Angostura

4 hours ago, trymahjong said:

beside the 6 visitors spots and if they don’t bicycle or Uber over, where will the roomates ( perhaps 20% of the residents will probably have roommates I would guess) where do those people park when competing with established permit holders, new permit holders and restaurant valets? 

 

I think that's part of the point. Right now, everyone, new AND existing residents alike, are shielded from the economic impact of the decision to drive (alone, usually) to a destination. However, the cost of providing 1.33 parking spaces for every 1BR apartment adds something like $250-400/month to the rent. Providing the required two off-street spaces to a townhouse or SFH adds something like $30-50k to the price in this part of town. By un-bundling parking from rent (and providing 2 fewer spaces that the ordinance requires) at least this developer is exposing tenants to the costs of their decisions, and allowing those that don't require a parking space to stop subsidizing those who do.

12 hours ago, trymahjong said:

I’m not sure COH permit parking guarantees a parking space in Avondale. I say that because of the numerous cars that go round and round looking for a spot and their permit is hanging from rear view mirror.

 

Even if this block goes resident-only, the people that live in these apartments will be residents.

13 hours ago, Alec said:

I don't think Houston is ready for mandatory un-bundling of parking, but Seattle's research and ordinance show why à la carte parking is a substantial way to offer a lower price - parking accounts for 12.5% of typical rent in King County.

 

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/04/03/landlords-in-seattle-cant-force-renters-to-pay-for-parking-anymore/

 

It will be interesting to see if nearby neighbors start to rent their extra private spots; that strikes me as a win-win.

IIRC, Kirby Collection was charging $300/space, but that might be for below-grade construction. An above-grade structure probably needs to charge about $200-250 to be cost-neutral with the residential square footage, which is 10-15% of the rent of a typical 1BR in the area. Though since the actual requirement in Houston is 1.33 spaces per 1BR unit, people are probably paying 13-20% of their rent to store their cars.

2 hours ago, H-Town Man said:

I would say this is a pretty terrible location for an apartment complex but other developments have already fubar'd Avondale over the years. This is about the most sensitive development you could possibly expect considering the land value.

 

Actually, it seems like a pretty terrible location for low-density single-family houses, being less than a mile from downtown and within walking distance of lots of restaurants and other destinations. Seems like we'd want more people living here, not fewer.

5 hours ago, BigFootsSocks said:

Oh man that would’ve been awesome but I guess they would have had to tear down the existing buildings?

Nope. All three previously existing buildings are in the rendering. The taller, diagonally oriented building is where Braun is putting the surface parking lot.

This is 214 Avondale, a block-and-a-half East of Taft, and between the two Avondale HD's.

There is currently a parking variance on the agenda for tomorrow's planning commission meeting. The project proposes to provide 57 parking spaces (and 28 bicycle spaces) for the 50 1-BR units. Normally 66 spaces (or 59 + 28 bicycle spaces) would be required.

According to the variance request, providing two fewer spaces than the ordinance requires allows them to keep parking to a single level, reducing the overall cost of the project, and thereby the rental cost of the units. The building will have an Uber/Lyft lounge, and each unit comes bundled with a Metro pass. Parking is NOT included in the rent; tenants choosing to park in the building will have to lease a space. (The apartments in the Kirby Collection work the same way, I think.)

I assume this is something they put together during the bidding process for the land a few years ago?

Which means GID is paying property taxes on $50M+ of vacant land.

An optimist would say that it's likely someone like Hanover or Midway buys up the land and does something similar with it, but I think we should be prepared for something far crappier.

Most likely: a couple of residential towers. If we're lucky they may have some GFR.

The plat is called Buffalo Bayou Park in the variance request.

This ought to be symbiotic with Regent Square. Each within walking distance of the other, and this appears to be more office/hotel focused (with a little GFR and a lot of suburban-office-park green space) whereas Regent Square has a higher proportion of retail and residential. Both this development and Regent Square are more valuable long-term if the other is built.

Someday we'll learn the real reason Regent Square was never built.

Site layout and elevations from parking variance request. The 7 large trees are already existing on the site. 

In addition to parking and setback variances, the project requires a variance to Ch 28, Section VI, the ordinance regulating location of hotels, as it takes primary access from a local street (Ashland) and is within 750 feet of both a church (Baptist Temple) and Hospital. Both have written letters of support.

14 hours ago, Luminare said:

 

where is the latest agenda? Can't find a link for the upcoming agenda.

https://edrc.houstontx.gov/edrc/login.aspx

Some additional details on the project are in this week's planning commission agenda.

The property will have a gift/floral shop at the corner of Ashland & 20th, accessible from both 20th St and the hotel lobby. They are requesting a reduced setback on 20th for this part of the building. The pool/courtyard will be along the 20th St frontage, parking in the rear. 4 floors of rooms, 5 stories total. Most of the existing live oaks will be preserved. 

