WAZ

These are just efficiency apartments. It's weird that they're talking about these as if they're a new idea.

Small is certainly not new. The houses in Levittown were originally only 750 square feet, and they weren't efficiency apartments. They had a kitchen/dining area, living room, two small bedrooms, and a bathroom on the first floor. (The second floor was an unfinished attic). The houses that Frank Sharp developed in Oak Forest and Sharpstown weren't much bigger - many were around 1,000 sf.

I came across this article today on the KHOU website.

Has anyone seen the proposals that are being made for the PlazAmericas? Can they be posted here?

I drive by there every day, and I'm intrigued.

I would have to agree with what Peter Brown said, the creative class is not coming to Houston. I would also add that the creative class that Houston creates are lured away by other cities such as NYC, LA, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, etc.

The city is growing but take a look at this:

That is a sad statistic.

What will the city be like when those under 30 grow up and become the leaders? Will Houston be a big slum?

http://www.chron.com...ok/6982670.html

Nonsense. Houston will be just fine.

Why?

Because we have jobs, and an affordable cost of living.

This played into one of the first posts I made to my blog. Houston is a city in which a starving artist can still find a warehouse, and work on giant canvases while his neighbors fix truck transmissions. Artists can't afford to do that in New York (or Los Angeles) any more. We have a lot less red-tape than other cities, too (if you believe Tory Gattis). So if you're a small business, you're more likely to choose Houston.

We should not fear the statistics you pointed out - that 75% of Houstonians under 30 are minorities, and most of them are poor. It was like that in New York a century ago - (well, they were German, Italian, and Irish then; not Latino; but they were poor). The influx of immigrants did not cause New York to become a slum. Quite the opposite.

(They didn't keep drop out rates in schools a century ago)

Give them a generation or two, and you'll see. In the mean time, look at this Op-Ed in the Washington Post. Pay close attention to myth number '3'.

Not sure if I missed something but it seems that all the noise for the apartment complex near Katy Mills WAS initiated and supported by someone with specific interests in the land around Katy Mills (smells like a neighouring money grubbing developer holding out for more cash). The reason why I bring this up is that the new apartment complex construction (on the corner of Roesner and Katy Ft-Bend road) is just about a half mile away from where the low-income apartment complex was set to be built..... and I have not even heard a peep from our Mayor Elmer Fudd. The question is "why isn't Elmer out there looking for illegals" as he said in his statement.

Hmmmpppphh must mean no one is interested or they're all tired from fighting the other developer. I feel sorry for the home owners near there since their values are about to go down.

Plus I saw the land across the street from the new complex said something about custom homes... I doubt anyone would spend $500K on a home across the street from an apartment complex.

Are they using TDHCA tax credits and other public funding for this complex?

The problem is, in between being dilapidated housing and becoming new affordable housing...the site becomes open land. Neighborhoods seem to latch onto that. I seem to recall that a site on Broadway ran into this conundrum, and the Glenbrook Valley crowd threw a fit and derailed the project.

Is that actually what happened to the Woodlen Glen and other apartments on Broadway? This article suggests otherwise. It seems former mayor Bill White promised a makeover of Broadway - but it was basically just to rebuild the apartments. There were no parks, schools, new bus lines, or any of the things I proposed. Ultimately I suspect the lack of these things, coupled with the gentrification of the nearby neighborhood, doomed the proposal to failure. It wasn't so much a delay between the demolition and reconstruction.

That said, I could see the scenario happening - if neighbor groups fought long and hard to get a bad apartment complex demolished, - with dreams of a park or detention pond on the site - only to have a developer come in later with a proposal for a new apartment complex.

Ironically, one of the few places in town where affordable housing would be the most politically feasible is also the sort place where it is the least financially feasible; an expensive area such as Greater Montrose, Midtown, or Uptown that is populated by people who are affluent, young, without children, and that have little intention of living in that neighborhood after they do start a family.

It seems to be feasible in other areas, too - if it's done right. I've yet to see anyone protest the reconstruction of the Kennedy Place Apartments in the Fifth Ward. In this case they're going from public housing (the worst kind of housing in most neighborhood opinions) to subsidized mixed income housing. Neighbors seem to be welcoming the improvement.

