Nate99

A couple more. They are definitely stripping the cladding. The windows are out of the upper floors too.

It kind of turned out that way, but I wasn't necessarily meaning for it to when I started the thread. I knew some folks see urban density as the be all/end all, but I didn't know the level of devotion they had to the idea would preclude the acknowledgement of a drawback to such a setup. In the end, it was probably a bad idea of a thread. Safe travels.

If you're not familiar, Long Island is a bit different than the Bolivar Peninsula. Hempstead, NY has about the same elevation as Sugar Land (~100 ft.), though points on LI are up to 400 ft. above sea level. Unless they were directly on the coast, they received little storm damage at all. The distiguishing difference in this comparison is where you would like to be without power in the greater metropolitain area. If I have to spell that out for you, Niche was right, this will be an absurd discussion.

I only have what I perceive to go by, so the sensationalism may be coloring my opinion, but it's not unsupported. Staten Island feels ignored, there was looting in Brooklyn and apparently three mile long lines for gas. Perhaps it's not a completely fair comparison, but it made landfall on Monday and four days later, it looks worse than I remember Ike being. If Long Island and NYC proper can't get gas today (which they can't), even if the roadways were open you'd have to drive a lot longer than 35 miles to find the next open station and pass a few million more people that are thinking of doing the same thing that you would in Houston. That all sounds definitively worse than what we had here. The "other problems to deal with" are precisely my point. One of them is density and a reliance on floodable tunnels for the transportation needs of millions. Ours are isolated and easily avoided. Would you rather live on Long Island after a Cat 1 like this or in Sugar Land after a Cat 3 like Ike? If you can honestly answer this as an either/or proposition, then you can call it even. After seeing what I have seen, I'm taking the latter. To me that means their situation is worse, but that's just my opinion.

Agreed there, it is my impression that the density of the area hit is making the recovery more difficult, and that density only occurs where people are dependent on public transportation. But it's not just correlation, for one, once power is restored piecemeal, you have millions more in range of those more limited than they otherwise would be resources. Finding gas four days after Ike for me was as hard as driving to Katy, that seems a lot better than what they are dealing with up there today. Everyone in Katy drives a lot, so there are a lot of gas stations there. Everyone on Long Island rides a train in, so there are not as many relative to the number of people, but they still want gas every bit as badly as we did after Ike and Rita. I don't recall Rita being anywhere near as bad once the initial outflux cleared. Perhaps I'm just stating the obvious, disasters on densly populated areas are worse, but the dependency on a system that can be completely knocked down as opposed to one that is more flexible seems a contributing factor to the problems that people are having. No one went dumpster diving for food in Meyerland. The bickering may be contrived, I probably shouldn't have taken kyle's bait to argue the same old "denser is better" argument, but my point is that private transportation and the related infrastructure is more flexible and useful in a disaster situation. No, you don't plan a city or where to live around that narrow set of circumstances. My point may have been framed poorly by the diversion, but it is not absurd.

Portland, Oregon is waiting for you with open bike paths and regional mobility commissions that are unquestioned, though perhaps not gainful employment. You can rid your angst and free up that support time that you devote to changing a very effective city in to something it does not want to be.

Were you in line for gas that entire distance? Did you evacuate after the storm hit? If not you're making a dissimilar comparison. The Rita evacuation was a monumental CF which one would expect of one of the largest urban evacuation ever attempted with basically zero planning. Nothing could keep up with that, but I stayed put and was able to get gasoline uninterrupted. Three or four days after Ike, I still had no power, but 35 miles away they did. I drove there, waited behind three cars and bought 50 gallons of gas. That's comparable to what is going on in the three mile lines you brought up. But I'm apparently arguing with a public transport fanboy, which is folly on my part. It has some upsides, but you throw straw men out and think you're defending its drawbacks. You can always move, presuming you do in fact live in Houston. I wish more people would.

I realize that the superiority of high urban density and public transportation is a sacrosanct notion to many around here. I just thought I'd poke the bear a bit. It's no panacea.

Better let the MTA know, they seem to believe otherwise. I'm not saying a "car plan" would work in NY, but if for some reason it could, you would have more gas stations and more highways to use to stock them up like other cites do. Their infrastructure to get gasoline to people that want it is clearly inferior to ours, and I posit that this is in part due to their dependence on public transportation.

