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Nate99

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Everything posted by Nate99

  1. Nate99
  2. Nate99
  3. Nate99
    Do you head out around sunrise to avoid traffic?
  4. Nate99
    Good info, thanks. Interesting that the "immutable" angle gets any traction when the City is offering them an alternative location.
  5. Nate99
    Judging by those vents, Capitol St. is going to bellow delicious greasy-ness. If that doesn't bring vibrancy to Houston's street life, nothing will.
  6. Nate99
    They are moving fast on this one, very impressive.
  7. Nate99
    It's kind of open, at least if you wander around from Pennzoil, there's nothing/no one to stop you continuing through the tunnel level. It looks really well done. In one mole person's opinion, it's the best looking bit of the tunnels by far.
  8. Nate99
    Fun to dream, yes, but so many gigantic and glaringly obvious issues to get through. There's a template to approach something in that area if one was feeling similarly inspired, that is, start with flood mitigation and work with the CoE before you scare the pearl clutchers with your high rise renderings. It has been instructive listening to the local feedback loop. Every development is assumed to make flooding worse and traffic unmanageble, never mind that new/expanded roads and the storm drains that would come with them get massive resistance every time they are raised for discussion. Selling the locals on any kind of medium scale project or larger is going to be tough. These people really like their back yards exactly the way they are and are willing to indulge in fantasies about renegade sand pits and nefarious river authorities out to get them. It's a niche, we'll see if it holds value.
  9. Nate99
    The morning view down Capitol...
  10. Nate99
    I didn't mean to imply that institutionalization was the answer, just that it's not even an option until they do something worse than chronically ruin others' property. A reasonable expectation might be to use sites like what the city proposed, but it's not enough of a draw because it has some restrictions and/or they can't get cash for drugs as easily. Seattle, Los Angeles, Vancouver (BC), and San Francisco have provided varying levels of housing and that just attracts more people away from the Aldines and Cloverleafs across the US and Canada. One can live quite cheaply in all kinds of places if you don't cause trouble, but access to drugs is fairly limited off in the sticks, and it's even harder to panhandle to the wildlife. There are better/safer options already available for these people, but they can't hold it together long enough to use them. The secured dorm model is the shelter model that we have, and these people don't want that, unless you want to relax the rules, which I don't get the impression is at all workable, but maybe there is a middle ground. Peripheral personal experience and reading anecdotes are really all I have to go on, but I get the impression that people may end up in shelters for a short period of time due to bad luck, but unless they press that bad luck with addiction or mental health issues, they find somewhere to subsist off the streets, and there are a lot of resources to help people do that. If these programs are successful but overwhelmed, by all means, lets do more of that. But in the other case, it can be a full time job of a couple of people to keep just one person with addiction and/or mental health issues from harming themselves. That's a ton of resources, and the more resources cities use to provide accommodation, comparatively, the worse the local problem seems to get, and that's just easy economics. It's another one of those "hearts and minds" type issues that I think you have to fix over generations, but the drivers that land people on the streets seem to be getting worse, not better. As you point out, prison is very expensive and not at all proportional to the crimes committed, but literally crapping on the city is something I would start making compromises to individual liberties to address, but anything can be abused. No easy answers when people have nothing to lose. Maybe there are more success stories out there, lots of different cities dealing with this in different ways.
  11. Nate99
    Would that perhaps be a design feature intentionally scaled the way it is to keep a car that has inadvertently (or otherwise) jumped the curb from getting through to the glass and further on to the tunnels below? The planters would need to be thick enough to stop something heavy moving fast and the gap between them and the columns would need to be sufficiently narrow.
  12. Nate99
    Sorry, that was a private joke to myself, I should probably keep such things private. The press release-ish verbiage describing the food halls use the precise phrases "chef driven concept" and "local bar talent" with such regularity, I infer a lack of self-awareness on the author's part. It reads like boilerplate.
  13. Nate99
    But what about local bar talent?
  14. Nate99
    I knew about that thread, but the parking lot has been operational for some time now, figured I would start a new one if this meant something else was happening mods may choose to merge if they like.