In Brays Oaks (formerly known as Fondren Southwest), the Fondren Court Apartments were gutted and renovated to become the Reserve at Bankside. Nobody complained. And if anyone can complain, it's the people in that neighborhood. You should have seen the TDHCA hearing on the Costa Del Rey Apartments in 2008.

Are you sure that that's what the neighbors would want? My research has always tended to indicate that neighborhoods DO NOT want transit perceived to serve poor people located anywhere near their homes (and that includes working class families that themselves are at or near the poverty line), and also that homes immediately adjacent to parks in neighborhoods with questionable demographics tend to sell at a discount. And schools...whew...the neighborhood is NOT going to like the idea of Tax Credit or Section 8 housing zoned to their schools. That's the last thing they want. And for good reason; it does have a disproportionate effect on the composition of the student body when the spirit of affordable housing laws are abided by pursuant to the choice of location of the affordable housing in question.

This is, unfortunately, one of those contentious issues where compromises must be had on both sides. The outcome is largely distributive.

Your observations are dead-on for the construction of new low-cost housing on open land. Nobody wants it near them, period. It doesn't matter where, who, or how.

But what if they replace a big block of deteriorated, run down low-cost housing - known to have crime problems - with a park, a police storefront, AND some new low-cost housing? From a neighborhood standpoint, that's a totally different thing. That's really what I'm talking about - and it's what I'm hoping Annise Parker is going to do.

Now if only we could find a place to build safe and new low-income housing...

Easy: We can build safe and new low-income housing on the site of the dangerous buildings we've demolished. The Houston Housing Authority already has some practice with this - they're tearing down the Kennedy Place Apartments and rebuilding from the ground up.

I must reiterate the first and third caveat here. Once they've rebuilt, they can't walk away. Apartments need periodic reinvestment or they deteriorate. And they need to redevelop the housing in ways that are welcomed by neighbors (Hint: it can't JUST be low-income housing; they need parks, bus stations, schools, and that sort of thing, too).

I can think of a handful of such complexes, but most of them were operating until Hurricane Ike and the financial crisis conspired in the very same moment to damage numerous complexes while simultaneously restricting access to capital to make the necessary repairs.

Thanks for the very astute assessment of what happened to these complexes.

I would only add that, a lot of these complexes were built in the 1970s, and had a useful life span of 30 years. They were already pretty far gone by the time Hurricane Ike and the financial crisis hit.

But Mayor Parker's comments did not seem to be addressing these instances but rather cases where presently-occupied multifamily housing is blamed for dragging down a neighborhood...and actually, looking at them again, I don't think it was a flub on her part. It does kind of seem like the issue she's covertly addressing is that the desperately poor people in low-rent complexes are getting all up in the man's business....so to speak.

From my reading, Mayor Parker was talking about the vacant, dangerous buildings - AND buildings that are occupied, but shouldn't be, due to numerous building code violations. The latter is actually a much worse thing, but harder to deal with for the City.

I agree with our Mayor on most of these things - but as I said before, there are certain caveats in it.

Don't have a subscription and can't find it online. If you have a link, it would be appreciated, or, if not, maybe more details of the argument? Does he get into commuter bus vs. rail? What are the key issues he cites?

The article posted by JamesL is pretty close to what Christof wrote in Cite. Unfortunately they are really bad about putting articles form Cite online.

The title of the article says a lot about what is in it: "Are We Setting Up Commuter Rail to Fail? Level of Service Matters Most, Not the Technology" I'm paraphrasing, but the goal of transit is to get people from point 'a' to point 'b'. What really matters is how effective the transit is in reaching this goal. It matters less whether that's on a bus or a commuter train.

Simply put, it's better to have a really effective bus system, than a commuter or light rail system that doesn't go where people need it to go.

Again, I am paraphrasing. But everything I've read sounds really great to me.

Did anyone else see new Metro Board Member Christof Spieler's article in Cite Magazine?

I liked what he said: “Rather than rush ahead with a system based on preconceived, often faulty assumptions [about transit] and driven by political urgency, we need to engage in a discussion about what we want to accomplish and how best to do that.”

I couldn't agree more! I just hope the discussion includes average Houstonians. They should ask people “where do you travel to and from? How do you get there? If you drive, what’s keeping you from taking transit?” I’ll bet the answers would be surprising, and very informative about how to improve transit in our city.

