TheNiche

Demographics and value systems change over time, should 70's and early 80's developers been held to a more stringent code? Probably, or is it more likely that the resultant sprawl would have still conceded to entropic development and ended up as a high crime neighborhood ever further out from the city center than currently?

Crime does equal part or whole of the idea of the urban form; but that is, if anything, a false connotation perpetually blared from televisions. It is a social problem, whereas to react with the skill-set of design is symptomatic of a communication breakdown on a societal level and only produces artifacts of fear. The prevalence of obliques, fractured symmetries, and a general lack of cohesion makes it a cakewalk for criminals to operate in this town. My misspent youth can attest to this.

Crime is best dealt with by the idea of surveillance, check your RCP.

The following multimedia presentation presents itself as a barely-related inoculation countering the heinous crime that is constituted by your unadulterated pretension.

Ah, that's better! Translation of the above: SPEAK NORMAL.

Wonder if they'll ever extend the University Line beyond Eastwood TC... get it to Lawndale and on out to 225.

Seems like a huge chunk of East End is actually pretty distant from a future rail station.

The East End is a big place, and the quarter-mile rule for walking distance barely does justice to even more cohesive neighborhoods such as Midtown.

Like you, though, I suspect that the Eastwood TC terminus is only temporary. I would suspect that the Denver Harbor TC is the next stop, however, while the Magnolia TC terminus will be extended towards Gulfgate.

The architecture and urban design doesn't cause the crime.

I don't think that you'll find any thoughtful person that would disagree with agree with that statement. Whether we're talking about something as innocuous as architecture or as potentially destructive as a firearm, these are just objects. Objects don't cause crime. They may enable or deter it, however, which is what makes such objects fair game for policy discussions.

I am of the impression 1/2 of the homemade signs in all of Fort Bend County are located on the corner of I-10 and the Grand Parkway. It has quickly become quite the eyesore. The classics include advertising poop removal on full sheets of plywood.

I believe we need stricter code enforcement and soon.

I can't get behind you on requiring that signs be professionally made or that they not advertise poop-related businesses, but you can talk to Harris County about the removal of bandit signs.

Perhaps these "urbanists" feel crime is beyond their purview or their realm of expertise. Perhaps they feel crime is a policing issue (or an educational issue, or a blah blah blah, etc) and that they'll stick to designing urban space for walkability and other puppy issues that fit within their realm of expertise.

More accurately, I think that urbanists would generally rather sweep the entire issue of crime under the rug. From a PR perspective, they know that they can't overcome the perceived notion that urban areas automatically translate to a higher rate of crime. Trying to talk about how crime relates to urban form reminds people that crime is part of the urban form. And that's not good PR; it doesn't advance the urbanism movement.

There are exceptions. It emerges on occasion with respect to special issues such as subsidized housing, and even got a little press with respect to the reconstruction efforts in New Orleans and Galveston.

(Btw, I didn't use the word "puppy" in my last post. I used a similar word that in fact has very little to do with even half of the population of puppies.)

Then again, as Red pointed out, the "urbanists" are been left largely undefined. Are they city planners? Are they architects? Are they development financiers? Are they a consortium of all of these and more? What role do the urbanists play?

Urbanism is a movement; those that ascribe to the movement are urbanists. Urbanism was not originally the purview of architects. It mostly had to do with city planning, which was professionally and academically removed from architecture. But since architects have a god complex, they have largely co-opted the movement under the heading of "landscape architecture" and other bogus terms. Architecture also has its tentacles embedded in fields such as sociology and economics, much to the detriment of everybody involved.

Urbanists can be found in many professions, most notably urban planning and architecture. But professions ranging from developers to bankers to structural engineers to city councilmembers have had some significant level of exposure. The extent to which individuals in these professions buy into it is largely dependent upon their perceptions of how urbanist design principles will be received by consumers, clients, or constituents. But the general public is largely ignorant of such issues.

Is there anything they can actually do to prevent or eliminate crime? My past studies lead me to conclude crime is far more complex an issue than can be solved with the design or placement of a building. Crime is a social problem, not an architectural problem. Walkability on the other hand... that can be determined by the design and placement of buildings.

