Jump to content

Nate99

Full Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    2,803

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    85

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Nate99

  1. Nate99
    I don't disagree with this point, but this building had been surrounded by a sea of decay and surface lots for decades. The Houston Press did a really good article on nasty abandoned buildings by walking out their front door and walking around for a handful of blocks. The old part of the Savoy was crumbling into the ground and the Days Inn persists to this day. Now, you have the nice YMCA across the street, the old Christian Scientist church is a nightclub (not sure if that's good or bad) and the newer part of the Savoy was rehabbed, and yet, Chevron was the high bidder with what would have to be obvious intentions. Maybe if the old Exxon tower is redeveloped that would flip the value on the location (and even the whole area), but I fear that thing could as likely end up a hideous duplicate of the Days Inn situation as it could a successful project. In any case, expecting an owner to go long on this property for the upside of character that it might bring to a neighborhood that might never exist is a tough sell. The kind of "personality" an older building might give to a neighborhood is worth something, but apparently not enough for anyone to try and make a go of it here. It's a "classic tragedy of the commons" situation, where someone harms a public resource for their own benefit. When that public resource is the aesthetics of another's private property, I can't get worked up about it, but again, I realize I am in the minority here. Redevelopment worked for the Rice, Texaco, Magnolia, etc., but again, how much that is worth vs. how much public money it takes for someone to bother with it is an obscure political matter that won't sway any elections.
  2. Nate99
    Fair enough, we all want to make things better, whatever better is for us. I just bristle at political power being used on something that accomplishes a nebulous benefit at specific cost, but if I'm being honest, the mixture of local government and real estate tends to be nasty however you slice it. That and my heritage in this town, while three generations deep, isn't anything that couldn't have occurred with other buildings standing in the background. To your earlier point, historic home neighborhoods have a more compelling case to me, but I don't think I would choose one myself. It's more of a peculiar deed restriction at that point, which undoubtedly can increase property value. Plenty of weirder examples of what people can, can't and must do in their neighborhoods than to maintain the existing style. In places like downtown, there are a fair amount of older buildings sitting empty or inhabited by low-rent businesses long-term. To me that indicates that there is not that hard of a pull for that type of market, though the number of conversions and rehabilitations is a good sign. Whether it is worth however much was paid in incentives would be dependent entirely on the economists' assumptions, so I take that with a grain of salt. There are also a few that are known to have serious structural/mechanical issues that make rehabilitation a long shot, which might have been the case here, Chevron said it was past it's useful life, but maybe that just means to them.
  3. Nate99
    Was there an incentive paid for the early downtown revitalization efforts that you reference? I know that there is some kind of Main Street district/preservation zone, but to the extent that folks find historical stuff worth the cost, I have no problem whatsoever with it and am glad to see it work. If we sent the city deeper in to debt to get people off of Richmond (or even to get the Super Bowl), that's where I have a problem. Entertainment districts seem to ebb and flow. Richmond, downtown, midtown, Washington, etc., seem to have run the course, but I could not tell you if there were any organized effort behind incentivizing it. I thought it was just people doing good work putting up successful businesses driving things organically until something else of interest popped up and the crowd changed.
  4. Nate99
    Every property is going to be unique, not sure why there wasn't a buyer on this one that wanted it more than Chevron would for (presumably) future downtown campus speculation/optionality, but if a bidding war started, I bet Chevron would have won in any case. If what you see for your properties becomes a trend, I would guess there is a tipping point that once crossed ends up keeping the older stuff safe from being demolished, that is, there are enough people that want the few remaining older buildings that the scarcity holds the value up. There are a few similar era buildings over closer to the courthouses (I'm thinking along Prairie) that look like they would be candidates for redevelopment. My question was the inverse of the "why are you on this forum" question asked by another immediately above my post. It's not the best question, but I mimicked the syntax for an effect that was missed, but I should have seen that coming. I meant to mock people talking past each other. The emotional reaction to the loss of something in the background of your life is not something I identify with much. I didn't think it was necessarily unreasonable to ask if people might be happier somewhere else where this doesn't happen as frequently, and the actual history was more compelling than a former Pontiac showroom. But I'm on record here for being ok with tearing down Grand Central Station, so I know I am an outlier. Every position has a tradeoff, the preservation "this is my home that I cherish" argument is asking someone else to pay for your aesthetic enjoyment. The only honest response I hear to this fact is "but it's worth it", which is easy to say from the perspective that doesn't have a significant amount of money tied up in a particular property. The available remedy is for preservationists to buy the property themselves and do what Kinkaid is doing to good result, and I wish him and others luck. Losing the variety of older buildings is unfortunate, and I like the look of them myself, but not nearly enough to insult the owners on the internet or push for legal restrictions on what they can do. I will stipulate that it is possible that, on net, a more preservationist approach could lead to a more valuable city, but we haven't yet needed it in Houston over my lifetime to provide a productive home for several million new residents that wouldn't otherwise have had as good of a choice. I hold the lack of restrictions on personal property to be a more legitimate and worthwhile motive than continuing to see the structures that you have seen in the past, but it's all a matter of what you value more and within the political process to manage as you point out. We all have an interest in everything we observe. Yours is a legitimate position to take, and I disagree with it.
  5. Nate99
    We all pick our tradeoffs, whether or not we acknowledge them.