Today, Mayor Annise Parker announced her new choices for City Attorney and director of the City’s Department of Housing and Community Development (David Feldman and James Noteware respectively). The choices weren’t as interesting as what the Mayor said: “We can put more housing out for more people if we upgrade the multi-family housing we have and we do whatever we need to do to remove the really terrible multi-family apartment complexes in our city that drag down the neighborhoods around them.” I’ve been advocating for this all along; most recently in this thread.

There are three caveats on it. First, apartments need periodic reinvestment or they deteriorate. It’s not enough to just upgrade apartments and then walk away. Sooner or later, they’ll be back where they started. Second, like Christof Spieler said about transit – we need to carefully study which apartments are demolished and which are upgraded. Neighborhood Protection has data on the worst apartments; the Department of Housing and Community Development should use that data. Third, they need to do these things in ways that are welcomed by neighbors; not in ways that piss people off. This last piece sounds like simple logic; hardly worth mentioning. But when you're talking about low-cost housing, it might be the hardest part of all.

I am very happy that we finally have a mayor who 'gets it' on the subject of low-cost housing.

Interesting. In this thread, you wanted to put ex-cons in wealthier neighborhoods, so that the poor would not be forced to live amongst them. Yet, when a proposal to allow the poor to leave the neighborhoods full of ex-cons for (presumably) better neighborhoods, you are ready to sign up to speak against it.

If that's what you got from the thread, I can almost see why you've been flaming me ever since. :-)

I NEVER said I wanted to put ex-cons in wealthier neighborhoods. I only said that too many of them are in poor neighborhoods, and I asked for realistic ideas to keep this from happening.

I'd like Houston to be a city where dangerous ex-cons and sex offenders have a harder time finding places to live. I want them to stay priced out of expensive neighborhoods. I want them kept out of poorer neighborhoods, too. We can keep convicts (especially sex offenders) in prison through their full terms - denied early release because they don't have homes to go to. When the law says they must be released, they can move to other metropolitan areas.

What I wrote about the apartments near Katy is very much in keeping with this ideal. The Houston area has a surplus of low-cost housing, and one result of it is that landlords are left scrounging for tenants. Some landlords keep their complexes full by not screening their tenants. To these landlords, it doesn't matter if their tenants are dangerous ex-cons or sex offenders. They pay rent.

The construction of new low-cost housing adds to the surplus and exacerbates the problem. The rehabbing of existing low-cost housing does not. And the tenant screening requirements in official "low-income" housing are an added bonus to these rehabbed properties.

The housing should be at a reasonable distance to the person's place of employment.

We could debate the meaning of "reasonable distance" 'till kingdom come. It's a subjective term, and it shouldn't be a determining factor in where we put subsidized housing.

And don't underestimate a well-planned mass transit system.

1. Yes, a Sunnyside house would be good for someone working in the Med Center or the Port of Houston - However I believe that all areas of town need to be addressed by these funds. The funds to target the Medical Center area can be used in Sunnyside. But the question is where should funds for far west Harris be allocated?

2. Which properties in Alief are in a poor condition and are eligible to be fixed with the funds?

1. I think we're actually on the same page with this. And Alief is the obvious answer to your question.

2: For the purposes of our argument, let's go back to the Chronicle's 2008 database. In Alief, The Claridge at 10027 Spice is in most need of rehab - with 127 citations. Willow Meadow Place nearby has 57 citations. Closer to Katy, there's The Belvedere at 7000 Cook Rd., with 32 citations. The latter would probably be the best choice for this round of funding, simply because it's the closest to Katy.

Of course, this database is 2 years old and things might have changed. Neighborhood Protection has more current data that's unpublished. I would hope the TDHCA uses NPC's data and not an old Chronicle database.

As far as TDHCA's eligibility rules: many of them need to be tweaked to allow for greater reinvestment in existing low-cost housing. I'm under no illusions that this will be easy or quick. It never is in Austin. That's part of why we need to speak so loudly at every hearing.

In any case, this is straying from a discussion of Katy per se.

Not everyone has a car.

But as Edina from Ab Fab said: "Anybody can use Public Transport, Sweetie!"

