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Angostura

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Everything posted by Angostura

  1. Angostura
    Because it's essentially saying that if you want to live in a particular neighborhood, you must have enough money to buy (an increasingly expensive) single family home, or have had the good sense to be born a few decades earlier, when those homes were affordable. So if you're not one of those entrenched elites, you're out of luck. Policies that restrict the housing supply increase the price of housing, which enriches the (older, richer) existing owners at the expense of potential (younger, poorer) newcomers. If you're sitting on half-a-million dollars in home equity due to rampant housing price inflation (not uncommon in cities with restrictive zoning), you're already in the top quintile of the wealth distribution in this country. Restrictive zoning is a very effective mechanism to transfer money from younger, poorer people to older, richer people, and we should be ashamed it's lasted as long as it has in most of the country.
  2. Angostura
    And if those people aren't buying expensive condos in high-rise buildings, what ARE they buying? If the number of people who want to live in a given neighborhood goes up (which is the case in Montrose), either we build more housing to meet the demand, or the price of the existing housing stock goes up, which absolutely prices people out of the neighborhood.
  3. Angostura
    But on the low end of the initial 100-150 res units. That said, a reasonable amount of 3BR units. If dense areas are to attract families in addition to singles and childless couples, we need more 3BR+ apartments and condos.
  4. Angostura
  5. Angostura
    Or build on smaller plots! With the elimination of parking minimums in Midtown, small scale development might start to make more sense. Neighborhoods developed as small (say, 0.1 acre on average) plots are virtually always better than neighborhoods developed a full block at a time. Compare the north end of downtown to the south end, for example. It takes a lot of effort to make a full-block development interesting at the pedestrian level, but if developed 25-50 ft at a time, it just happens naturally. (Neighborhoods developed as a series of multi-acre reserves are not, in fact, neighborhoods. They're a series of subdivisions, interspersed with retail centers, connected by major thoroughfares.)
  6. Angostura
    From the revised variance request: Now 6000 sf of retail, 4 x 1500sf, one of which will be a new version of Khun Kay Retail parking on the 2nd floor Residential parking on floors 3 thru 7 Residences on floors 8 thru 20
  7. Angostura
    more ice cream for the Heights...
  8. Angostura
    The artisanal ice cream places are trying to catch up to the burger places. Fat Cat, Dolce Neive, Gelazzi, Cloud 10, and now Sweet Bribery.
  9. Angostura
    As long is there is some preference overlap along the spectrum from high-rise apartment to 1-acre homesite, it doesn't need to be a direct substitution to be true. And people's preferences are not immune to price and availability. Right now, you're able to indulge both your preference for a certain type of housing AND your preference to live (in certain neighborhoods) inside the loop, but there's no guarantee that those conditions will persist.
  10. Angostura
    The "what about the drainage" people are the best. Aesthetics of this particular building aside, building high-FAR, high-population-per-acre housing results in less impervious cover per resident. And the increase in population is coming whether we build here or out in the sticks. Every apartment in this building could mean one fewer house on the Katy prairie, which should HELP the flooding situation. The "what about the traffic" people have a point, sort of. To the extent that all the people living in this building will mostly get around by driving personal automobiles, the additional population will increase traffic. But it's not a question of WHETHER we get additional population, it's a question of WHERE. If you want to reduce traffic, you need to reduce vehicle miles traveled per person. If you don't build dense housing near where people work and play, you build sprawl further away. Which means more people driving more miles, which means more traffic.
  11. Angostura
    Looking at the rendering, if the retail parking is undergound (probably 50 spaces or so) it's almost certainly exceeding the minimums by a fair amount. 50% or so, I'd guess.
  12. Angostura
    No real discussion from commissioners. One speaker in favor, though wanted less prominent parking (either fewer spaces or automated parking system). Two speakers opposed.
  13. Angostura
    ftp://edrc.houstontx.gov//2018/2018-18_FinalAgenda.pdf
  14. Angostura
    For those interested, there IS a rendering in the version of the planning commission agenda currently online. It DOES show 9 floors of glass-clad parking over what appears to be two floors of retail, including "Gucci" and "Prada".
  15. Angostura
    Yes, developers would still build parking, because tenants would still WANT parking. However, when it stops being a requirement for every site to have their own parking you start to get some small benefits: You can more efficiently share parking across uses. Currently, if a coffee shop that's busy during the day and a restaurant that's busy in the evening have any overlap in opening hours, they can't share parking It gets people used to paying for off-street parking (it's hard to park for free in the current zero-minimum areas) It allows someone to build a parking structure to support nearby business, freeing up land for retail or residential development It allows the development sites too small to contain a structure AND a parking lot. I mostly just want parking to carry a price that's close to the cost of providing it.
