TheNiche

To the best of my increasingly-dated knowledge, the gas tax goes to the State and not municipalities. So that wouldn't be an issue for Mayor Parker. Things that will be issues are whether the City's claim to some of Metro's sales taxes for road work should be returned to METRO, and/or raising City property taxes in order to cope with budgetary pressures related to pension obligations or to increase the level of services.

Dammit. The longer I'm unemployed, the more dated is my knowledge. Its like I'm de-evolving back into an ordinary jackoff. ...no more being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, or being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. This just sucks so much.

oxymoron alert

FWIW, I think that the NIMBYs are ignoring the prospect of increased neighborhood visibility and are looking a gift horse in the mouth. There are basically two problems with EaDo. One is that the many overgrown and littered vacant lots make it appear grungy and a little desolate. Another is that it's not on the way in between very many places (the way Midtown is), so relatively few people know that it exists or are familiar enough with it to feel comfortable and safe there. A stadium would consume some of these vacant lots, the Dynamo would exert pressure on the City to keep the area clean, and most importantly, the public would finally get to lay eyes on this forgotten neighborhood. Visibility is a huge deal. That's how apartment complexes such as Sawyer Heights Lofts are able to lease up so quickly is that they are their own billboard; it doesn't matter that 95% of the population is put off by the views and sounds of freeways if fifty times the number of individual householders are aware of its existence than would otherwise have been the case. And just so you're aware, low traffic count, low visibility, and the lack of public familiarity with access to this neighborhood are directly responsible for the slow lease-up rates experienced by apartment complexes in EaDo. If you intend to make mixed-use pedestrian-friendly developments viable in the future, people have to become more familiar with the area. And entertainment venues (including bars and stadia) are going to have to be an inherent part of that process.

To be clear, the TTC involved having private companies build new toll roads from scratch, not the tolling of existing roads. Actually, TXDoT operates on a pay-as-you-go requirement. Counties, municipalities, and special districts issue and guarantee bonds, the federal government can issue treasuries, but TXDoT pays with cash.

Well then there's the other nice thing about toll roads, which is the prospect of congestion pricing as a means to efficiently ration capacity to the users with the highest economic need. Well yeah, definitely. That happens all the time it's all accounted for above the "bottom line" and feeds into the "bottom line". What I'm saying, though, is that seeing as how government financials read somewhat more like cash flow statements than private-sector income statements, red ink at the "bottom line" can have an immediate and devastating effect on cash reserves. We have to be mindful that funds have to come from somewhere, whether from operating revenue, from taxes, from bonds, or from outside agencies. Otherwise our credit rating tanks and payroll checks start bouncing. Nobody wants to see that happen. And that's why Mayor Parker's comments about METRO not minding the "bottom line" so much raised an eyebrow. She should know better. That's not a bad idea. There's even the political infrastructure for that to be done in most of the major business districts around Houston, by way of Management Districts that levy a tax within their jurisdiction that is separate and independent of that from the City or from METRO. This is an interesting discussion itself. Many people argue for regionalism in transit. I think that there's a place for that in certain kinds of transit infrastructure, but I also think that there's a place for neighborhood-level transit in certain places (and most definitely not others) for which the burden ought to be borne by those who benefit from it. The Woodlands Express is a prime example.

Where did all of these rumors about a new jail facility come from? It's not the first time I've heard them, but placing a jail facility so far from the courthouse complex just seems...dumb. And I believe her when Garcia says that she hasn't seen any evidence that the Eastwood Civic Assn. or the Super Neighborhoods support the stadium, but it sounds like somebody is stoking rumors of a jail just to freak these people out so that they'll actively embrace the Dynamo. I know it's a conspiracy theory, but this stuff just doesn't add up.