Hopefully the new board members at METRO can better connect poorer neighborhoods to employment centers.

The point on the derelict properties vs. new developments could work [only] if the derelict properties are in [close] proximity to the proposed new developments.

Why?

In this case, I'm not sure how many derelict or severely under capacity properties were in proximity to the proposed low income site. If a low income individual wants to live near the intersection of I-10 and the Grand Parkway and work in area businesses, it would not make sense for him or her to move into Sunnyside, even if the property in Sunnyside was rehabbed.

Of course; a commute from Sunnyside to Katy would be a nightmare. But a rehabbed apartment in the northern reaches of Alief could certainly be an option for your hypothetical "low income individual." And that rehabbed house in Sunnyside could be perfect for someone working in the Med Center, or the Port of Houston.

My fiancee and I would love to live in Bellaire or Meyerland. They're equidistant from our works, and we love to shop and eat there. But we can't afford those neighborhoods, so we live about a mile to the west. We have a house we can afford, easy commutes, and we can still shop and eat in Bellaire. It's the same concept.

I'd like to say it's a moot point now that the Katy thing is dead. But there are going to be more TDHCA hearings for subsidized housing on open land. They all need to be fought - and the funding directed to fix Houston's existing, deteriorated low-cost housing. We can't allow ourselves to be swayed in this.

The Grand Harbor application (#10197) has been withdrawn from consideration by the applicant.

Robbye G. Meyer

Director of Multifamily Finance

Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs

221 East 11th Street

Austin, Texas 78701

(512) 475-2213 (V)

(512) 475-0764 (F)

Thanks to all the supporters and Haters(AtticaFlinch and others)

Don’t worry about the haters. They hate me with a passion, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But I’ll confess I'm a little disappointed. I had hoped to speak at the hearing, to talk about how badly we need to fix Houston's existing low-cost housing.

Properties that I'd have talked about:

- Candlewood Glen & Candlelight Trails on the Northwest side (DeSoto Street): The properties should both be bulldozed, one turned into a park; quality low-cost housing built on the site of the other. (It won't be easy - the Candlelight Trails is actually a condominium complex).

- Le Promenade on the Southwest side (7400 block of Bissonnet): These condos should be bulldozed; half of the site turned into a park, or sold to HISD for use by Sharpstown High; half turned into quality low-cost housing.

- Properties on the Chronicle’s Database from 2008: Some of these places have changed hands and names, and repairs have started; but they can’t just put lipstick on pigs. They need to gut these places down to the studs and rebuild from there. TDHCA help sure would be nice.

- Houston’s countless derelict houses: There is no reason derelict houses can’t be demolished and rebuilt into quality low-cost housing. The City is starting to do this, and TDHCA actually has some programs in place that could help; but I’ve yet to see evidence that TDHCA is using those programs here in Houston.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. My point is that the TDHCA is doing Houston a huge disservice when they spend money to subsidize new housing on open land. It’s the urban equivalent of buying a new car, and leaving your old car to rot on the front lawn.

Entropy exists.

You should fight this Katy residents.

It doesn’t matter where you live . If you care about low-cost housing in Houston, you should fight this. It’s a matter of resources and priorities.

I challenge anyone to prove the Houston area has a shortage of low cost housing. Everything I’ve seen suggests the contrary. According to Forbes, Houston is the 8th cheapest market for renters in the US. Median rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is only $707, and our vacancy rate is 11% (four times that of New York City – a place that actually does have a shortage of low cost housing). If you don’t want to rent, a quick search on HAR.com reveals plenty of condominiums available for less than $30,000; houses for under $60,000.

Unfortunately, Houston’s low-cost housing is in a sorry state. In some neighborhoods (Gulfton; Alief), apartments that were built for the middle class, now house the poor. Many of these apartments were built 30 years ago, and had a useful lifespan of 30 years. In other neighborhoods (Sunnyside; Acres Homes), poor homeowners desperately need help to repair older houses; but the programs available to them are inadequate.

We need to do more to repair and reconstruct Houston’s existing low-cost housing. But there is a finite amount of resources available for low-cost housing. Every dollar that’s spent to build new low-cost housing, is a dollar that can’t be spent to repair or reconstruct existing low-cost housing. That’s why we all should fight the thing in Katy, and others like it.