There probably are some prescriptive codes and public infrastructure projects that would influence the types of crime that occur. Case-in-point: I used to live in a garden-style condo complex just south of the Medical Center. It was a neighborhood specifically referred to by Andres Duany, a high-profile urbanist and architect, as being exactly the opposite of how a neighborhood ought to function or be laid out. His observations were based solely on aesthetic issues. The population density in this neighborhood is tremendous, it is one of the few residential neighborhoods with easy access to the light rail, and the crime rate per capita is moderate. But TMC workers park their cars along the streets every single day for free to catch transit to work, and those cars have a knack of getting broken into. It makes sense that those cars would be easy targets. A vehicle is randomly-placed, nobody that lives nearby owns it (and most residents can't even see past their landscaping and fences onto the street), and the owner of the vehicle is a mile away and won't be back until after their shift is over. Take those crimes out of the stats, and what is left is one of the lowest crime rates in the city. And there is a reason for that, too. Each garden-style complex has about 300 units in two- and three-story buildings with one way in or out, video-monitored access gates, and perimeter fences. Most complexes hire security guards. Common areas have long sight-lines, and the effect of such hard boundaries between public and private spaces mean that someone cautious of their personal security can more quickly size up their situational risks. Whenever there is a spree of residential burglaries in the area, HPD easily communicates with the managers of each of these complexes and apartment or condo management would relay information to individual residents, typically using flyers posted over common-area mailboxes...meaning that 100% of households saw it, not just the nosy 'neighborhood watch' crowd. That information typically included a description of the perps and the make, model, and color of their getaway vehicle. And even if you didn't know half of the people that lived in your building, you knew faces and whose cars belonged where. In spite of the crushing sense of anonymity that was fostered by the built environment, suspicious activity wasn't difficult to detect. A single-family neighborhood typically doesn't have either the physical or political infrastructure to be so easily able to communicate crime issues.

So how about them Astros? Spring training starting up soon.

Hey, you heard the woman. Talk about downtown businesses like Marksmu and I or be quiet.

I'd love to participate in this thread, but there are two problems. One, who are these 'urbanists' of which you speak? You keep denigrating their work, yet you have neither identified them nor their work. And, two, can you point to at least one instance where 'they' have said that crime is not a problem?

Thanks in advance.

Oh, and having watched the video of the assault, I'd like your opinion on what should be done to solve THAT problem. I have my ideas, but I'd like to hear yours, in light of your urbanist rants.

In all fairness to WAZ, it's true that urbanist monologues (and I use the term "monologues" because discourse on the subject is consistently framed from the perspective that urbanism is above reproach, question or doubt) rarely bother to tackle crime as an issue in lieu of addressing what I like to call "puppy issues" such as walkability. He has a valid point that crime is largely swept under the rug by this bunch.

If there are any doubts, browse through a few ULI magazines.

Sealy is actually 12 miles from Brookshire on I-10 and about 20 miles from Pin Oak Road, which is close to the end of development in Katy. It's really a stretch to call it a suburb.

Not to mention that if a town located 20 miles from a suburb is a suburb, then Columbus (located 20 miles further) also fits those criteria, meaning that it is also a suburb of Houston. Ditto Schulenburg. Ditto Waelder. Ditto Luling. Ditto Seguin. And therefore San Antonio is a suburb of Houston. After all, it's even located within a common geographic boundary as recognized politically and by the U.S. Census Bureau.

There is a huge difference in being PC and just being offensive. Your post is not just wrong, its both offensive and inflammatory.

Wasn't my post.

The thug appearance is not limited to any single demographic, and it is NOT as a previous poster stated part of any culture. The baggy clothes and sloppy look originated with the rap culture. It was cool to be "street", and it was a way for those who were "street" to conceal a weapon. Whether or not people of various classes (lower, middle, upper) wear this attire, it is not a part of any culture. It is a fad popularized by hip-hop music.

Baggy clothes look like an element of various subcultures to me. Only, since you've excluded "ordinary person" bars as a separate category, what's left in the downtown scene that you aren't happy with caters to a very specific socioeconomic profile with numerous and prominent demographic traits. Bearing that in mind, don't tell me that you aren't talking about nigg*rs. You may be squeamish with someone using the word "nigg*r", but that's just your compulsion to be PC and your white guilt showing.

People who are concerned that others wearing this attire will reveal their concealed weapon and rob them, choose not to goto establishments where this is prevalent, or even to be in the vicinity of it. It has nothing to do with race at all.

