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Angostura

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Everything posted by Angostura

  1. Angostura
    Less terrible is better than more terrible, but I think "tie in" is a stretch. There's nothing there to tie in to. The site is an island from a walkability standpoint, bordered by a freeway, a railroad and two big box sites. The thing about drive-to urbanism is that the "drive-to" part is a lot more important than the "urbanism" part.
  2. Angostura
    Rendering shows two-way traffic on Shep.
  3. Angostura
    This would be big news.
  4. Angostura
    "Historic" is just a bit of verbal seasoning that always seems to accompany the term "Houston Heights," much the same way "crumbling" always seems to accompany "infrastructure."
  5. Angostura
    Access to this site is tricky for anyone actually coming from the Heights (by car). If Shepherd/Durham weren't the functional equivalent of an 8-lane highway running through the neighborhood, but were instead a pair of 3-lane two-way streets, it wouldn't be as much of a problem.
  6. Angostura
    Is that a Shake Shack logo in the video?
  7. Angostura
    The stretch from Washington to the bayou is particularly unsafe, given the speed that the road design encourages cars to travel. The whole length from I-10 to Gray could be converted to 4-lanes without much degradation in service. The traffic count on Waugh just south of Allen Parkway (6 lanes, with median) is around 22k per day. The same stretch of Montrose (4-lanes, no median) is 35k. Plenty of room for protected bike lanes on both sides.
  8. Angostura
    They've already removed the parking from the Center St frontage.
  9. Angostura
    Or just levy a per-sf tax on surface parking, separate and apart from property tax so everyone has to pay it.
  10. Angostura
    Mid rise, I'd guess. On that site, you can probably fit that many units in 5 stories.
  11. Angostura
    And yet they seem to have found room for six lanes of car traffic.
  12. Angostura
    Tower-in-a-park > tower-in-a-parking-lot, I guess.
  13. Angostura
    I assume it's in reference to doing a trail like there is downstream of Shepherd. To do that kind of trail upstream of Shepherd would require clearing a bunch of vegetation along the north bank of the bayou. If you look at the two sections (upstream and downstream of Shepherd) they look pretty different.
  14. Angostura
    Agree. Though the entire Wilshire corridor is an artifact of quirky zoning: high-rises along Wilshire, single family for several blocks on either side.
  15. Angostura
    I think it's not totally out of line to describe this as River Oaks. RO extends as far as the RR tracks at its westernmost extension. But architecturally, this strikes me as more an eastward extension of Uptown than a westward extension of RO, especially if you consider the buildings on West Loop North to be part of Uptown.
  16. Angostura
    That this is going to get done before Regent Square, which is in a much more desirable part of town, will never not be amazing to me.
  17. Angostura
    Site says 15,000 sf of retail and 375 units on 5 acres. 5 acres is almost a quarter of the total area, so the site layout must have changed significantly.
  18. Angostura
    GFR?!
  19. Angostura
    The setback variances were approved, subject to certain conditions on the plat:
  20. Angostura
    Couple different reasons. For some, it's, "I oppose this project, so hopefully if the variance is rejected the project will go away." For others it's too much density, so setbacks will reduce the number of units/amount of parking/effect on traffic. Other people are just angry at either developers in general or this develop in particular, and oppose anything the developer supports. Other people don't understand the relationship between setbacks and walkability, and just want more "green space," even though empty green space, like front yards, is dumb and useless.
  21. Angostura
    Notwithstanding some neighborhood opposition, the setback variances were approved last week.
  22. Angostura
    Evidence from the past several decades would indicate the exact opposite. The most walkable places in the country and around the world were developed organically, usually on small lots, without any central planning (other than laying out rights of way and platting lots, if that). While it's theoretically possible to urban-plan your way into walkability, in practice zoning is pretty good at sewing the seeds for car-dependence, by implementing use segregation, density limits, minimum setbacks and parking requirements.
  23. Angostura
    The planning commission has been pretty receptive to granting setback variances, usually in return for wider sidewalks and other improvements in the pedestrian realm beyond what's required in the ordinances. Parking variances, on the other hand...
  24. Angostura
    It doesn't have to be the same people for the effect to happen. Home buying/renting choices are influenced by a lot of things: location preference, home type preference, and, perhaps most of all, budget. While the people priced out of Montrose bungalows may not opt for high-rise condos, some portion will opt for a townhouse in Montrose over a bungalow in the Heights, for example. Those priced out of townhouses in Montrose may opt for an apartment in Montrose over a townhouse in Shady Acres. And so on. New buildings usually come in at the top of the market because it's expensive to build new buildings. It's also relatively cheap to build with "luxury finishes". See this analysis of an apartment project, which indicates that high end finishes only account for $52 of a $2000 monthly rent check: https://www.sightline.org/2018/08/30/what-makes-portlands-new-apartments-so-expensive/ The reason why adding new supply at the top of the market still improves affordability is a phenomenon called filtering, where adding new supply prevents those buyers from bidding up older properties, keeping those properties affordable. (Provided overall density increases. Replacing high density housing with low density housing has the opposite effect.) I know of no market where failing to add supply in the face of increased demand causes prices to not go up.
  25. Angostura
    Whether the high-rise project needs a laydown area wouldn't have much bearing on whether this particular landowner decides to sell. There's about $1M worth of dirt under that car wash, so I suspect it's just a reflection of the fact that a car wash is a pretty low-value use of pretty high-value land. Whatever income the car wash is generating is probably lower than the opportunity cost of not selling or developing the land, especially if property taxes keep increasing.
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