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Angostura

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Everything posted by Angostura

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Angostura
  6. Angostura
    Then, no, I haven't seen the same thing. The rendering in the variance request is not what anyone would describe as beaux-arts. More early 20th century industrial. It's pretty similar to the building immediately to the west, just without the glass-brick center column.
  7. Angostura
    Back on the agenda for Thursday. No change in the parking variance (one assumes they weren't successful in leasing dedicated spots). The container trees are gone, and an awning (encroaching into the RoW, similar to its neighbors) has been added, both at the request of commissioners.
  8. 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.)
  9. 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
  10. Angostura
    Called it. From the variance request:
  11. Angostura
    more ice cream for the Heights...
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Angostura
    Agree. I don't see how they could add significant amounts of GFR the way the building is currently constructed. Also, this is not the phase of a project where you ask for a building line variance. Especially on the W. Gray frontage. It's possible that they want to bump out a little to squeeze in a coffee shop or convenience store off the lobby. But it wouldn't shock me if there were some kind of surveying error, and one of the buildings is a few inches from where it should be, thus violating the building line on the current plat.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Angostura
    Deferred two more weeks to allow the project to seek some number of off-site parking spaces, and potentially include an awning. The mini space on the 3rd floor has been removed, so this is now just two floors. Three people spoke against the parking variance, two nearby homeowners to say "but muh parking", and the owner of the hospital at 20th and Ashland rose to say "don't park in my lot". One person spoke in support, saying that if you provide a ton of parking, you'll get a ton of cars. The plans included two street trees in containers on the sidewalk at the direction of staff, which at least one commissioner object to as it would result in a sidewalk obstruction.
  19. Angostura
    ftp://edrc.houstontx.gov//2018/2018-18_FinalAgenda.pdf
  20. 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".
  21. 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.
  22. Angostura
    Would rather it was the entire area inside 610, but it's a start.
  23. 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
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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