TheNiche

Hmmmm. I was trying to make a joke, did you catch the whole Kevin Bacon/degrees of seperation thing? Maybe you think my attempt at humor sucks?

Over my head, to be honest.  I'm only vaguely aware that Kevin Bacon is a celebrity, and I'm pretty sure that he's an actor, but all I ever can think of when I see his name is bacon.  His name is very distracting from anything of relevance that might involve him.

Are you linked with Kevin Bacon also?

I'm not kidding.  That's how it worked out, and none of the three of us are totally irredeemable 'Connection' whores.  Small world.

Tory just showed up in my LinkedIn "People You May Know." I guess LinkedIn has been following me on HAIF.

No dude, it's my fault.  You and he are both connections of mine, so there are only two degrees of separation.

Let's take a look at the numbers.  i think apartments in  these new developments are averaging about 800 square foot per apartment.  This building plans 300 square units; that gives us 240,000 rentable square feet.  6,000 square feet is 2 1/2% of your total.  You've just put that portion of your planned return into a very different risk pool and different rental market. (And that doesn't even address the difference in building and operating costs.)  I don't know, but It seems like that could indeed break the financial model.

Having done financial modeling for a living at one point in my life, I'll chime in briefly.

A developer's model backs into the highest dollar amount that they're willing to pay for the land.  If a developer decides to take a haircut on a development in order to provide a public good, then they won't be able to pay as much for the land.  They'd get outbid by a profit-maximizing developer.

Also, people that specialize in multifamily typically are hesitant to venture into retail.  Its a totally different business model with its own market dynamics and cost structure.  If the retail rents that can be achieved are sufficiently high, then the extra effort and uncertainty may be worth it.  The problem is that there are only a very few cases in Houston where the risk-adjusted retail rents exceed apartment rents.

Which brings me to my next point: It isn't enough to point out that restaurants at the Post development are busy or that Phoenicia is busy.  Many other stores are not busy; that consumers return over and over again to busy stores and witness other consumers doing exactly the same thing probably has a lot more to do with those stores' business models and good management than with their physical plant, but that's easy to forget if you don't go to the places that are suffering for business, which you aren't because otherwise they wouldn't be suffering for business...and besides which, don't tend to last very long anyway.  So consumers see other people at the places where consumers are at and figure that everywhere should and could be like that.  But the fact is that there are only so many retail prospects out there, and so many fewer still that have viable business models or good management.  When rents are being negotiated, landlords are price-takers.  They can't necessarily tell whether a store will be successful (although a place like Phoenicia is probably an exception, and in cases like that the TENANT typically holds the cards and the rent is much lower), but whether destined for success or not, the prospective tenant can go down the street and find a landlord that will undercut the other one.  Its a competitive market.  If the rents aren't obviously high enough or the demand isn't obviously there, then nine times out of ten a multifamily operator isn't going to make the effort to take the risk.  The multifamily operator has no doubt that there will be demand for their units, with or without a retail component, and they know that even if the market declines prior to delivery, they can give concessions and fill the units quickly to generate cash flow, cover the note, and make the investment marketable to a third-party buyer.  If that retail component sits empty for three or four years before finding an awesome tenant, that's a goddamn long time and there's no cash coming in.

One last thing.  Having retail at the ground floor can be disruptive to parking designs.  It depends a lot on the layout of the site and what the architect can do with it, but any option that requires more concrete to yield less net rentable area skews the model against that option.  Mixing uses still requires on-site segregation of those uses for resident convenience and security.

So yeah, if its a good model then the model won't break.  It'll just indicate a lower land price that can be paid as a maximum bid, and the mixed-use guy gets outbid.  There are exceptions, but not many in Houston.

Niche, out.

The rail saves time going from the port. In general istanbul metro once complete will be very impressive. If they can build it with the obstacles of archaeological finds and earthquakes why can't houston have a world class system?

[/exile]

Structures built from concrete and masonry in accordance with International Building Codes that are enforced in developed countries by governments that aren't rife with corruption are vastly preferable to wood frame structures that are built under the same set of assumptions. (Yet wood frame structures are generally favored in the United States because they are more cost effective, more forgiving, and less labor-intensive in a country where labor is expensive and cumbersome. An American developer intending to turn a profit should only build with concrete when they are deprived of every other option.)