  15. Nate99
    Corporate preference, I would guess.
  16. Nate99
    Not even sure they are real at this point, but those lights are seriously bright.
  17. Nate99
    Anyone have better permit-fu skills to see what's going on here? Best I could see was "Site work for parking lot 2012 IBC" (applied for in February), but it appears that the lot is closed, the kiosk was ripped out, and some drainage whatnot showed up (culverts and corrugated big diameter plastic pipe.) If it were to remain parking, I can't figure how/why it would need additional drainage, but perhaps around the perimeter.
  18. Nate99
    One more from across Milam. You can see the trees poking up from the tunnel level.
  19. Nate99
    Turner is a failure on so many fronts, but I will give him and the city one qualified bit of credit in trying to eliminate the campsites via an ordinance some years back. Apparently a judge found a constitutional right to camp on public rights of ways, so the city stopped enforcement. It appears that they threw in the towel after the judgement though, so my credit stops there. The idea was part of a larger effort to move these camps away from downtown to minimally restrictive sites with a few basic services to keep the spread of disease to a minimum and keep downtown's trajectory as a place that the rest of us, from dish washers to CEO's, actually want to be. "Affordable housing" and people living in underpass campsites do not belong in the same discussion. It's hijacking one visible emotional problem to serve another, completely separate issue. People that can not manage the most basic parts of a social compact are not a subsidized apartment away from benign, but apparently we can't legally institutionalize them or clear out their filth until there is some definitive public health hazard. There are dozens of private charities in Houston in addition government services that these people are not utilizing. As pointed out, cities with better climates and more generous public services have the problem far worse than Houston, we might want to use that as a marker for our next steps as a city. Panhandling every day around busy pedestrian areas nets enough cash for their addiction/self-medicating on occasion until they are either arrested, taken to a hospital or tragically die on our streets. This is not compassionate and it's not "grit", it's shameful. One case in point...
  20. Nate99
    Cool find! It reminds me that the Federal prison that takes up the next block up Texas was likely build when that part of DT was the absolute dregs. Now that would be an ambitious hotel conversion project, but one with a built in kitschy marketing angle. .
  21. Nate99
    Maybe Response is saying you can't scale back from nothing. Pretty easy to mentally confuse amusement concepts up in this end of town, hard to imagine that there would have been one, much less two (or three or four, depending on how you count). Good that the water park seems imminent, hope that it is very successful.
  22. Nate99
    They're really closing in on completion here, they have furniture in the lobby already.
  23. Nate99
    Still think something like this could be net beneficial if planned and executed appropriately, but that's a giant if. This latest round of flooding in Kingwood stinks to high heavens with a lot of suspicion on work around a new development outside of KW proper in Montgomery County just to the north of Elm Grove. The rainfall rates last Friday and this Tuesday were horrendous, but not unprecedented. Not sure how accurate/speculative any of this is, but here's a summary of what happened in Elm Grove. https://reduceflooding.com/2019/05/09/elm-grove-looks-for-answers-and-doesnt-have-to-look-far/?fbclid=IwAR1ClS0zJtGHCkmxgGmZ5LrpD5vlV_6HXIT9Zmq1NP2TOhBy2xRw-Ke259Q The issue here was insufficient storm runoff/detention capability, during Harvey, it was the river/lake rising. Seems like some civil engineering needs to happen either way. Oh, and while you're at it, how about adding an exit or three that doesn't get cut off during an emergency. Bridging Kingwood Drive to Huffman sounds like a good start.
  24. Nate99
    Time goes by faster than it used to, but it seems like the escalator steps and mechanicals were replaced probably 3--4 years ago all through 2HC. That couldn't have been cheap.
  25. Nate99
    It was a Brown Bag Deli, which isn't bad, but is strictly a lunch for office drones like nate99 type of a place, they moved to underneath 919 Milam, over by Becks Prime. A 7 day/week, open nights and weekends type popular franchise/concept displacing the five day, three-hour spot on Main is what the city needs more of.
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