X.R.

They are flying, the crane going up.

So what are people hoping happens with this? Torn down and something new (just not a surface parking lot), or restoring the building and using it for something else (I assume this would be faster than a tear down)? I guess I assume, based on the listing itself, that if anything happens to it then it will be an reuse or restore. Its strange that with all the development in DT, including development in that area, that no one has taken a chance on the building. They should make it like the city museum in St. Louis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Museum . Make the top floor a bar and restaurant with all glass walls because of the view would be great, call wolfgang puck and tell him the space is his.

I think I went back and forth with various peeps, including @Houston19514 and I think iah, about lightrail and my automatic disposition towards it, and I gotta say, they helped me rethink it and seeing the maps with the various funds associated with each line really shows that for somewhere like Houston, with so much ground to cover, BRT might be the better option. Cheers to people helping other people see the other side of things. The BRT lines for uptown, inner katy, and IAH look...great! Almost exactly what Houston needs. So Richmond will have dedicated, enforced lanes like Uptown or nah? They have to, right? Otherwise its moreso MetroBoost?

I drive through Midtown a lot, both on the weekends and during weekdays either during rush hour or after, and I gotta say that the City needs to figure out a way to make what I call "middle midtown" a bit more inviting. East midtown (closer to 288) is alot of townhomes and has smaller businesses like Gypsy Poet, the boxing gym, and is slowly having businesses open up over there. Theres some people outside sometimes (😂), maybe going to grover or baldwin park. So thats OK. West Midtown (bagby to main) obviously has the apartments and the food and bars and a whole foods/Randalls and a whole bunch of other stuff. But it almost feels like two completely separate areas despite being like 3 streets away from each other, and i think in part its because of Fanin/San Jacinto being two mini-highways. Since nothing is being done about that, there needs to be something that ties the two together and maybe this could help. This helps start to break down some of the older stuff that designated Midtown as as an area for people to drive through instead of being a place where people actually live and prosper. And as long as they maintain an entrance and exit on 527, I think its the best of both worlds. I'd vote for any of the 3 proposals, tbh. I kinda like leaving the old Bridge in place because its very Houston - my life in Houston has always revolved around freeways and its only right that a communal green-space is in the shadow of a freeway exit ramp.

Oooo will check it out. I sort of stay away from the gravel areas of the park, aka the main trail, because I feel like such a dick sometimes on my bike because of how many people are walking. Anyone else feel like that? I know that might be strange. The bayous are home for my bike, but man when Hermann park is busy I just dunno about getting on the gravel trail.

I spend alot of time on 59 by those entrances and exits and the amount of traffic actually exiting into downtown in the mornings and afternoons during rush hour are tiiiny compared to the people trying to stay on 59 (frustratingly so, because people will just sit in the spur exit lanes and then cut back into 59). Actually, when I moved to the area to be closer to work I didn't really understand why those exits and entrances existed (I never had taken them as a young adult) because they seemed so empty and kind of out of place when compared to 288/59. But they are convenient. Despite the convenience, I don't really know why there are multiple exits cause they all just drop you into Midtown. I split time between the galleria and downtown for work, Bagby is crazy busy on the other side of 45 during rush hour, midtown bagby is nothing compared to that. You could probably lop of a whole lane on Fanin and San Jacinto and Caroline and no one would notice. Fanin especially. All three are just people gunning through midtown to get to DT or the highways/MD/Med Center (raises hand). To me, the writing probably was on the wall for the bagby exit/entrance when Whole Foods got there. It meant real development money is going to come into that area, and the way its currently constructed is basically unacceptable. Something had to change. You have three traffic lights on top of each other, so if you're texting your special someone while driving you might see a green but really you have a red (they almost got me). Then you realize that there is an entire neighborhood of actually very, very expensive houses to your right when taking the Bagby entrance ramp that are completely walled off. Whole foods probably looking at that like, nahhh bro, what we gotta do to give these people easier access to our store. I will bet everyone alot of money if another big tenant moves onto bagby in that new development by old st. danes, the city will have another "ah ha!" moment when it comes to walkability in that area.

Yeah you could take Bayou to Columbia tap but that always made me feel like I was going out of my way to go back up. Plus, at the very least, you have to access Brays either at the light on Almeda or cross somewhere else in the park to get into the bayou which then has me surrounded by usually fast traffic. I like this because to me it feels like less of a hassle, cars are a little slower. So basically, if I want the extra exercise its Bayou to Columbia, otherwise its the new way. Gray is super-duper nice. Goes from Bagby down to the Columbia Tapp, but the portion of nearest to the columbia tap for like three streets is a sharrow. Then it gets protected. With Bagby in downtown getting the facelift its getting, I'm wondering if bike volume on Bagby in Midtown will go up. That area, with all the apartments, need something other than the sidewalk (since people actually walk in that area) that is away from the cars to allow for bikes.

Seems some people at Rice thought it would have been better where some of the startups already are/where other businesses are near Galleria and/or San Filipe.

Looks like Hutchins is getting done really quick: Not the biggest fan of Hutchin's development, but its 100% better than the old bike lanes like the ones in East downtown/Wesleyan. And this shows that Cleburne is going to be done sooner than later: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/February-News-and-Updates.html?soid=1118751441959&aid=v8XUCwq_TFI So from Hermann park you can take either Caroline or La Branch (both have generally slow traffic, easy to be on the road with cars), take a right on Cleburne, take Hutchins to Gray and then access East Downtown via the Columbia Tap. On mostly high-comfort bike lanes. Thats amazing considering where Houston was 10 years ago.