So why do you suppose I should have to walk ten stories up to my $10/night penthouse on a windy day, because the hotel staff has decided to disable the elevator in this five-year-old concrete and masonry highrise? And once I get there, why do you suppose that the solid concrete wall behind my bed sounds like rats are chewing through it during the strongest gusts?

And would you consider the city that I'm in to be more "world class" because there are three dozen more buildings just like my hotel being hastily constructed by an effective government decree within a mile radius--of which a half dozen or more have turned out to be real estate scams for which construction activity has halted? Maybe that has something to do with why there are so many Bentleys on the road. Would you consider a city like this to be somehow less provincial because the grand new suspension bridge is already rusting through and occasionally drops portions of its decking into the river below? But it looks really really cool, framed by mountains and sea, even if it can't fulfill its intended function of moving trucks safely from the port in a way that bypasses the chaos of the center of the city.

As far as I'm concerned, this is all fine and well. I'm happy to live in a provincial city because I think that life is better here, simpler, easier to enjoy. There are bigger cities that are more developed. Some of them even bother to treat their wastewater; but mostly, they're just as provincial with the same attitudes having been scaled-up in terms of pathological groupthink, hassle, pollution, and expense. The same sort of comparisons could probably be made on some level between Houston and New York, Manchester or London. To compare Houston and Istanbul, you have to compare two cities for 'world classiness' that not only exist at a different scale, but with governments, cultures, and economic systems that are totally alien between the one and the other. It is a totally asinine and superficial effort. Please stop.

[exile]

I live nowhere and I live everywhere. I've wandered off the reservation and onto another planet that bares no resemblance to your own. It's great.

I still read some HAIF threads and browse Swamplot, but I'm finding the issues that I once expounded on to be distant and petty. (Who really gives a crap about METRO or a new highrise? It just seems like people that lead fairly boring lives have a need to invent drama for themselves, a reason to squabble, a reason to complain, a reason to feel self-important. (It's not lost on me that my own comment, which points that out, is cut from the same cloth.)

Every now and then, I'll spot some otherwise reasonable person saying something that's really quite dumb. Where I'd have pounced on it before, now I feel like I should let it be and speak for itself, as a monument to its own nature. Its sort of like a park with statues of former communist leaders that is maintained with revenues from outdoor advertising for Axe body spray. Never mind the Pizza Hut delivery service bringing the teen skateboarders in the park their lunch, and never mind the local girl in the U.S. Army T-shirt and a miniskirt riding sideways on the back of that motorbike ahead of you. ...oh, well I suppose that it's okay to mind her just enough not to hit a pedestrian or the random sweater-wearing chihuahua in the street.

And there's no historical imperative -- I think we can all agree we're over that; don't be a stranger, Hegel -- so this new system can be somewhat flexible, with a thin veneer of democracy -- another bad idea, though not as bad as Communism -- to lend it legitimacy.

I don't care for it, but my reasons you would judge to be aesthetic ones and reject out of hand. Apart from your professional unhappiness of late... you've said the system is stable -- maybe it's as stable and efficient as it can be, given the complexity of the modern world; and keeps the largest number of people well-fed (rather appallingly well-fed) and best promotes your favored value (which seems to be, strictly material human welfare).

Or are you prepared to admit of other values? (Yes, that's where I was going all along...)

All reason is aesthetic when you get right down to it. And there is your answer.

It strikes me that you would have no conception, or markedly less, of the ultimate meaninglessness of your place in the cosmos if not for the work of others determined to penetrate to the meaning of it.

This is pretty much accurate. The search for meaning is a collaborative effort (and always petty). It is the development of language that allows one to infer and carefully sculpt a formal system of logic, and then also for zany barely-plausible abstractions. It doesn't have to be that way. However, the most extreme documented instances of neglected children seem to indicate to me that without an opportunity to develop that system of language and logic among humans; a child might go through the same process among a pack of dogs and howl at the moon, but does not thereby seem well-equipped to contemplate notions of philosophy.

It is easy, then, to say that a person enabled by language/logic to step outside their own culture and deconstruct its absurd barely-plausible abstractions (religion, political schemes, the 'American Dream', things that are supposed to make me happy). But can you ever totally leave the reservation behind? We are social animals, too easily programmed, difficult to re-write, impossible to reformat.

