Angostura

Shep and Durham work OK if you're in a car. They kind of suck if you're not. 3-lane 2-way streets have almost the same carrying capacity as 4-lane 2-way streets, since they handle left turns more efficiently. (They're also a lot safer.) Shepherd and Durham between 11th and 20th both carry less traffic than (3-lane) Studewood between 11th and White Oak. A 3-lane configuration would reduce travel speeds to a safer level, discourage cut-through traffic, and allow space for wider sidewalks or bike lanes. Reducing average travel speeds from 40 mph to 25 mph along this corridor would add all of 2 minutes to a trip from I-10 to 610.

Just on the 19th/20th St corridor, between Rutland and Lawrence, there are 5 large surface lots and a parking garage that are largely empty after 6PM and on weekends. That's not counting the ocean of parking in front of the Kroger, all the parking for Walgreens and CVS, or the St Andrew's lot. There is an absolute TON of parking on 19th St, but since our rules require each development to provide its own (exclusive) parking, it's very poorly allocated. You know what's great at efficiently allocating scarce resources? The price mechanism. SPA's generally seek to REDUCE the amount of parking for new developments by leveraging the existing, often poorly allocated, supply of parking. By not pricing parking correctly (or at all), we're shielding people from the economic impact of choosing to drive to a location, which in effect subsidizes drivers at the expense of walkers, bikers and ride-sharers (or even car-poolers). Second, people don't own the streets in front of their houses. Before building more empty parking spaces, we can and should make more use of on-street parking, for both residential and non-residential uses. If demands exceeds supply, then the price should go up. (Also, there's no need for actual meters anymore. It can be implemented with signage and an app.) Lastly, the idea that you only get structured parking if there are parking minimums is ridiculous. The area of the city with the highest density of parking structures is downtown, an area with no parking minimums. Where parking minimums exist, structured parking gets built when the cost (including opportunity cost) of providing surface parking exceeds the cost of building a parking structure. For sufficiently large developments, this happens at a land cost of around $100/s.f. For small developments, that number is a lot higher, since the cost per space of structured parking is a lot higher for small numbers of spaces. The problem is that with all the surface parking, it's hard to achieve enough density for land values to rise to a level where structured parking makes sense. So in effect, parking minimums actually discourage the construction of structured parking, especially for small developments. In the absence of parking minimums, what determines whether or not it makes sense to build a parking structure is the same as what determines whether or not it makes sense to build a restaurant or retail center or apartment building: whether the investment provides enough return to cover the debt service. That means that each space needs to generate about $8/day in revenue, either directly or indirectly. Once the effective cost of the existing on-street and off-street surface parking exceeds this value, then we'd see standalone structured parking get built. Not before.

This is true, but easily solved: re-stripe both Shepherd and Durham from 4-lane, one-way to 3-lane, two-way, so instead of having an 8-lane highway running through the neighborhood, we have two functional commercial streets.

There's a chain of temakerias in Brazil that appears to do pretty good business. It's basicaly poke in a cone.

This is correct. 32 spaces is not enough scale for structured parking to work. The proportion of space taken up by ramps, etc., makes the per-space cost really high. There is currently (a) no market for parking in the area (people expect it to be free) and (b) no mechanism for someone to build a spec parking structure and allow nearby developments to use it to meet their parking minimums in an efficient way. With respect to (a), the expectation that parking should be free isn't universal in the city. In areas like downtown and midtown, people expect to pay to park, and do. Not coincidentally, these are the areas of the city exempt from parking minimums. With respect to (b), there IS a mechanism to establish a special parking area, but it's not a city-led process. It requires a significant amount of work to assemble the necessary documentation for the city, and unless there is strong leadership (or a large single landowner), it's difficult to overcome the collective action problem. I think the only two current SPA's are Montrose and Menil. The current regulations make walkable development (i.e. development with very little surface parking) viable only for large-scale developments. Places like Highland Village and ROSC can manage to make structured parking work. The proposed automated garage on White Oak is over 200 spaces, enough to cover the new retail, existing retail, and whatever goes on the Fitzgerald's site. Braun probably had enough scale at the Waterworks to go structured, and include enough parking to also cover Harold's and whatever they want to build on what is now parking for Harold's, but chose not to. If we want small-scale walkable development to be viable, the best approach is to eliminate parking minimums and price on-street parking in accordance with demand. Tenants will still want parking, but this will allow parking to be decoupled from each individual project, and make it viable for someone to provide paid structured parking.