I will note, that to their credit, the municipal government of the City of Houston has realized this. If you look at how the City spends low-cost housing money, generally it’s to renovate and reconstruct existing properties. They take the right approach to low-cost housing for Houston. Unfortunately, my observation is that TDHCA in Austin and HUD in Washington DC don’t share the approach.

http://search.har.com/engine/6209-Grape-St-Houston-TX-77074_HAR43862330.htm

Came across this while mucking around on HAR.

Perfect little Mod in Robindell. Someone please dive in before an 'investor' gets to it!

But really, I'm trying to figure out Pei's response in his comparison of New York/Dallas to Houston. Can yall figure it out? Cuz honestly, I can't figure out how Dallas is like NYC.

http://www.ft.com/cm...144feab49a.html

My impression:

Houston is like New York used to be, back when 42nd Street had peep shows; Washington Square had bohemians; and artists could still afford SoHo.

Dallas is like New York is - clean and sterile. Generic.. No peep shows. No bohemians. Artists all gentrified away.

I have to agree with Niche, too. Houston demands architecture that's uniquely Houstonian. But if New Yorkers like it, then chances are it's fine for Dallas.

When you characterize Downtown as a pig, it's easy enough to dismiss any additional funds used to improve the neighborhood, but there are many of us who don't see Downtown as such. That said, I certainly wouldn't object to other places getting considered (the heart of River Oaks, for instance), but Sharpstown?... Also agreed with LTAWACS - No.

So you complain about those who dismiss funding to improve downtown, and then in the same breath you dismiss funding to improve Sharpstown?

And funding really is the problem here.

The downtown proposal needs $10 million from Harris County for parking and infrastructure. Trouble is, the County is really hurting for money, and they are hard-pressed to cough up your $10 million. (In fact Harris County is looking at cutting $15 million from the Sherriff’s Department).

The beauty of the Sharpstown site is that, if they do it right, the parking and infrastructure is already there. They could go ahead without that $10 million from the County.

This will be my last post to this thread. I just wanted to end with two notes.

First, I am certainly criticizing other architects. In the 1990s it became fashionable for architects to study, dissect, and dream about cities. Architects and other urbanists talked about transit, flooding, density, urban streetscapes, the environment.... But somehow crime never entered into the discussion.

Second, window dressing matters. If you think that the built form of cities has no impact on crime, you're missing the point. Perceived crime has as big an impact on neighborhoods as crime itself. People need to BE safe in their neighborhoods, but they also need to FEEL safe in their neighborhoods.

No prescription prevails to remedy this polysyllabic belligerence. O, woe! Forsooth, I surmise some individual person procured a thesaurus lagniappe on the day commemorating the holy St Valentine.

But anyhow, I still don't see in how everything you and WAZ wrote there's anything done beyond treating crime as a symptom rather than an illness. To effectively combat disease you need to address the underlying issues. The same is true with crime.

So crime is an illness; and urbanists should stand back and let the doctors cure it? What if that disease is incurable?

I’m not sure I would accept your illness analogy. Crime is its own beast. It has some elements of a disease. It also has some elements of weather. (Crime patterns resemble weather patterns to me). And then there’s the perception of crime; broken window theories; the obvious link between urban blight and perceived crime. Like my list of questions, this one goes on and on.

Urbanists are shooting themselves in the foot if they ignore these things. (Or maybe I should say – urbanists are shooting cities in the foot if they ignore these things.)

I can't speak to what "urbanists" have said about crime, but I can refer to what Peter Moskos said in his great book Cop in the Hood.

He said that the rise of policing from cars and 9-11 have turned police from being proactive to reactive. No one responding to a 9-11 call ever stops a crime (unlike 9-11 calls for fires or medical emergencies, in which lives are often saved). The cop on the beat had more of a relationship with the neighborhood, was a visible presence, heard things from folks, etc. (This was also pointed out by Jane Jacobs, of course.)

I was not familiar with the work of Peter Moskos, but I’ll check it out. This is exactly the sort of thing that’s been lost in the discussions of urbanists.

Most urbanists agree that Houston will get more dense in the next 25 years. It'd be very interesting to see if we put cops back on foot as our City rediscovers density.

