IronTiger

Well, besides the fact that it wasn't just whites that left a lot of these cities (demographic shifts happen to every single demographic--tell that to Old Chinatown in East Downtown), when using the term white flight it becomes an inherent race issue and you run the risk of sounding like a huge racist in the process, which is why that term shouldn't be used. The people who look at demographics and turn suburbs into a race issue (focusing on the race and not the policies) are cut from the same cloth of the people who will blame black mayors for ruining cities (in the Northeast, mostly) with a straight face (focusing on the race and not the policies). That being said, is there a more neutral term to sprawl?

How did Midtown, then, get a Fiesta in the late 1980s (1988 according to articles) and a Randalls then? Midtown was in decline for a lot of the latter part of the 20th century, and lost a lot of houses. (I don't know when the Randalls was built, HCAD is returning 2225 Louisiana as a home in Deer Park), and yet it's had two grocery stores for a number of years? EDIT: I found out that Fiesta actually sits on land owned by Sears, and when it opened, Sears coordinated an interior spruce-up with the opening. While it's kinda cool that Fiesta opened as a complement to Sears, it's a safe bet that Fiesta will outlast it.

I know that Bridgeland wants to open a "town center" of sorts in the center of their development, but details are sparse and that's years away anyway.

Thanks. She was really suffering, but now she's in a better place.

Yeah, they found a lot more dissolved gasoline plumes than expected, and current environmental laws would require cleaning that up before it's disturbed (like, say, with an underpass). Makes you wonder how polluted the rest of the area actually is...

Because of your traffic flow predictions, or is it alluding to your insane plan involving mobs of angry anti-Culberson protesters to start bashing some heads in and burning houses?

Yes, even once classic Texas towns like Lockhart and Bastrop are fast becoming bedroom communities for Austin, and after all, Katy and Sugar Land were once independent towns with economies until they were "poisoned" with suburbs. On the upshot, their economies are now better than ever with the blue-collar jobs replaced with white-collar commuters. So...is this a bad thing overall? Of course the reverse holds true, too. The suburbs are often painted in a negative light, it doesn't matter if they're ethnically diverse (with great restaurants), better traffic, cleaner, greener, etc.

Sprawl is a loaded word, I agree (and then we go back to the "urban snob" word) but not nearly as much as "white flight", because once you introduce race into the mix you're more or less implying that the "white man" held up the city and once they left, the city goes to hell (which makes things really uncomfortable if that wasn't your intent) As for the city stopping, the line goes between "city" and "suburb". Arguably, the current line for this is still the Beltway (or past it). As for sprawl stopping, I think that the intents of stopping sprawl are aimed to prevent loss of countryside and invest in the city more (since there typically tends to be abandoned space). Radicals may have some sort of anti-suburban bent to try to do this, but I think it's just misguided principles in general. But I really don't know, I remember my cousin (from a few weeks ago) talking about how the sprawl marches on, yet he's the one who lives south of the Pearland city limits, so even those in the far south 'burbs still talk about it.

Well, on average, and older hotels, and I do take that back. Usually by the time it's changing names to things you've never heard of, it's in trouble, or if it changes names to hide a bad reputation (Southwest Inn, nee Roadrunner Inn, was a hellhole and the name change did little to change that)

Yeah, everyone generally holds the opinion that sprawl is bad, and of course, suburbs have a bad reputation too. I could fill an entire iTunes library with anti-suburb songs. (Well, at least one, anyway). But the idea isn't to bash sprawl/suburbs, it's to discuss it, just like a discussion on the University Line isn't supposed to be "Look guys, I bought a giant Culberson piñata. Have at it!"

It may have. Usually hotels of that age go through at least 3-4 rebrandings beyond its original one. A lot of hotels in general change names on an average of every 10 years or so.