On 1/8/2019 at 1:39 AM, jmitch94 said:

NIMBY's are the worst and it seems like the richer they are the worse they are. Drainage issues have to be the worst excuse they have considering most of these people are probably River Oaks residences with 10,000 sqft roofs with driveways and patios that are even larger.  

It's worse than that. Remember that, when it comes to housing, it's not a question of whether it gets built, it's a question of where. The residents of this building would generate a whole lot less impervious cover per resident (and square foot of built area) than almost any other type of development, with the exception of house boats in the ship channel. If housing doesn't get built here, it (and a lot more impervious cover in the form of roads and highways) is going to get built further north and west of here, which is to say, upstream. 

If nearby residents are TRULY concerned about drainage issues affecting their neighborhood, they should send RD a thank-you note.

10 hours ago, s3mh said:

 

The dental office leases parking spaces to the theater.

 

The theater has a parking variance, and doesn't need those spaces to meet its minimum.

10 hours ago, s3mh said:

Decoupling parking is the right idea.  Letting a market develop for parking is economic-speak for turning what should be the responsibility of the people making piles of money off the real estate developments into a cost externality borne by the surrounding community.  If you gave the city the power to impose a parking district, you would be able to distribute the burden of parking more equitably, open the area up to more development and stop sticking the surrounding community with the burdens of over development.

The cost of an externality should be borne by the party that generates it. In this case, the development isn't the externality, cars are. So the cost of the externality should be borne solely by the people who drive to the destination in question. As far as the people making piles of money are concerned, if the change in my property tax bills over the last several years are any indication, nearby homeowners most certainly belong in that category. That said, if by "the burdens of over-development" you mean that someone might park in front of my house, I feel like I've been fairly compensated. 

With respect to the city imposing a parking district, I'd be interested in hearing how exactly it would work. Aside from there being no mechanism in the code of ordinances for the city to do it, I don't see a way for it to be done with (a) eminent domain (which the city has no money for) and (b) a lot of work (which the city has no appetite for). Besides, I imagine if the city announced a plan to buy up a bunch of Heights parking lots so that surrounding property owners could more profitably develop their land, there'd be mobs with pitchforks and torches marching down Bagby St.

Seems far simpler to just eliminate the parking minimums, and if there's any fallout over "spillover parking," allow streets to petition for (meter-less) metered parking. Go somewhere where parking is truly scarce, and you'll see that people can be pretty resourceful about efficiently allocating it.

11 hours ago, IronTiger said:

By that, do you mean "can't rent them out to fulfill required parking requirements", or "can't let others use it for parking"? Because the latter definitely isn't true as a whole...there are plenty of places in Houston and others in Texas are shared among tenants, or have parking lots available to rent out.

It means that, say, the owner of the hospital can't say that the parking lot across the street from this hotel is open to anyone who pays $5 to use it. Parking that is used to meet the minimum requirement has to be dedicated to the use that generates the requirement.

There ARE rules in place that allow multiple uses to share parking in slightly more efficient ways, but only within a single development or within a single parking plan. There are also lots of pay lots unconnected to any particular development, but these aren't being used to meet someone else's parking minimum as well. And most of them are in areas that are exempt from minimum parking requirements (CBD, Midtown).

52 minutes ago, lithiumaneurysm said:

 

Minimum parking requirements also act against Houston's own interests. The city's annexation days are over—the only way to grow property tax revenue is through developing existing land. Every unwarranted parking lot created by these requirements neutralizes land which could otherwise be productive and reduces the city's tax revenue per unit area.

Under-rated point. The costs of providing infrastructure (roads, sidewalks, water, sewer, etc.) scale roughly with street frontage. Tax valuation per s.f. of land is a good indicator of whether a given development is likely to be a net contributor or net cost to the city budget.  

A square foot of Heights land used for surface parking might have a taxable value of $70. That same sf of land with a store or restaurant on it could be valued at 3X that amount. Put a couple stories of residential over top of that retail space, and it might be 6-10X. 

13 hours ago, IronTiger said:

In terms of parking garages, the only way to prevent "spillage" if that was a big problem is to build a parking garage, but parking garages are expensive to build, and no one wants to be liable for building a parking garage, unless you wanted the city to build and operate it and take a loss on it for several years (or if a developer bought up every single property to operate it in essence as a mall).

There is ALREADY a 4-story parking garage 500 ft from this site. There are also already HUNDREDS of off-street parking spaces within easy walking distance of the main destinations on 19th and 20th streets. The problem isn't that there's not enough parking around 19th and 20th St, they're just very inefficiently allocated, because everyone has to provide their own exclusive parking to get an occupancy permit. The current owners of those parking spaces AREN'T ALLOWED to rent them to other people. If we de-coupled parking from the destination and allowed a market for parking to develop, the existing parking supply would be more than enough to serve current and future development nearby.