  16. Angostura
    Would rather it was the entire area inside 610, but it's a start.
  17. Angostura
    Planning commission will present today the plan to extend the CBD exemption from parking minimums to Midtown (up to the Spur/59) and Eado (the triangle between 45, 59 and the UP tracks). https://twitter.com/HoustonPlanning/status/1034919312962797568
  18. Angostura
    Probably a lot of factors at work. Off the top of my head: Overbuilding of large shopping malls in the 80's. Municipal incentives to attract big-box development in the 90's. Lots of REIT/MBS/CDO money looking for places to invest in the 00's. Higher suburbanization (and more road building, and higher rates of car ownership) in the US compared to other countries making more large greenfield sites available for retail. Development rules that favor large projects over small ones. Municipal authorities generally favoring commercial development over residential development (sales tax plus property tax > just property tax). Local homeowners being less likely to oppose retail densification than residential densification. Etc.
  19. Angostura
    In the US, the ratio of residential square footage to retail square footage is around 28:1. That's largely because we have an insanely high amount of under-utilized retail square footage in the US. In Australia, it's almost 50:1. In the UK it's about 99:1. Taking the Australian ratio as a target, and assuming 5-story buildings, for every block with GFR, you'd expect 9 without it. That lines up pretty closely with dense, walkable neighborhoods around the world, where the number of buildings without GFR far outnumber the ones with. That said, either by tradition or by zoning, retail in those places is often concentrated on specific streets, such that some streets have essentially 100% GFR, with surrounding blocks having close to 0%. One would expect a street like Main St in Midtown to belong in the former category.
  20. Angostura
    I find this an odd way of thinking about development. It's as if the developer just harvested this building from the building farm, and just needs a place to plant it.
  21. Angostura
    I was told the building would have scary teeth and angry eyebrows. Kinda disappointed now.
  22. Angostura
    Manhattan has varying FAR caps, up to 12 I think, but you can buy your neighbors' unused FAR, which can result in buildings with FAR well in excess of 12. Some of the super-skinny buildings in NYC have aspect ratios (height divided by smallest dimension, usually width) well above 10. This building will be closer to 2. Is this building out of scale with it's neighbors? Yes. Are FAR caps mostly tools used by zoning boards to benefit existing property owners at the expense of new entrants by limiting the supply of housing and thereby increasing prices? Also yes.
  23. Angostura
    It just makes things a lot more expensive. Also, this site is relatively compact, which makes garage layouts inefficient to begin with. The footprint is 86' x 144'. A parking bay is usually at least 60-ft wide, so that leaves just enough space for a two-way ramp. I'm guessing they'd be able to put around 30 spaces per floor. If they do two floors of retail, subtracting out the space for the ramp and pedestrian circulation, they may have around 16,000 sf of retail space, which requires at least 64 spots, more if there's a lot of space dedicated to restaurants. Which means if they do all the retail parking underground, it needs to go at least two levels deep. For the residential parking, if it's 100-150 units, assuming they're all 1 and 2-BR units, it's anywhere from 133 to 250 spaces required. At the middle of that range, it's 6-7 levels of parking. Add the 2 levels required for the retail, and you get close to the 9 levels they talk about in the description.
  24. Angostura
    Honestly, and this is a very unpopular opinion, especially among single-family homeowners, if this kind of project is viable on this size of parcel, it's not that this project is over-built: it's the SFH's that are UNDER-built. That said, the way the variance request was written I don't think the plans are finalized. Splitting the parking between one underground level and nine additional levels ABOVE two levels of retail seems like a very inefficient configuration. On a plot this size, ramps take up a pretty high proportion of area, so that may be what's driving the height. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, by the time this actually gets built, it's a single level of GFR, with 4 to 6 levels of parking between the GFR and the 1st residential floor. This type of project is challenging. As you walk (or drive) around cities, you will find very few buildings on plots smaller than 1 acre that include retail, residential, AND parking for both uses in the kinds of quantities that Houston requires.
  25. Angostura
    Planning commission agenda. Not much in the way of detail. They're asking for 5-ft setbacks on Montrose and Clay, rather than the required 25 and 10-ft setbacks. 24,000 sf retail, 100-150 residential units.
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