  6. Nate99
    Interesting that some view disagreement as an attack. Pointing out the trade offs of preservationists is not yelling. The impulse to enlist government regulations to have the world underwrite your aesthetic preferences, or directing specific insults at property owners that choose not to do so at their own private expense seems misguided to some of us and we occasionally point it out. If expressing such opinions has no place in an architecture forum, whoever controls this place is free to ban users. It should go without saying that people are free to disagree with opinions, but to do so on the internet always seems to run straight to insults and moralizing, which is a shame. Despite the apparent initial intentions for the site, there's very little architecture discussion here and a lot around general development. That's why those of us that were exposed to more economics professors than architecture professors have showed up over the years. In between these types of threads, there is a good discussion of how things are changing here and some of us that don't value old buildings all that much still find that content very interesting. Old structures are not the entirety of history, and they impose real incremental costs on the people that must use or maintain them if they are not allowed to pursue other alternatives as they wish. Sometimes it ends up being ugly, other times it ends up allowing another thousand people to support their families. Or, to put it another way... This city cherishes fewer restrictions on the use of private property. It's part of why this city has grown at such a furious pace. If preservation of old buildings is that important to them then why are they in a city like this?
  7. Nate99
    At least they are still working on it, though it appears the three guys in the picture may be the only ones given the pace.
  8. Nate99
    Commuting sucks, but it happens everywhere there are concentrated jobs. The tradeoffs are fairly well established, you pay in money or time for any upside to your living situation. If you can tolerate downsides that other people won't, for whatever reason, you can enjoy some bargains.
  9. Nate99
    Apart from some windows on that side, I don't know that the banking hall is going to be that impacted, though it sits mostly empty with fewer bank walk-ins these days as compared to when it was designed. In the interior, there are two big blank wall that will be eliminated making the whole place more hall-ish..
  10. Nate99
    Random crap is in the eye of the beholder. I look forward to the re-vote.
  11. Nate99
    I've been on a couple of forums that were owned and operated by enthusiastic folks that got busy with the rest of their lives and these boards followed the same trajectory. It's all manageable in some volunteer moderator's spare time until it isn't, then you have to upgrade software, hardware and/or hire a pro and it get expensive, time consuming or both. If they have folks willing to step up to do it, I don't see why they wouldn't pass along the name to give someone else a kick at it.
  12. Nate99
    Free internet forums don't pay the bills. For a place with inactive site admins, it's a miracle this place hasn't cratered altogether. I don't know who owns it and keeps the domain up, but they clearly have other priorities, and I for one can't blame them.
  13. Nate99
    Chinese language scammers are stepping up the spam lately. If you get an automated call on your phone in Chinese, odds are it is the phishing scam that is telling you that there is a problem with your visa and you have to call them to resolve it. I have received it twice, and had a work colleague translate.
  14. Nate99
    Not a talk radio listener, but I say, make the dignitaries go out to that forsaken municipal courthouse building in Alief to which I was summoned for jury duty if they spent all of the drainage tax money before getting to pretty lobby furniture.
  15. Nate99
    It looks pretty serious down there. Residents in the Rice, Aris and MST are going to need to get used to the sound of jackhammers for a while.
  16. Nate99
    True, though clearly there was no ironclad quid pro quo within those incentives to have a real brick exterior, or at least no will to enforce it.
  17. Nate99
    Two weeks later...
  18. Nate99
    I doubt we'll ever get the full story, but it looked like the mastic over the original brick on the J.W. might have precluded anything other than a complete re-bricking if they wanted to stay original. The parts that they stripped down to bare brick looked like hell. They took a long time with the façade partially stripped off, and maybe it was a cheapskate call at the end of the day, but it did look like they considered rehabbing it.
  19. Nate99
    Right. I'm certainly no visionary, but it seems like it would be more trouble than it is worth.
  20. Nate99
    De gustibus non est disputandum. Unless you're talking preservation of old buildings, we have very odd rules, or not, for that.
  21. Nate99
    You could always dig them out deeper with the existing floor being the new lake level; I'm sure the civil engineers could come up with something given enough funding. The creeks that feed into Barker and Addicks are pretty tiny outside of flood events, that might make these lakes semi-stagnant, though one might say the same of the existing bayous.
  22. Nate99
    I wonder how accommodating these plans are of the existing tenants. After 2pm, it's a mausoleum in there, but the existing food court hall does brisk business at lunch. I suppose if they dress up the staff at Doozo and Chick-Fil-A in trendy outfits and place a few buzzwords on the menu boards, folks might not know the difference. Getting bar traffic in there will be a challenge, but I've been surprised how many people Discovery Green draws in, so hopefully that carries over. I still refer to the area as "The Park Shops", maybe the third name is the charm. I had a theory that the Bennigan's that was in there failed (a decade before the whole company went down the tubes) because of the lack of alcohol sales that help to support profits of the casual restaurant biz.
  23. Nate99
    I was being a little snarky before about the nomenclature; every "food hall" seems to have "concepts" that are "chef driven". If it is a food court with better quality, bring 'em on. Whoever writes the ad copy seems to be grabbing buzzwords and it seems that a lot of these things will be (or are at least at some stage planned to be) hitting all at once. Poorly run restaurants and/or bad food won't last long anywhere and good food will always be popular. Seems like they set these things up to have the tenants come and go, so what works stays and what doesn't gets replaced, supposing they have enough chefs to step up and pay the rent.
  24. Nate99
    They were putting some bracketry on the Milam street side just today.
  25. Nate99
    Looks like we are going to need about three dozen chefs downtown to drive their concepts, we've got a hell of a food hall backlog building up.
×
×
  • Create New...