Actually, once the Crosby Freeway is finally completed, it'll probably be the last un-tolled freeway ever built in the Houston area. And toll roads are designed, built, and operated with the expressed intent of being 100% paid-for by users. There has even been significant private-sector interest in purchasing and operating them. Bear in mind that operating profit (or loss) is different from the "bottom line". The bottom line in governmental accounting is really damned important.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6856178.html Wow, for a policy wonk and former comptroller, I wasn't anticipating some of this stuff. Statements to the effect that a transit agency in the midst of financial turmoil ought to be less concerned with their bottom line (pretty much under any circumstances or in the context of any other statements) are dangerous ones. If METRO reduces or eliminates its fares, then in order to maintain balanced books, it will have to reduce costs by a matching amount if outside matching funding proves elusive...which it probably will be, given that the City is itself not on fiscal terra firma. On the one hand, the elimination of fares (which would overcome a psychological barrier to transit use) paired with a reduction of service could be cause for fewer seats to be empty, meaning that asset utilization would be dramatically increased. Efficiency is good. (And yes, Mike Snyder, we CAN do cost-benefit analysis even without fares. ) On the other hand, if METRO is expected to maintain or expand services to poor neighborhoods as Mayor Parker has stated should be its focus, then it will have to sap resources away from more well-off neighborhoods to accomplish that. And that may also create a systematic long-term PR problem, as well, if Mayor Parker's philosophy about the bus system being a feeder for light rail coupled with her views about transit being primarily a means of moving poor people culminates with light rail getting a reputation as being transit for the poor. On-vehicle vagrancy could also contribute to that problem, particularly during bouts of inclement weather. There'd definitely be some kinks to iron out, here. To her credit, I'm glad to see that Mayor Parker recognizes that the FTA rules may not be accommodating to the idea of transit without fares. However, the FTA's primary concerns have always seemed to be gross costs and ridership, project-by-project. Eliminating fares system-wide could possibly induce such significant ridership as to move us toward the front of the line for federal matching funds. But of course, there's a lot more to it than just that, so her caution is justified.

Well yeah, but primarily because Uptown had perennially sucked the life out of it during the boom years. Downtown and Uptown Dallas are in direct competition for the same tenants and ought to be considered the same submarket for purposes of comparison with other CBDs, including Houston.

You wouldn't know it, to watch the Super Bowl...which sucks because that could've been a very memorable advertising opportunity for Heinz. I suppose I should be grateful for their commercial successes. Otherwise, practically nobody would know about the good music. Seems to work that way for a lot of artists. Having said that, I wouldn't be sad to see them retire. They are too old to preserve the memory, IMHO.

Yes, none of which was played tonight. The Who Sold Out. ... ( -- Nobody's going to get that but you and I, probably.)

Nope, they were from the 60's. And they crappily performed their Clear-Channel-approved "hits". Here they are from before the incontinence. Note Keith Moon and Pete Townshend's cam-toe.

You didn't read the narrative either. Downtown Fort Worth is a relatively stable submarket, but it is small (about a quarter the size of downtown Houston) and its prospects for growth are weak. I'd say that one or two new mid-rise office buildings over the next decade is plausible, however a new speculative building even the size of Houston's MainPlace would about double the vacancy rate and require achievable rents that are significantly higher than market conditions allow. So a skyscraper in Fort Worth is not plausible. Of course, if you'd read the narrative, then you'd know better than to try jumping to such conclusions based on evidence that I had already established as superficial.

West U, Bellaire, Rice Military, and significant portions of Montrose can now be characterized as I did earlier. Perhaps "pock-marked" wasn't the right word. Parts of the inner loop have been so completely transformed that "localized rash" might be applicable. West U, in particular, would be unrecognizable to someone who lived there even 15 years ago. And anywhere that there's been a reasonably large tract, homogeneity has run amok (horrifying case in point, the old Markle Steel site). As for homogeneity of the ages, I'd submit to you that whenever at any point in our history there's been a compelling reason to build new housing for people of few means, poorly-built homogeneity reins supreme. Only, you don't see much evidence of that before WW2 because so much has already been knocked down; we mostly just see evidence of the former upper-middle and upper classes and are thereby led to believe that they had better taste back then. Then you get into post-war structures, and I'd have to say that the worst offenders are the Levitown-like subdivisions. That was an era where poorly-built homogeneity was taken to a whole new level; there was now mass production, they started building on slabs that are all too often un-reinforced, they started to frame out houses with yellow pine instead of hardwoods, and building codes hadn't yet caught up. By the late 1960's, population growth rates were starting to decline and most cities were large enough that an influx of poor people merely took the older subdivisions and the middle- or upper-classes took on the mantle of buyers of new homes. This was the beginning of white flight. Higher interest rates persisted for a good long while, too, so that was part of the calculus. Once again, most of the new for-sale housing stock from an era reflected the buying power of people with means (and to the extent that it did not, witness the vast cluster of forgettable condos near the Astrodome). Mass production stayed with us though, because urban populations were large enough to support it; and that'll never go away for as long as a reasonably large tract can be developed, pretty much anywhere in or out of the city. Then, in the mid- and late-1990's as interest rates continued to decline and the political and regulatory environment shifted towards being friendly to home buyers, people of few means once again were able to buy crappy new homes. It started as a trickle, and ended with...Copperfield. I wish that I could say that we won't witness that again any time soon, but I don't think that anybody in politics is serious about de-incentivizing the purchase of crappy houses. But the one common thread in all of this historical context is that housing built for poor people sucks. It always has. When you get right down to it, the lack of mass production, the postage-stamp-sized lots, and the existence of street grids makes Eastwood comparable to the new West U in many respects. Each neighborhood was built (or re-built, respectively) over a matter of decades, each features mostly custom homes that are exemplary of only a handful of different styles, and Eastwood has deed restrictions to keep out businesses while West U has zoning. They're the same neighborhoods from different eras. And bear in mind that Eastwood was the first "master planned community". Although the limited size of the market precluded a development at the scale of The Woodlands, that was the idea behind it. I'd think it fair to say that Eastwood is to The Woodlands as Magnolia Park is to Copperfield. And The Woodlands and Copperfield have very little in common beyond that they happen to have been developed during the same period of time.