Do giants have navels? Perhaps, as with most human curvature, even the slightest distortion from the norm makes the whole ugly. And so it is best to look into the giant's navel and marvel at it. Even if that is all that can be seen--and especially if that is all that there is to see.

Brain damage.

Right or wrong, and quite apart from the fact that you don't share my narrow interests, we can't really expect to be mutually coherent given that difference.

Why should we let that stop us? Mine is chiefly a crisis of internal coherency. Drawing others in only exploits a kind of chaotic order, a formal logic with which to communicate universal senselessness.

If ever my views should fall within the spectrum of common sense, then they would not be worth expressing.

In this matter,my conflicting sense of humanism and nihilism are in agreement. The climate is changing due to humanity's economic development. Productive capacity (and the political stability afforded by globalism) will prepare humans to adapt successfully. But then the nihilist in me says that they'll adapt or die, just like any species, that it really doesn't matter which, and that preserving the tradition of the living is absurd because there is also a tradition of dying, and of extinction. What happens happens.

You are so right, samagon. Nature is destiny and these effects will be much more profound than any of the shifts about which The Niche and I talk past one other (though these things are not unconnected: in particular, America's self-imposed loss of standing in the world and the collapse of our values down to the naked singularity of the almighty dollar, means we must sit on the sidelines of a process we might once have influenced). Only, the result will be a continuing loss of species diversity, thus a less interesting world. But yes, if I am pursued by a tornado that has a personal vendetta against me, that will be interesting.

Hasn't it been unseasonably warm lately? Here, we had not a drop of rain in November for the first time since 1897. A little cold front comes Tuesday.

Of course, some of the manifold climate models project more severe winters, as part of greater overall turbulence, I guess; but more heat trapped in the atmosphere=warmer weather really doesn't seem all that implausible.

Nah, I don't really care about climate change. Warmer weather typically aids in building up species diversity, but it's the pattern of rainfall that is the real kicker. Some regions win and some regions lose. Whatever the anthropogenic contribution to climate change, the climate has been changing in absolute terms since the beginning of geologic history. Sometimes it is warmer, sometimes it is cooler, sometimes Texas is under water. That is our geologic heritage, which begat our economic heritage and the climate change that you seem to abhor. Concern over it just seems so senseless in the scope of geologic time. Everything is so new; what is worth preserving? Perhaps our civic architects should preserve construction sites in mid-course if every event and activity is so precious, if we are so self-important.

"Witness to the total demolition and reconstruction of their environment" is a phrase I read by chance a moment ago. It happened that the writer was referring to the Stalinization of eastern Europe. I don't say it's comparable in kind or degree; it's nothing whatever to do with it, so skip the lecture -- but the words in a different sense express how psychologically jarring I find what has happened to Texas even in my lifetime, and I wonder why others don't find it so. I'm left to conclude there is some flaw in my makeup, that I'm not very adaptable.

Is it that you are less adaptable, or perhaps society has adapted to your ilk?

I was born at the brink of the "Stalinization" of Texas. I think that the manifest insanity of the oil boom and the looming reality of an oil bust began to set in by about 1981 or 1982. You can hear it in ZZ Top records if you listen to them in a chronological sequence. And then, with the S&L bust, the hard money was gone and the soft money--the "American Dream" money--took hold. The people shall never again be free, not from the banks, and not from themselves. It is their desires, their greed, and a mechanism that fulfills it; that is what makes the American form of communism feasible is the peoples' implicit consent. We fought a revolution and then a civil war over something more straightforward and less ugly; but we will not do so again over what we have become. We don't even know what we are.

And i do know how very fortunate i am, and one thing I am grateful for is that I'm not a man trying to figure out a place in the modern economy. I derailed early, found a guy that I knew -- with the pure cunning of a woman -- would take care of me the rest of my life; so I didn't have to feel I was participating in something I didn't understand. I work half-time in a clerical way merely to ease his mind, in case something should happen to him -- to demonstrate "Look at me! I'm totally employable!" Yeah, right.

(For me, unlike you, too damn many people -- always a curse, never an amenity -- is a major part of it ... I mean, what was the point of all those pills and "procedures"? If we'd known that the void we created was going to be so thoroughly filled -- well, hell -- I want my dead babies back! It's so quiet here, and there's a long road winding in front of me ... Sorry -- too honest? I don't have "any particular need to care," either.)

