travelguy_73

Kingwilliam, thanks so much for your insight, pictures, and links. Being a native of the area, I have followed this thread with interest, and find the debate to be, ummm, interesting. While I don't plan to move back to SA, my parents will surely be there until they die, and I am always trying to get them back into the city to see all the good things that are going on. Who knows, maybe one day they will decide that retirement is lame and old houses are a good way to keep active.

And I love the transformation of Commerce Street! Hiding the unsightly power lines makes so much difference!

Wow, you got the check written out to just you? Everyone I'm talking to tells me that anything more than $5 grand is getting cut to the homeowner and the mortgagee. And it takes forever to handle the paperwork that goes along with all that. A week, I wish!

Yes, it surprised us as well, and our payout was around $10k. I had even already contacted BofA to find out the procedure (send the check to Phoenix, wait, wait some more). I thought it was an oversight, but same thing happened with our neighbor and Nationwide, even after they told both of us that it would be a co-endorsement.

Cotton, that is terrible and I really feel for you. Your story could be any of ours, and it is more luck than anything. I am not eligible for USAA, but before your story, would have jumped at the chance to be covered.

I guess we ended up pretty lucky. We had to replace our asbestos tile roof and two of three sides of fence. Nationwide's contractor adjuster came out within a couple of weeks, wrote it all up, and we had a settlement about a week later. And it was actually right on the money. They said they would have to make it payable to us and the mortgage company, but then they ended up just writing the check to us, which saved at least a week in delay.

We replaced the fence with our own labor to recoup some of the 2% deductible, M&M replaced the roof (very nice job), and all seems well. Of course, our insurance rates will go through that new roof next year, but we will all be in the same sinking boat at that point.

If it makes you feel any better, don't forget that you can tax deduct casualty losses denied by insurance. The threshold is pretty high, but at least you get something back.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc515.html

I like Stewart in that location, because I guarantee that if they move, they are moving to the suburbs. There are far too few car dealerships left inside the loop. Besides, that dealership is clean and employs a lot of people from nearby communities (many of whom might just take the rail). And I guess it goes without saying that they were here long before most of the residents .

I covered the cannas and crotons, but left everything else uncovered and all of the plants seem to be doing just fine. Eastwood got a nice blanket of the white stuff Man, I need a better camera...

My Parkwest house had about 20 piers, but amazingly my Willow Meadows house didn't have a single one and every door closed and every window opened.

The article doesn't really bother me. I would rather live in this kind of community than with some old ladies that would call the cops every time I turn the radio up too loud.

In all seriousness though, there hasn't been anything that anyone has heard that would cause so many of them to be in foreclosure?

I believe it is more a function of the market, and a number of lofts owned by investors or others who qualified but shouldn't have. I haven't heard anything negative about the place, other than the parking is all carport-ish.

I ended up throwing the product away, but I did keep the envelope "just in case."

Having owned a home in Parkwest for a few years, I can attest to the quality of the neighborhood. Many of the benefits of Meyerland, but without the Meyerland price.

Does anyone know why was this house was facing backwards? Was it moved from another location? Did it originally face Rusk, owners sold part of the lot, the house was moved back towards Walker, and someone built another house in front of it?

I had heard that the house was moved from the Heights (or the Heights area) and intentionally put on the lot backwards.

You might try posting on the Credit Boards forum. They have a mortgage section that was very valuable when we were researching our options.

OK, so I'm off this week, just taking care of a number of little house projects that have been piling up. The neighborhood postal worker comes to the door and asks me to sign for a registered package. I do, curious about what I ordered but forgot about. It is a thin package from India, and the customs declaration says it is a dietary supplement. Wait, what? Hesitant, I open it (but not without calling my partner first to tell him that if I am dead when he gets home, it is due to the mystery package!).

Inside is a small package of ProVigra2Go, which (upon searching) is sort of like Viagra. It is from a company named Tulip Lab Private Limited.

OK, it sounds SO spammer, and I have no idea how I got it because it isn't like the package is To Current Resident, and it isn't like I put my real address on anything questionable online. And no snarky comments, LOL, I'm just curious if anyone else has had such an experience.

We were in New Orleans over the holiday weekend visiting my sister. We drove down into the Ninth Ward to see the "Brad Pitt homes" (Make It Rightas well as the one that This Old House redid last season. That part of NOLA--talk about devastation! Any bad feelings I had toward Houston's "prolonged" recovery were wiped away after seeing NOLA. Disgust isn't a strong enough word.

We had our roof replaced a couple of weeks ago, and should be finishing up our fence replacement this weekend. So, for us, everything is returning to normal.

The US Accord split off from the international version several generations ago. Amazing that a car once known for being trim and agile is now a bit of a bloat-mobile.

My dad has an 08 Accord EXV6, which he proudly calls his "old man car" (got it after his company-leased Range Rover expired in more ways than one). It has a very nice interior, but is as floaty as a Japanese car can be.

And what happened to channel 77, audio visions? This was my anti-road rage channel. I could put it on and just relax during a 5 hour drive. Now it's not even there. Or am I on crack, anyone else know what happened to it? I know there is the Escape channel which I think is meant to be sort of the same, but it's more light jazz, and nothing kills my relaxation like retarded wussy vocals. I need a relaxing, instrumental channel, or people on the road are going to pay.