In other words, honkies get scared over the presence of nigg*rs and then they abandon a neighborhood, even if the neighborhood is safe, as RedScare pointed out. But that can't be racism or penis envy or white flight:

Call it whatever you want, but racism, penis envy and white flight are all wrong. Its a choice based on perceived threats.

You just said so. And we all know you aren't racist.

Ugh, even Austin is calling it Eado now.

http://www.statesman.com/life/travel/emergine-eado-houston-s-newest-arts-community-235511.html

Wow, this reporter really phoned it in. She went to only one event, probably looked at a couple of brochures, and drove around very little. She mentioned Lucky's and Huynh (who catered the event) but none of the other edgy offerings that have cropped up, like Calliope's, Sparkle Burger, the meat pie vendor, District 7, or the taj mahal of Vietnamese food, Kim Son.

And it was a good event, mind you. I was there, so it had to be good by default. ...or maybe it was just free and that made it good, and not me so much. Still, not worthy of a travel article in Austin.

why do the drawings always look more exciting than the actual pictures?

I don't think that the drawings are to scale. The y-axis is compressed, giving the illusion of a larger amount of space.

And I agree with him. El Franco Lee should speak up. Why is he stalling?

If I had to guess, I'd say that EaDo NIMBYs are probably whispering in his ear. The best thing that Dynamo fans can do is write letters and call in to his office...and keep it cogent, people. It'd be great if Houston could show Bellaire how to engage in post-racial political discourse.

Sealy is in Austin County. Austin County is a part of the Houston-Baytown-SugarLand metropolitan area. Sealy is about 4.5 miles from Brookshire and only about 9 miles from Cinco Ranch and other parts of the greater Katy area. It is most definitely a suburb.

The Census has definitions for rural and urban areas, but does not include in its extensive glossary any official terms such as suburb or exurb.

Furthermore:

"Geographic entities, such as census tracts, counties, metropolitan areas, and the territory outside metropolitan areas, often are "split" between urban and rural territory, and the population and housing units they contain often are partly classified as urban and partly classified as rural."

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

No portion of Sealy meets the criteria to be considered an "urban area" according to Census standards.

The problem is that crime prevention has been lost in discussions on urban design. Law enforcement and criminal lawyers (naturally) still talk about crime, but they’re not the ones designing cities.

What urban planners actually do is develop a piecemeal framework (that is codified and enforced by lawyers) within which architects and developers can design and build individual projects. Though a common conceit, it's a fallacy of composition to say that urban planners design cities.

Though they just built HOB, I wonder how they worked that out.

"They" wasn't the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority.

Given the discussion about outlying towns changing their identity from distinct communities outside of Houston to now being suburbs of Houston, a Chronicle article today about the Stewart and Stevenson plant in Sealy referred to Sealy as suburban Houston. Interesting that the point 1/4th of the way to San Antonio is now considered a suburb, or else the writer didn't know how to use the word "rural" to describe the area.

It was just a Chronicle flub. Don't bother reading anything into it.

True, but the "ornamentation" goes down through that whole side of the building, compared to just a roof(Hess), or a couple of stories of the entire building(MP).

The skins of Hess Tower and MainPlace are ornamentation in and of themselves. They were very expensive.

Shame, they don't build something this intresting in Downtown. Well, Hess Tower has the turbines, and MainPlace has the sky garden/lobby, but still.

Also, thanks for the update.

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.

It almost seems like the city did them a favor by cutting their potential losses.

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

houston area could lose up to 10,000 aeronautical jobs??? dang...that's not good.

Well, manufacturing & aeronautical jobs. This plant in Sealy only dealt with ground-based vehicles.

All the same, this sucks.

Guess property changes are due to the rail system going down that way.

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.

If I crank some Iron Maiden or Pantera as loud as I can and bang my head while I'm rolling down the road, am I being "ghetto?" I'm white, by the way.

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.

Awesome. I'll bring an extra bottle of Jack.

Someone just told me that if they start to build this thing, the owner of Toyota Center is going to sue the city... something about having too many new venues close to it. Apparently, there's a clause in their contract with the city that says there can be no other sports venue withing xyz distance of Toyota Center or something other... I told them I wasnt aware of such a thing... ugh.

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.

We should just build the thing already!

You go ahead without me. Have fun.