage broker. They have differing objectives. Speaking as someone who has written dozens such analyses for every kind of client, I'd say that if you're using the phrase "every commercial real estate analysis I've ever seen" to describe just about any facet of an analysis, then I'm guessing that you're something of a specialist and don't see much variety. That's pretty weak. Do you realize that a person intending to drive from Downtown Houston to Uptown Houston via US 59 would have to travel 6.7 miles? They'd witness a distinct change in the character of office buildings the moment that they pass under the Pierce Elevated, and again the moment that they take the left turn onto Westheimer and emerge from under 610. They'd also pass through other distinct office submarkets en route and would probably notice that the transportation infrastructure and the number and types of amenities available in each of the two submarkets is vastly different. Compare that experience to a driver en route from Downtown Dallas to Uptown Dallas, which is about 220 feet as the driver (or pedestrian) crosses over the Woodall Rogers Freeway. Of course, rounded off to the nearest tenth of a mile, as was cited above, the distance amounts to 0.0 miles. The character of the office buildings does not dramatically change except insofar as that they tend to be newer.

That's been going on for a long time, not only in New York but throughout the Northeast, the Rust Belt, and in California. It's a big part of how sunbelt cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, and Las Vegas were able to grow so quickly. One of the fascinating processes in urban economics that has changed significantly, allowing this to happen, is that it used to be that large headquarters offices required a substantial pool of what used to be thought of as highly-specialized labor to operate effectively. And labor was less mobile, professional and business services were highly concentrated, travel was expensive and time-consuming, and communications were delayed and sometimes unreliable. All this fostered an economy based on agglomeration. The larger a city's population became, the more unique amenities could be supported, creating more reasons for more companies and more people to live there. It justified continual disproportionate population growth and increasing per capita wealth in only a handful of global cities. Today, the world's two largest corporations are based in Irving, TX and Bentonville, AR. And up until recently, the world's largest bank was headquartered in Charlotte, NC. Clearly some urban amenities still matter, like hub airports. But (aside from specialty engineering-intensive industries like energy and high tech) it isn't enough just to have the right kind of people in your town anymore. People will relocate with the company, particularly if the pay buys them a better lifestyle than would otherwise be the case in a huge city like NYC; and if not, the company can easily lure enough of the tens of thousands of new MBAs that get cranked out of podunk college towns each year. Honestly, I think that the only reasons that NYC experienced any population growth at all in the last decade were that it's a huge destination for immigrants (which is reflected in Census migration stats) and that it happened to take part in the financial boom/bust cycle. I don't think that this decade will be nearly so kind to NYC.

The people who voted against LRT on the basis of cost went into it with a mentality that it was qualitatively "too much" money. "Too much" plus any other number still equals "too much". The rest of the voters either don't understand concepts of money or didn't especially care, ultimately, that the Red Line came in over budget. So yeah, I just don't buy that.