Spa must be the replacement. My stereo autoprogrammed it into the preset I had for AudioVisions.

That's the euro tsx you posted. I don't believe there is a JDM version of the TL.

flipper

You are correct. Our TSX is everyone else's Accord. No one (except perhaps some random Asian or Latin countries) gets our Accord, and no one else outside NA gets the TL. The TSX is now the least offensive of the Acura passenger cars.

This is good to see. There are so many people in the world who are steps away from being forgotten by society and, as a civil society, we owe a basic standard of living.

"From the outside looking in, you can't understand it. And from the inside looking out, you can't explain it"

I had a terrific undergrad experience at A&M. There are aspects of Bryan and College Station I don't care for, but they were mainly related to the subpar student housing (cheap, though!) and the missed opportunities for additional mixed use developments close to the school, instead of all the suburban-style apartment complexes. Still, it is a fine place to attend school, and my couple of friends who live there permanently live there because it is perfect for them.

Would I love for it to look like Ithaca (my ideal college town), all hilly and full of little shops and crunchy granola students? Sure that would be cool, but my housing would have cost twice what it did and I probably wouldn't have been able to get away with having my education fully paid for.

I think it is silly for those who have never lived there, and don't know anything about it other than random trips in and out, to criticize. We hate it when people do that to Houston and its residents, why act all high brow with BCS?

We are going to New Orleans to see my sister, who moved to the uptown area earlier in the year. It will be my first time in NO in years, and we are looking forward to touring the old neighborhoods and generally being liquored up most of the weekend .

I think we are supposed to bring the turkey, but all those bottles of wine take up a lot of space!

So we went to the LA Auto Show this past weekend. Used to go to Detroit, but LA has proven to be formidable competition, and the weather is so much nicer than DTW. Anyway, just because things are a bit slow today, I thought I would share my personal hit and miss list from the show. I kept the list short...there were many more!

Hit:

(1) Volkswagen CC: An MB CLS for half the price. Visually stunning and, if the crappy VW dealer network doesn't ruin it, then VW has a niche hit on their hands

(2) Nissan 370Z: The freshened styling looks very nice, IMO. What doesn't work on the new Maxima works well here.

(3) Infiniti G37 convertible: Another hit for Nissan. This thing is drop dead gorgeous in person.

(4) Honda Insight concept: So very Prius-looking, but lovely nonetheless.

(5) Hyundai Genesis coupe: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the Koreans have certainly learned this trade. Hyundai has made incredible strides in a short amount of time, and the Genesis sedan and coupe show what this automaker is capable of. I hate to say it, but the Big 3 could learn a thing or two.

(6) Kia Soul: I love the direction that small cars are going: funky, efficient, and customizeable. R.I.P. Cobalt!

Miss:

(1) BMW 7-series: The current one is atrocious, and this one is only marginally better.

(2) Nissan Cube: While I like the overall idea, this one is sort of cartoonish. A Scion for teenage girls?

(3) Lexus RX350: A terrible redo. I don't like the direction Toyota styling is taking.

(4) BMW X6: I still don't get it. Got to have some fun with it at a ride-and-drive and, while it drives very well, it is horribly impractical and overpriced.

(5) Acura TL: Ugly from every single angle. They took a wildly successful near-luxury car and ruined it. Being a former TL owner, I am deeply sadened by this new generation. The TL, TSX, and RL are so ugly that they make the 7-series look good.

I gotta agree with just about all of them with the exception of the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse. I kinda like the windows on it ... not sure why...

A couple of years ago, I would have called this THE ugliest building, at least downtown. But now I agree that the windows are fantastic. Not the red trim around them, but their look.

Is there where Minute Maid Park is now? Perhaps taken from downtown looking past what is now the 59 elevated and toward Navigation?

Bus Station

I grew up on the north side of SA, but now when I go home I try and spend as much time exploring the inner city as possible. Niche, you are correct that there is so much potential there! Not being an expert on such things, I would guess that SA is still a a decade behind Houston in rediscovering its urban core. There are bits and pieces of gentrification outside the usual urban neighborhoods that were rediscovered long ago, but it doesn't seem like there is all that much. And given the incredible amount of historic (or at least old) housing stock, there seems to be more potential than exists in Houston to buy a cool old house cheap and renovate it.

SA residents generally appear to still be fleeing to the suburbs. Perhaps it has something to do with not having a strong central business district, or perhaps the CBD isn't strong because the northern neighborhoods have been dominant for so long.

I miss Flight26 already, but I am loving BBC Radio 1 and Hair Nation (a guilty pleasure). And is NPRNow new for XM?

One of the ones I had called several weeks ago initially said they were at over 900 call backs. SO, I called them a week ago and now they say no estimates until 2009. May as well put a recording that says "leave us alone"

M&M just finished ours up today. They did a good job and cleaned up the yard, which I appreciated. After many a sleepless night (everytime a storm rolled through), it is nice to have a solid roof again.