Your last point is also important: currently the only way we get even halfway decent urbanism is by developing HUGE parcels of land (e.g. City Centre), which allow for enough scale to build structured parking. However, most great streetscapes are built as small parcels (20-60 feet of frontage), not monolithic block faces (see in Houston the 300 block of Main St and the good block-and-a-half of 19th). We should want to have development rules that don't make building great streetscapes illegal. 

21 hours ago, Luminare said:

 

Amen. Houston is a true oddity. If it developed in the same pattern as other cities then it would be drastically different by now. One with more density and more verticality. Its horizontal nature is like a Unicorn. It shouldn't even exist, but as the city matures properly and densifies its going to feel very rough when things get demoed or replaced (even if they should stay) because its just very difficult for small residential single family houses to survive in a vertical landscape. If we had already an established history of verticality throughout the city then it would be like New York where old buildings get torn down by the day yet nobody really bats an eye because you already have so much density around and the existing can survive longer than what is existing here.

Actually, New York (specifically Manhattan) is the unicorn. Houston hasn't really developed all that differently from most other US cities that grew during the same time period. Most cities in this country have grown out, not up, over the last 50 years. This is partly due to how we spend transportation money (we build a lot of highways into the exurbs), and partly due to building restrictions within the central cores of cities. In most cities, density restrictions are imposed by zoning ordinances, historic preservation, and other impediments to developing projects with higher densities than the surrounding neighborhood.

Zoning is used, almost without exception, to limit density. In Houston, even without zoning, there was a lot that kept density low inside the loop. For much of the 2nd half of the 20th century, it was effectively illegal to build anything with more than four units inside the loop, largely due to inadequate sewer infrastructure, which drove a lot of multifamily development just outside the loop. In residential sub-divisions, deed restrictions, which the city enforces, accomplish a lot of the density restriction that zoning does in most cities. After Chapter 42 was adopted, with minimum building setbacks of 25 ft, commercial buildings could no longer be built like 19th St (with front doors on the sidewalk), so developers filled the building setback with parking, and the strip center was born. Add in parking minimums, and the traditional development pattern is largely outlawed, just like the rest of the country.

Only in the last 20 years or so are we starting to see real levels of infill development. It's been hindered by our development rules, but the Planning Commission has been pretty consistently granting setback variances for projects that ask for them. And with the expansion to EaDo and Midtown of the area exempt from parking minimums, we'll see those neighborhoods become more walkable, with transit links to Downtown.

http://blockcompanies.com/projects/the-standard-in-the-heights

It looks like what would happen if Highland Village and the Central Market across the street had a baby.

BTW, there's structured parking elsewhere on the site. Why separate one of your anchor tenants from the rest of the development with a sea of asphalt?

Thanks for the pointer to CoH data. I was using the TXDoT data, which is different. http://ttihouston.tamu.edu/hgac/trafficcountmap/

20 minutes ago, Ross said:

 

According to the City of Houston Traffic Counts site, Shepherd between 11th and 20th carried 10,000 more cars per day than Studewood between 11th and White Oak.

Studewood @ 8th: 19,632. Shepherd @ 14th: 18,654. Studewood DOES see fewer cars north of 11th, but the point is that a 3-lane road configuration can carry similar levels of traffic to what Shepherd currently carries, and do so with much higher levels of pedestrian safety.

20 minutes ago, Ross said:

 

If you are biking, there are better streets than Shepherd and Durham a couple of blocks to the East.

Unless your destination is on Shepherd. Within a few years, Shepherd will have transformed into a series of used car lots into a pretty dense commercial (and residential) district. It has a better chance of thriving if people can navigate this area safely.

BTW, CoH will never make this change, because we value moving cars efficiently more than we value not killing pedestrians. I'm just trying to move the Overton window a little. (Though, one way to avoid killing pedestrians is to do everything possible to ensure we never have any.) 

26 minutes ago, Ross said:

 

You would be insane to bike on Shepherd and Durham until the City gets around to redoing the pavement.

On this, we agree.

15 hours ago, Texasota said:

The city is already planning to put in bike lanes on Shepherd and Durham. I don't know if they're planning on taking a car lane from each street or what, but even just taking each street down the 3 lanes would help.

 

The other thing that would really help? Lights at 10th, 12th, 13th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, and 30th streets. The biggest problem with this couplet is how difficult it is to cross.

It's hard to cross because there are four lanes of one-way traffic, and the road design encourages people to drive way faster than the 35 mph speed limit. You're crossing what is effectively an 8-lane divided highway.