Well, a Whole Foods downtown would tend to give a net gain of zero in terms of a "large, affordable supermarket downtown" because WF is expensive and while I've never been to Phoenicia, I imagine there'd be overlap in products offered and customers served. Furthermore, it would need to be amazingly popular with lots of foot traffic to go for a supermarket with nearly no surface parking, but if you were going to go for that, why not place it in the tunnels? We all know that the food court at Commerce Towers is more or less dead, what if that area was gutted and replaced with a large-ish supermarket? It might draw more people to Commerce Towers (hence, more people downtown) and bring life to a corner of the tunnels otherwise neglected. I mean, there's a lot of logistics issues there (time opening, accessibility), but the idea intrigues me.

Even if Culberson was out of the picture, what's to prevent another roadblock in the way of the University Line? Think of the stink East End raised over the whole underpass/overpass issue...what if Richmond-area NIMBYs had something like that?

Hey everyone. I wanted to discuss suburbs and sprawl in one of my future blog posts, but I thought it would make a livelier topic if I discussed it here. We've all heard of sprawl, but I wanted to know your thoughts on the following: - What is sprawl to you? - Where does the "city" stop and the "sprawl" begin? - How would you combat it, if anything? To the first question, sprawl is defined as such. Quoted from an anti-sprawl website, we have Obviously, subdivision upon subdivision is a bad thing, but then that would then rule out master-planned communities since they are planned with major roads and commercial centers. That would make sense...often saying "I don't like sprawl" is a byword for "I'm an urban snob who hates the suburbs", or simply "I don't want things to change". But not always. I think what some people's definitions of sprawl is a personal frame of reference, which segues into the next question. If you're familiar with the city, you likely remember the "edge" of town, therefore everything inside that point is the city then outside is sprawl. As such, Fairfield's new commercial developments and newer residential like Bridgeland is sprawl, but Fairfield itself is less so since I remember that from my youth. As I was telling someone else, I remember years ago when Beltway 8 signified the true "start" of Houston for me, now it pushes far out from that. (Get it?) Combating sprawl to me is unfortunately impossible. Any successful city will keep expanding, and attempts to limit it will just create a "walled garden" to get into the city and raise costs of living. The best thing would be to try to let things take course and let them mature. Montrose and the Heights were once suburbs in every sense of the word, but they haven't been suburbs for years. The idea of this thread is to encourage discussion, try not to make one-two word refutes to a full paragraph, and keep it civil.

If a big grocery store like HEB opened, we'd have complaints like a big chain being so close to downtown, or someone complaining that it would be too low-rise, and so forth.

He also denied FEDERAL funds for it, and if METRO was halfway competent, they could use it on their budget.

Cats for me. My old cat at home has reached the end of her life (she's being put down tomorrow) but there's a local cat who hangs around where I live now.

Well, McDonald's, Chick-fil-a, and Cracker Barrel opened.

Yes, and if the taxi companies have any political power (which I'm sure they do), they could substantially change Uber/Lyft's business model, if not kill it entirely. All it takes is a sympathetic judge or jury in any pending lawsuits across the country. It will be interesting to watch since I don't have a super-strong opinion one way or the other. Either way, there's already lawsuits pending regarding the disabled/blind riders not being able to use the system effectively.

Don't bet on it. First, taxis use company cars, that's why in CARPOOL, a local TAMU group giving drunks a free ride home after the bars, use donated cars by dealerships (not personal vehicles). Secondly, wait until some high-profile incident where someone takes advantage of Lyft/Uber to commit some kind of crime (kidnapping?) not possible with regular taxis. I think it will probably succeed in cities where taxis don't have a huge presence (Sunbelt cities in particular), but not so much where taxi companies are established and have influence (Chicago, NYC).

Ah, so the taxi services rely on "being dishonest". No wonder Uber's booking fake rides on Lyft...seems like that's legit under the same idea, too.

Nope, it was definitely 4640 Main Street, which is now housing for homeless U.S. vets. Although Midtown, it was on the south end. It also three blocks away from the Fiesta earlier mentioned.

I'm in the same camp. Heck, I recently came across a photo on HAIF showing Montrose as it was in the 1930s (all houses, you'd think it was a suburb or something... ) but now I can't find it!

Eh. Never been a huge fan of Kyle Field's new look, but the old one really wasn't much of a looker either, to be honest.

So was it Houstonaire -> Ramada > Colonel Sanders > Greenway, or am I missing something?