One of the lessons that has never been forgotten by the third world, which could never be extinguished by traditional communism, is that children are a more reliable form of social security than is any government. They will tend to one's social needs, but only if they are also responsible for one's fiscal needs. The latter begets an interest in the former.

Other lessons, more pertinent to an architecture forum, are that motorcycles (not bicycles) are a worthwhile solution to America's infrastructure constraints, that entire bathrooms can exist within shower enclosures, and that the only built-in fixture needed within a kitchen is a sink.

If you want chaos, and "may you live in interesting times," try America in a few years -- this is 5th century Rome right here.

No, I don't see it that way, not unless Al Qaeda and Somali pirates are construed to be our Visigoths, our Huns, or our Vandals. Rome had something worth fearing, and it did not fear them enough; Americans have very little worth fearing, yet we are excessively fearful. The biggest threat on our radar would be a naval conflict with China in the South China Sea, which would draw in the Philippines (and its ally, America), Vietnam (and its investment partner, India), and then possibly Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan. You infer a prelude to a 21st-century dark age: that's how we get there.

But I don't see it happening.

... and where, in time, the creature comforts will come in! They have a frightening power to take the edge off life when you've totally lost your edge: warm beverages, one after another; fancy little shelf-stable foods; footrubs, I-feel-a-draft so I'm going to go choose among five different weights of throw blankets for just the right one... Docility is not without its rewards.

No, no, no. Those things are readily available. I've never lived so well on some days (or so poorly on other days) for so little money.

Docility is not material in nature. One can be poor and docile as easily as one might be a millionaire and also be docile. One can be docile in the third world, too. It is the comfort of one's own kind, the safety that is implied by that circumstance. It is a false sense of security, but perception is reality enough for most people. And then it is a willingness to invest in a community of like individuals, of being manipulated into an insidious entrapment scenario. That is what it means to be docile. If you work hard and try not to break the law, you'll be forever on the cusp of being well-off enough; and never beyond that threshold, because success in that regard would only reset the location of that threshold.

The Eagles were wrong in Hotel California, Texas is where you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

I know. I'll come back eventually, but only when I am content to be docile. America is a good place to be docile. It'll be a while, I think.

I should add for the sake of honest and because I don't have any particular need to care:

If physical anthropology taught me one thing worth knowing, it was that my Texan ancestors sought out the 'strange', resulting in some unofficial bloodlines. (You can tell from the shape of one's teeth.) The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.

strickn posed a question that was sincere, though unrelated to the back-and-forth about which city's medical services district is "better."

None of those Texas virtues, real or imagined, are or ever were perceptible to me in Houston. You need hardly look to the past for anything, and it would suggest something less than full commitment to the future, and your fearsome industry, if you did. I was just looking at Swamplot, at the Brookings Institution's "Global Metro Monitor" rankings, in which Houston compares favorably with metropolitan economies in developing countries; it makes perfect sense.

I notice that the Houston Chronicle immediately drew the same lesson from the Census results -- accelerating population growth and the "mythology of Texas" are not compatible:

http://www.chron.com...sus-1589808.php

An A&M study a few years ago put it this way: by 2030 Texas will have added another DFW, another Houston metro area, another San Antonio metro area; and with the leftovers, another Corpus Christi (or Beaumont-Port Arthur, or Temple-Killeen-Fort Hood ...).

For me, a hard-to-wade-through and never-revisited book that is yet a must-have on any shelf of Texana is John Graves' "Goodbye to a River." {I really should like it given how I feel about dams, but his tone of world-weary boredom -- earned in the war, I know -- didn't engage: tell me how you really feel about taming the Brazos! And he dwelt a little heavily on the theme of how he alone hunts "for the right reasons" -- hunt or don't hunt, with less sanctimony.}

I read it expecting a gentle rumination on nature, Texas' "Sand County Almanac," but found instead it was more a scattershot catalog of the settlement of the river, with story after story of hotheads who came to Texas and their various violent ends and blood feuds.

But I do think he is on to an aspect of our Anglo (more especially Scots-Irish) Texas character, and years of reading historical markers has confirmed me in this view: they came to Texas because they couldn't get along back east, in close proximity with others.

This is a trait that must necessarily be extinct for cities like Houston to work, and I can't pretend it's admirable, though I seem to be a throwback.