When the parking variance for the new retail on (the good part of) 19th came before the Planning Commission, only one of the speakers was in favor. Requiring businesses to provide off-street parking is still wildly popular.

Two parking lots. http://swamplot.com/heights-hoteliers-next-teardown-target-the-florist-on-the-other-side-of-ashland-st/2018-12-18/ The floral shop across Ashland will be torn down to make way for (more) parking. That means the entire blockface of Ashland between 20th and 21st will be surface parking.

On foot or by car? The store is still built to engage the parking lot instead of the street. The materials on the garage are better than the typical raw concrete, and having the openings is better than a blank wall, but it's pretty clearly built for people to arrive by car.

In the Venn diagram of people who want apartments to be built with GFR and people who don't want to live within eyesight of retail, I wonder how much overlap there is.

With the demolition of the white house on the NE corner of Ashland and 20th imminent, swamplot notes that permit records indicate a hotel may be built on this site. The city's permitting site indicates that a parking review was submitted on 30Nov. The land is currently owned by an entity called Wood Lane Partners, Ltd., whose registered agent is Robert Ackerley, one of the founders of NF Smith, a sizeable privately held electronics parts distributor. Robert Ackerley also appears to be in the pecan business.

Except, as far as I understand, the swim club is a separate entity from the lodge, as not all lodge members will have access. The 360 charter members pay in $6000 each, which is $2.16M, which is apparently enough to cover the construction cost of the pool and other facilities. The lodge cedes what looks to be about an acre-and-a-half of land, plus, presumably, access to the parking lot, which is another acre-and-a-half. Even without the parking, it's something like $3M worth of dirt. In return, the lodge gets 360 new members and a new roof. Seems like it would have been cleaner to sell the club the 3+ acres the lodge owns on the other side of Beall St., but then the charter members would have had to find another $6M or so.

So, I guess this is moving forward, though apparently not without some controversy. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Pool-debate-dividing-Heights-community-group-13453316.php And it looks like they did get the land for free (well, in exchange for a new roof for the lodge).

It seems irrational that a lot of buildings get demo'd and replaced with surface lots while waiting to construct something new. Sometimes for several years. Usually if a seemlingly irrational thing happens frequently, it's probably to do with taxation or regulation. (One of) the reason(s) you see buildings get knocked down and replaced with surface lots is that the property tax on a vacant building is a lot higher than the property tax on a surface parking lot. There are ways to deal with this kind of under-development. One is to use a land-value tax rather than a tax based on the land plus improvements. That way, every square foot of land is taxed at the same rate, independent of what's built on it, which incentives land owners to develop to the highest and best use. Another way would be a special assessment on any land area dedicated to parking, exempted if it's structured parking with non-parking uses fronting the sidewalk. Something like $5/sf/year would make structured parking economically attractive compared to surface parking.

Doesn't look like the kind of foundation you'd pour for a 20-story building, but it seems too big to just be a sales office.

(Former) owner speculating that the building will be torn down after the new year. https://www.chron.com/life/article/Long-time-Houston-music-venue-set-to-shutter-13444663.php

10- and 25-feet are the Chapter-42 compliant setbacks for Dallas and Shepherd, respectively. For reference, the condo building across Dallas from this site appears to have 10-ft setbacks as well.

This site is a little smaller than the former KBR site east of downtown. The largest un-developed tracts of land inside the loop are probably along Clinton Dr near the ship channel.

Hmmm. The city needs $80M to do this work. The work frees up 16 acres of land in a location where land values could approach $5M/acre. If only there were a way to reconcile these two things.

Neither Summer nor Crockett are thru streets to this site. To get to anything resembling a neighborhood, you have to cross 6 acres of Target parking lot. It's now clear that the original sin of this entire area is that Target development. If that area had been platted with thru streets and integrated with the 1st/6th ward street grid, it would be possible to continue that pattern here. Unfortunately, integration with the 1st/6th wards wasn't seen as all that desirable when that site was developed.

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.

Rendering shows two-way traffic on Shep.

This would be big news.

Places that start out as retail and restaurant under the same roof pretty much always migrate to more restaurant and less retail as time passes. W/r/t parking, if this results in more people using the (yes, legal) street parking along Yale and 14th, thus slowing the traffic on those two streets, it'll be a good thing.

"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."

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.