NO! Read the narrative that accompanied the stats.

As opposed to what, the homogenized and poorly built stylistically-derivative multifamily buildings or the enclaves of McMansions built from off-the-shelf prints that pock-mark the inner city? It's pretty much never about architecture for the haters on this forum. My observations are that it's about history (which is actually kind of absurd in many instances because old architecture is so frequently mistaken as a proxy for good architecture), it's about environmentalism and the notion that others should feel compelled to live near where they work (which is also kind of absurd in a city where the majority of the jobs are beyond the areas commonly thought of as "urban"), and it's about mostly-young relatively well-educated tech-savvy people without children hating on lifestyles that they haven't (and aren't expected to have) given serious contemplation towards yet. And sometimes we see subcultural influences come up, where a person can't be secure in their identity as a member of a group (or their identity as an individual in the context of various types of other individuals) if they don't live in a place that the group and/or type of other person defines as being acceptable...even if that results in a hardship to them.

We already had our turn. Be thankful that the investment bankers practiced more restraint with this commodity price bubble than they had in the past. I don't think that there were any significant buildings started downtown between about 1984 and the mid or late 90's, and that's not something we should be gunning to repeat.

Some comparative office stats from Grubb & Ellis are provided below. But be careful about reading too much into these snapshot indicators, especially as they pertain to the likelihood of new construction. Each city has unique factors affecting it, especially with respect to their economy, geographic barriers to entry as reflected in the land prices, political barriers to entry, property tax and corporate income tax rates, unionization rates within the construction trades, exposure to the credit crisis, and submarket desirability. Additionally, these data only indicate asking rents, not actual effective rents that take negotiated concessions into account. Dallas is a good case in point. Downtown Dallas has nearly as much vacancy as downtown Detroit and lower rental rates to boot. I don't know of any developer that'd be interested in starting a project there even if financing were available. However, just opposite a freeway from downtown is an office submarket with buildings that are still under construction, where vacancy is 14.2%/16.6% and rents for Class A space are $32.03 psf. That's not horrible (like Atlanta), but it doesn't reflect in the CBD stats. Chicago is another good case in point. On the surface of things, it looks slightly distressed but still has relatively high rents. It looks like they ought to still be able to cope with things. But in truth, the prevalence of "zombie buildings" is distressing the whole market, and the impact to investors has yet to be fully reflected in a snapshot of market data. New York is probably the best case in point that there ever was. Out of every city on this list, rents there are the highest and vacancy is the lowest. But .and is expensive, the bureaucracy is tough, union labor is expensive and entrenched in practically every construction and property management function, and taxes are utterly ridiculous. There was a time in the not-so-distant past that that didn't matter. Class A rents used to average about $90 psf, concessions used to be unavailable, and vacancy used to be <4%. So stuff got built--sometimes--and even then, only eventually. But in the context of where it had been, NYC has suffered more than any other city, and with current owners unable to refinance, there will be a tremendous glut of inexpensive office buildings available to any of the investors left standing for many years to come. Why build when you can buy something relatively new for bottom dollar? Aside from one project in Midtown Manhattan, the only still-active construction is related to the WTC redevelopment, and that was only made possible on account of insurance proceeds and an insane amount of state and municipal leasing of space within those symbolic buildings. Detroit is by far the worst out of any city, but at least the decline there was steady and predictable. Real estate prices are crazy low, but should be more stable going forward. NYC's toughest days are ahead of it. And as for Houston, we may be hanging on...barely...but aside from that vacancy is increasing and that effective rents are coming down, aside from that commercial foreclosures have begun to become problematic, aside from that debt financing remains elusive, we (in particular) are fraught with political risk. Energy and environmental policy could still whoop our ass even if the rest of the economy begins to recover in earnest. City, Submarket - Direct Vacancy - Aggregate Vacancy - Class A Asking Rent Houston, CBD - 10.7% - 11.9% - $35.75 Dallas, CBD - 24.9% - 26.4% - $21.95 Ft. Worth, CBD - 8.7% - 9.1% - $27.98 San Antonio, CBD - 11.3% - 18.3% - $21.69 Atlanta, CBD - 19.2% - 22.2% - $21.13 Miami, CBD - 12.4% - 14.8% - $43.16 Chicago, CBD - 14.2% - 16.7% - $38.62 Detroit, CBD - 29.3% - 29.6% - $23.37 Washington DC - 11.3% - 13.1% - $54.69 Los Angeles, CBD - 12.9% - 14.1% - $38.52 San Francisco, Financial District - 12.2% - 14.0% = $32.90 Seattle, CBD - 17.6% - 18.9% - $32.90 New York, Manhattan - 7.0% - 9.4% - $65.47