Behind everything, there is always an idea or an ideology, even if people can't express it, or it was only crudely imbibed. I think, strickn, the people of Houston have already chosen what is "characteristic" about their "urban form." It was neither organic nor ordained.

I find your conclusion as to the motivations underlying Texas emigration to be of personal interest: "because they couldn't get along back east." Sure. That's the boiled down essence of why I've impulsively left Houston for a sometimes lawless post-Communistic third world nation, without business prospects, unable to speak the language or drink the water (which is okay, it turns out, because beer is cheap).

Proximity was not a consideration for me, however. Proximity is simultaneously an amenity and a curse; Texans have always had to weigh town and country, one against the other, within the scope of their means and their desires and the marketplace. I shall do the same here and see what happens. I would suggest that the emigres into Texas might have been a little disgusted at the culture of a settled people, however: absent-minded, unimaginative, and tame. Perhaps they had listened to their fathers' stories about the way that the east had been a generation or two back, and perhaps they felt like they had missed out on something grand and novel.

Add, for myself, that the settled peoples of a 21st century Texas are tethered to a bleak decidedly American existence, to their debts, to the 'American Dream', to constructed material desires mistaken for fulfillment, to an insidious slavery, to a system of banking so tied to government that you cannot tell where the one ends and the other begins. It is as near to a sustainable form of communism as I could ever imagine being achieved in the history of human civilization. And so rather than that they work to live, they live to work. And they work. They needn't even ask why, or for whom. They work.

I have fled that, exchanged it for chaos, for unbridled capitalism (a form of which the most ardent Libertarian cannot fathom, and that they would shirk if they understood its implications), for swindlers and hustlers, for simple earthy pleasures, for excitement, for an occasional sampling of terror.

Texas will get along just fine without me, but even the Texas that my father knew is long gone; and that Texan culture that my ancestors knew eight generations ago, it was erased by annexation, a civil war, the New Deal, WW2, and electronic media. The open range has been fenced and cross-fenced, the rivers dammed; the culture similarly hemmed-in, safe, comfortable, blind, and docile.

got any pictures of your bike?

Nope. It was borrowed.

No hints, except that I leave in three hours. Bye.

Well okay, one more hint. I just rode a motorcycle onto the public sidewalk in front of a major local landmark, then plunged headlong into oncoming traffic for a blocklength, and nobody gave a damn. It was more efficient that way.

Americans really are a bunch of ninnies. We're the Brits of the 21st century. Just figured that I'd throw that out there to inform the next round of debates where aggressive cyclists are concerned.

Don't be so cryptic. Where did you go? Was it for love, money, or adventure? Or shale gas? At least give a hint as to climate or cuisine.

No hints, except that I leave in three hours. Bye.

The issues revolving around GM payments is exactly what this thread pertains to. There's been so many posts even more off topic than my post, why pick on me?

Precisely, and your comments did not address that. Your propaganda is part of a pattern, a sort of pathological light rail apologism in even the most loosely-related of threads.

If we got rid of GM payments, we could improve bus service and build light rail at the same time, we wouldn't have to choose between one or the other. As long as we have to choose between bus or rail, our transit system will never be adequate for a city this size. We need both.

I wish that next to the "Like This" button was an "Off-Topic Propaganda" button.

his speculation is probably on point assuming Shoernstein is actually considering it. how close is the SkyHouse Houston high rise site to the exxon building? IIRC they're fairly close. if so the combination of both projects could really spur redevelopment in this part of the cbd.

That's nice to think about, but a de-tenanting, gutting, remodeling, and/or re-skinning, and eventually re-tenanting of the Exxon Building will still only replace a Class A office tenant with a Class A office tenant (or tenants). Its not as though the building is painful to look at; it's just isolated is all, and seems out of place. SkyHouse is going to look sorta out of place, too.

But all I see that really will add to this part of downtown is a few hundred extra residents. That's all. That is not a catalyst.

Could Frank Liu be the mysterious buyer of the KBR property?

Sources point to no.

If Lovett Homes Inc. is the only name he owns property under, I don't see an east side address for him per hcad - only a few on the west side, inner loop.

No, the entity name is Fenway Development Inc., which is linked to Frank Liu. He's already platted out all that land for townhome development just within the past year. You can look at the HCAD plat maps to see how it's configured.

EDIT: Here's a story about the cleanup process:

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/06/18/urban-renewal-toxic-brownfields-tough-to-redevelop/