The head of Rice's endowment said the church isn't going anywhere and they have been giving input during the development process, if I remember correctly. It was either during a presentation or the looped in pod. He seemed pretty pleased with, and complimented, having the church there, saying they were one of the few things that hadn't abandoned that area. @HoustonIsHome the nice thing about TMC3 is that it extends the urban landscape further toward NRG, so maybe in the future NRG won't be considered too far from much?

Wait what? Their putting a bike path next to the redline? Is this...real life? Huge news if true. Main in downtown and Midtown is basically a sharrow, but man people can still be assholes despite being stuck on a one lane road going 30mph. edit: @wilcal what is this sorcery?

Not really, I use that garage once a week-ish, and to me its just antiquated in design. Getting in and out sucks. It also doesn't make sense for its location, you get some foot traffic walking to the park over there. When are the repairs supposed to be done? I know they are kind of zooming, but I feel like this has been going on a while, and the lobby in the houston center is a little...rough with all of the construction stuff.

Yeah, I actually have two different friends in the same exact position as your friend (and one set of parents and their friends are the ones who were buying land to sell to the train peeps). One about 40 mins south of Dallas and the other is about an hour north of downtown Houston. Only one tried to convince his parents that doing weekly checks on the farm could work, lol. There is going to be a townhall: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/transportation/article/Brady-to-host-Navasota-town-hall-with-opponents-15054362.php

Yeah, there is another map that showed that the burger joint and its loveable-but-janky parking lot will be staying where it is. Learned this the other day, if you go there on a bike, you get 10% off. One can hope maybe the collective retail/cafe people see that and decide to also do that...you know...to encourage walkability and stuff. Impressive, and maybe shows a bit of what the developers are about, that they are preserving the trees. They know how to get to a montrose resident's heart. Edit: this was what I was referring to, which I think shows BJ is being left alone but maybe not the parking lot.

Wait, you guys know people specifically bought land to sit on it and wait for these people to buy it from them, right? Vanity project or not, parts of that land was land people held in the hopes of selling it for this train.

Every time I ride that connector I think about how they could have been making money on that portion of 288 for the past year, since that technically is the toll portion. But they are so seemingly unorganized I'm sure they haven't met some percentage-of-roadwork-finished criteria to trigger their ability to turn on the EZ tag scanners that have already been partially installed (according to a friend on the construction crews). My favorite thing is that its clear they are also simultaneously supposed to be landscaping those green spaces since you can see they have started to break up some concrete and in some areas plant some plants but even that is done in splotches and not in sync the road construction. What a weird mess.

Downtown slowly getting all of the amenities people have been clamoring for. So now you'll have Lifetime, the Met, and YMCA all in downtown, and if LifeTime Fitness has those lounge areas and fast-healthy food like the other locations then the downtown businesses and offices without a gym/lounge area of their own can now provide that service to their employees as a benefit of being at the DT location. And DT residents can go there too, I guess 😆 Thanks @wilcal!

I like it, looks nice from the freeway and on the street the arches are kinda nice to look up at. I know some argued about its architecture, but this kind of reminds me of the Georgian-type stuff you'd see in College. Put another one of these just North on the same street and you could really be starting something in a part of midtown that is a little under-utilized for the average pedestrian.

Holy crap, its actually happening. I drive by that area every few days, and just getting rid of that old building and putting anything on it (including a mattress firm) would be a huge improvement and make that area seem a little less...cold and deserted. Putting a 10 story medical building with constant traffic will 100% spur development in a tiny pocket of land that is strangely devoid of it and maybe rehabilitate some of those older buildings (some are actually quite nice).

A bar area? I can get my drink on at the park without my typical brown paper bag? Sign me up!

So that whole video that was posted in the thread is opening this year? Thats pretty impressive if so. Was there any reason why it took so long for stuff to grow? I guess if memory served me right, the ground there was kinda hard.

Three stories worth, supposedly. As a thought experiment, with this where it is a short train ride and a short walk from Randalls, got Yoga nearby in midtown, YMCA, the bars, and the foodhalls this is a place where maybe in another city the parking would be outsourced or the actual provided parking would be minimal. Its a nice spot. I do own a car though, so if I lived there I would definitely park it somewhere, so I'm not trying to be hypocritical, but eventually I think I'd be like "hmmmmm, do I really need this now?" (especially if the loss of the car payment helps alot, which it would).

Thought this was going to be CVS or something when walking by it until I checked this thread. 😅 This is one of the few developments where I kinda question the amount of parking spots. Its right on the light rail, and the people who live here probably will work either in DT or Med Center. You can take Lamar on a bike to the bayou and then to the Heights or the Park or to school at UHD. Still, exchanging a parking lot for 200+ units that aren't SUPER LUXURY like some of the other spots in DT/Midtown is a win. Need more stuff like this. I don't think you really get the kind of development, the cafe's and what not, that people clamor for until you have people at multiple price points in a market, but I may be wrong.

I'm at the point where I'm wondering if they checks just haven't cleared the GC's because they have the hallmarks of the type of projects I've been around where funding comes in spurts. Then when funding does come, they throw everyone at it as fast as they can generating unneeded overtime bills. You'll see people working late night/overtime and then nothing for a month in good weather. Lol, and people think i-45 is going to be done in 5 years or whatever. The crazy part is that decent portions of 288 has been done for a while, they just can't tie everything together.

Yeah it is going over OST because there is going to be that bridge that they showed in the video, the one with the bikes and people and autonomous cars. What kind of underrated is that they are building a pedestrian friendly way of getting from the bayou/TMC North/Hermann Park to OST without, you know, dying.