Bear in mind, those that felt the tragedy most acutely were engineers. And, perhaps because they are familiar with number theory and as a group are notoriously skeptical of most things--including numerology--engineers cannot be counted as members of any society that places particular importance on the number 25.

I would expect pretty favorably. We're only a relative newcomer to this recession. Most other cities have been slogging through it for years now.

From Cook's article: A likely-stained shirt or pants along with a risk of being drenched with my own scalding hot coffee...neither of these things sound very fun to me, so I can only possibly conclude that the other 50% must be equally underwhelming. There aren't very many cities that have larger downtown office markets than Houston, but Philly is one of them. Their downtown area is also genuinely mixed-use, measured in neighborhoods rather than a handful of residential buildings. It's also an old city, and old cities by nature of their pre-automotive legacy are typically tourist-friendly by their very nature. A place like this Reading Terminal Market fits with the context of that environment. We are not that city, and we shouldn't pretend to don its vestiges. But perhaps more importantly, we're the city that eats prairie and poops restaurants (credit to memebag for that phrase). Having everything under one roof in Houston is for the unadventurous. SCREW THAT. If either a tourist or a resident isn't willing to drive a lot and go out of their comfort zone to experience our city then all they're going to get out of it is a very small slice of it, mostly contrived and boring. And there's absolutely nothing unauthentic we can do to change that. Don't get me wrong. We can improve downtown and it's cultural offerings, just not by offering up an imitative and derivative urban form. We should instead do what makes sense for us, given our climate, our neighborhoods, and our local culture. The downtown tunnels are a good example of that. It's not that the idea of tunnels are unique to our city, just that they make the most sense here, so we've taken them to a much further extent. We should promote them and make them more tourist-friendly. We should also promote places such as the Bellaire corridor and make tourists slog down it to select from one of dozens of anonymous little Asiatic holes-in-the-wall if they want to experience Houston's culture. That kind of experience cannot be transplanted to a glorified food court. Dare I say...you'd miss out on 'half the fun.'

The downtown sublease space competes directly with the direct lease space, however is excluded from most market data. So that's part of what makes it look like it's still OK. Vacancy is a lagging indicator, direct-lease vacancy even more so.

oh snap!

Recessions are only defined by the length of time during which the economy is contracting, so yes, I think that this one already is or will be over. But that only means that we're at the lowest point. It isn't enough that the recession is over; what matters is that that we have recovered to the extent that rental rates and vacancy rates are once again adequate to justify the relatively high cost of new construction. Also, whether or not there will be another separate 'double-dip' recession in the near term is up for debate, and I think that it's possible if not likely. So that'd be the first problem is that the fundamentals are weak. The second problem is that the terms available for debt financing are not nearly as friendly and show few signs of getting better for as long as the commercial foreclosure situation remains bleak. ...and believe me, the worst is yet to come on that front. If there's any one thing that could trigger a second financial crisis leading us into a 'double-dip' recession, it's the projected rate of commercial real estate foreclosures. Even if we avoid a financial crisis, commercial real estate transaction values are going to be suppressed by foreclosures for years to come. And that, combined with poor fundamentals, still-high hard costs, and expensive debt...well, it makes for a bleak outlook. And that sucks for me, because I used to be the guy that worked through all of these issues and got big projects to pencil out as profitable. Short of switching over to appraisal (which is kind of a dead end), my career is over.