There would never be a perfect comparison. I think it's more than fair to consider what you give up when you gain the advantages of an infrastructure that enables high-density living. You bring up a good point though. Even in one of the highest taxed and most publicly (federal and state) subsidized jurisdictions in the country they can't keep up with the maintenance and modernization of their system or cope well with unforseen externalities. To the extent that such a system is workable, it is only barely functional and very expensive.

Looking at the Sandy aftermath, and I can't help but remember how easy it was for me to drive on a wide freeway to Katy (that had power back in 3 or 4 days) to get gas and groceries and drive back to my house during Ike. With so many people in the NY metro area, any such area would be immediately swamped and the roads to get there completely jammed because the density is enabled only by mass transit that is not yet functional. No one was dumpster diving that I heard of. For whatever the upsides of mass transit and high density living, this is one major downside in a disaster, which we will have every 20 years or so. As for me, I'm tempted to look for ways to live in rural northern New Mexico. Fewer people, fewer problems.

This was Copyright 2011. I doubt that much has come of this.

Most Libertarians come lately arrived at their beliefs following a weekend on the green stuff; it's kind of a hallmark of their platform these days.

Fair points, analogies are only so useful. The Swedes just seem to have so few problems, apart from the unrelenting cold and horrid cuisine. I tend to agree that macro level marriage success is fairly dependent on the social universe that helped invent the concept in the first place. We're pretty far removed from that. I would be surprised though if there were a Swedish phrase analogous to "baby daddy". Still, the nuclear family model works, in as much as you follow it; trouble is, people can't really follow it unless everyone else does too. Women often have grander ambitions than home life, and men often are not wont to work for others exclusively. We came by these notions when we decided the traditional family wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Absent societal pressure to curb ambitions and be disciplined you're either going to fail or be miserable in the process. It's indeed interesting that women working, premarital sex, cohabitation, small families and other common aspects of modern life are all completely counter to the religious teachings that established marriage in the first place, but people that do all this still go get married in the church. Those with means have choices in how to go about "family" life, so should you be repelled by the nuclear family concept, you have options even here in the U.S. If you have no means, the correlation to life long persistent poverty and having children without a father around is extremely strong. I read a quote recently, where a Swede quipped, "in Sweden we have no unemployment", to which his American interlocutor responded, "all of the Swedish we have here are employed too". Your DNA hypothesis is likely accurate. I was just thinking how all the data would shake out. FWIW I'm fairly far to the right myself, though hardly in the Pat Robertson mold. I see great value in a religious life, but the among last people I'd want parsing that in to codified regulations are our elected representatives.

I thought I read that the Texaco redevelopment was at least working toward some manner of incentive from someone, but I agree with you, this plan gives the Texaco developers a lot of subsidized competition. Maybe the whole deal will be more of a first mover advantage than create tons of competing projects, but if they end up going after the same homeowners/tenants, one project in the new zone is value lost to the Texaco project.

Partially answering my question, they extended the scaffolvator all the way across to the other building.

Looks like they wanted to make sure that no one got an incentive to develop condos in Houston Pavillions, and they also zigged to avoid teh Texaco building.

Isn't 806 Main going to be a JW Mariott? I have no idea if corporately they would or would not not want to open two locations (albeit different brands) very near by in quick succession. The two hotels will obviously serve different purposes, so who knows.

I would imagine that you are correct. There are probably only four or five of us on the planet that would parse the language thoroughly enough to notice a difference.

News to me. Last I read, Skanska had Gensler working on "something" but it wasn't specific enough to be able to call it a "major office tower".

I've casually wondered what this nation would look like if no one dropped out of school, became addicted to drugs or alcohol, committed a felony or had children out of wedlock. Sweden, but warmer, I imagine.

I noticed someone doing what looked like sheetrock work on the third floor of the narrow strip of building with the yellowish panels that face Rusk. He was right above the window unit a/c in my pic above. Is that part contiguous internally with the 806 Main building? It is a different height, but could be a section that was not raised when the original building added the additional floors way back when.

St. Anne's (the church across Westheimer from Adobe) uses the lot for overflow parking for nearly all of its surfaces. It wouldn't be a proper Catholic church if it had adequate parking.

A coouple of shots from today. Looks like they have a scaffold/elevator setup on the Rusk side, perhaps to start stripping off the facade.

Love this one... http://www.flickr.com/photos/sundayssignatures/2441818882/sizes/l/in/photostream/