T he "urbanists" are been left largely undefined. Are they city planners? Are they architects? Are they development financiers? Are they a consortium of all of these and more?

Urbanists are people who study cities, towns, or rural areas, and come up with ideas on how to change them. They can be city planners by trade, or architects (like me), or developers, or almost anything else you can think of. In my book, all you need to be an urbanist is a realistic idea of how to improve a city, town, or rural area.

What role do the urbanists play? Is there anything they can actually do to prevent or eliminate crime?

As I said before, it is impossible to completely prevent or eliminate crime. Urbanists need to talk about ways to make the public spaces in cities less attractive as locations for crime.

To that end, there is a long list of questions to ask. Like where should we put new police stations? Should they be a few big police stations, or many small kiosks? Should there be cameras on the streets? Where are the cameras and who's watching them? Which roads should get light standards and which shouldn’t? Should parks be fenced-in or open to neighborhoods? Should the public have access to drainage culverts and detention ponds? What do you put under an elevated freeway? Should there be something down there, or should it be left vacant?

The list of questions goes on, and on. Architects ask similar questions every day, but the scale is limited to single buildings and campuses. Urbanists are not asking these questions on a city-wide scale. Not in Houston anyway.

And ruralists need to make trailer parks less attractive as locations for meth production.

Precisely. People designing public spaces in rural areas should design spaces to be less attractive to crime, too. (And also people designing public space in suburbs; and those designing public space in exurbs....)

My post was never intended to instigate an urban versus rural cat-fight.

So are you endorsing some sort of prescriptive code on bldg public security?

If it comes to that through study and research, then yes - it could be part of the building code.

Before that, though, we need to ask the hard questions on crime in urban design. And we need to demand real answers from the urbanists. They can't keep saying 'oh, crime isn't a problem - now let's talk about how cool our Livable Centers are gonna be.'

Few subjects pertaining to large cities, also known as "urban areas", have been studied, discussed, researched, dissected, funded and generally been the top concern of residents as crime and its prevention.

Your lack of citations proves my point. Everyone just assumes that since crime is such a big issue, urbanists must be discussing it.

I believe that crime prevention, both in educating residents and in urban design, [is a] laudable goal.

The problem is that crime prevention has been lost in discussions on urban design. Law enforcement and criminal lawyers (naturally) still talk about crime, but they’re not the ones designing cities.

Talking about crime in terms of development seems counterproductive and a waste of time.

Urbanists need to talk about ways to make public spaces less attractive as locations for crime.

Don’t misunderstand. I am not saying that crime should be the only thing urbanists discuss. I am certainly not saying that urbanism is the only thing that affects crime. Nor am I saying that urban design could ever eradicate crime from the City. I am only saying that we need to bring crime back into the conversations we have about urbanism.

Correlation does not equal causation, and all that jazz...

Suggesting crime is a byproduct of urbanization is as absurd as suggestion rural living is a relative utopia. And that just ain't true. Crime is a result of many things, examples of which include (but, as always, not limited to) education standards, poverty, reproductive rights, policing priorities and the economy at large. Crime may be exacerbated by human proximity related to urbanism, but it in no way is caused by it.

The notion that urbanization causes crime is one of the far-fetched ideas that I didn’t want to repeat. You’re absolutely right that crime is a result of many things. A personal vendetta. Poverty and Desperation. Mental Illness. The list goes on….

Criminals will commit crimes. But what makes a criminal choose one location over another?

Usually criminals like to be out of the way, and in the dark: where they think they won’t be caught. They like easy access: to get in, commit the crime, and make a clean getaway. They don’t want to be confronted by alarms, barking dogs, or concerned neighbors. Criminals don’t want real police officers around, because they don’t want to be arrested.

The trouble is that urbanists have lost sight of these concerns. Jane Jacobs’ vision for cities grew out of crime prevention. When’s the last time anyone talked about that? Everyone assumes we’re “Creating Defensible Space” in streets and public spaces. But are we really?

This was a about some sort of personal grudge and has nothing to do with "urbanism."

Seattle's urbanism didn't cause the attack. But since Seattle is a model for urbanists, maybe the attack will shock them into a newfound concern for public safety. This is really what I'm hoping for.