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.

I was told the building would have scary teeth and angry eyebrows. Kinda disappointed now.

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.

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.

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.

More detail on this week's planning commission agenda. The retail is mostly on 2 stories, with each story divided into 4 spaces, each around 1100-1200 sf, with a corridor along the western wall of the buiding. The third floor is a small (748 sf) retail space in the NW corner of the building, with the rest of the 3rd floor space left as an open-air patio, accessible, it appears, only through the retail space. So it's closer to 2-1/8 stories than 2-1/2. The 1st floor facade will be set back 8-ft from the property line, with the 2nd floor over-hanging up to the front property line, supported by brick columns. The facade is brick and divided-light glass. Details on the parking variance are largely unchanged.

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.

The GFR requires parking, too.

5 months later, same chicken-or-egg comments on the new revision of the plans. This is going to get stuck in a recursive loop and never get approved.

Looks a lot like a Sprouts.

Very reminiscent of Vancouver-style podium towers: a mid-rise podium provides an engaging, human-scaled streetscape, with relatively narrow laneways between them and lots of ground floor retail, while the towers provide residences with a view and add to the skyline. Best of both worlds, and infinitely better than tower-in-a-parking-lot style highrises.

...as long as we don't screw it up. That infill on the 300 block of West 19th requires a ton of variances (incl off street parking) to be built to match its neighbors on either side. The planning commission's walkable places pilot is doing this, sort of. The current optional performance standards (setbacks reduced to 5-ft, parking in rear, wider sidewalks, minimum levels of transparency in the facade, limited curb cuts, entrance facing the street) will become mandatory in those areas, though parking minimums will still exist outside the CBD. Currently this is limited to a couple of pilot areas (near Northside, Midtown and Emancipation Ave in EaDo), but could expand.

Honestly, I'd be more likely to trust random development than zoning. Zoning done well could theoretically lead to very good results. The problem is that zoning is almost never done well. It ends up being captured by special interests like large-scale developers, big box retailers and single-family homeowners (and yes, single-family homeowners are a special interest). More often than not, zoning leads to use segregation; use segregation leads to car-dependency; and car dependency leads to parking minimums and low density and a really unpleasant pedestrian environment. With a few tweaks (setback rules, RoW widths) Houston's sometimes chaotic development rules may be the best way to migrate from car-dependence to non-car-dependence, since you can add density by right, without needing zoning approval. The problem is, there will be pain along the way. When you start with relatively low-density suburban style development, it's pretty comfortable (as long as you're in a car): there's not much traffic, it's pretty easy to park, and there's a lot of space. When you add density to this development pattern, things start getting less comfortable. It's still pretty shitty to be a pedestrian (lots of cars around, hard to cross streets, things are still pretty far away from each other), and it gets harder to be a driver (more traffic, harder to park, etc.). But if you keep adding density (and we're going to keep adding density, because that's what growing cities do), eventually you get to a point where vehicle miles decrease because things are closer together, demand for parking decreases because there are other ways to get where you're going, and quality of life increases. Traveling between neighborhoods is often still difficult, but within neighborhoods, it's pretty easy to get around. Very few places that start out as car-dependent have managed to get over this hump. Usually because zoning locks them into a certain density level, or people resist additional housing construction and convince their elected representatives to block it, or cities impose parking minimums that make it difficult to develop to a walkable density. So if automated garages can resolve the issue of complying with parking minimums while STILL providing levels of built square footage per acre compatible with walkable density, it's a big deal.

I counted about 100 apartments on the drawing. Assuming it's 3 stories (typical for suburban-style apartment complexes), that's 300 apartments. By eyeball, it looks like about 500 surface parking spaces. Which would be about right w/r/t CoH parking minimums. If they could make a 4-story wrap work on the corner of the site next to Elysian, why is it so much lower-density on the part closer to the light rail line? It's kind of laughable that they use the terms walkable and transit-oriented in a variance request for a project that is over half surface parking.

AKAIK, where CoH holds sway, they've mostly been removed. Where TXDOT has jurisdiction, they're allowed to stay.

The proposed construction would most certainly trigger Ch 26 parking requirements. When it was just a junk dealer, he didn't a building or occupancy permit, since there was no structure. There IS a clause for reconstruction of a building damaged by fire, which is the reason this site is vacant, but (a) that fire was over 20 years ago, (b) they're not rebuilding to the exact previous configuration, and (c) the rebuild cost must be less than 75% of the replacement cost of the whole building, which, since they ARE replacing the whole building, is unlikely to be the case. This project is entirely dependent on the planning commission issuing a variance, since it's currently illegal to build places like 19th St outside downtown.

It's tricky. Even in the absence of city-mandated parking minimums, tenants are going to demand a certain amount of parking, since they're aware that most of their customers are likely to arrive by private automobile. You can only really reduce the amount of parking consumed when arriving some other way becomes cheaper, faster and/or easier than temporarily storing your car at your destination. There's a certain level of activity density at which it becomes no less convenient to walk than to drive for daily necessities. It won't necessarily get commuters out of cars, but you're more likely to walk to a restaurant or grocery store than to drive. It's pretty much impossible to get to that level of density when there's high levels of surface parking. So parking structures are a gateway to getting to the kind of density needed to be a truly walkable neighborhood. The problem is that, since all that parking limits density, most neighborhoods never achieve land values high enough for structured parking to make sense economically, so they get stuck in a suburban development pattern where car dependence never really goes away. Which is why a parking system that can make structured parking economical at land values of $60/sf rather than $100/sf (not to mention on smaller footprints) has a real chance to transform how neighborhoods develop. (BTW, this can be done without going THAT vertical. There are a lot of very dense, walkable neighborhoods in cities around the world with typical heights of 4, 5 or 6 stories.)

Deferred. One speaker (the dentist across the alley) was very upset that there might be pedestrians in the alley, and that they would probably get run over. Also delivery trucks might make it harder to access the parking spaces behind her building. At least one commissioner was surprised at the size of the ask on the parking variance (4 vs 41). This is by no means a done deal, and the planning commission is fully capable of screwing this one up by requiring suburban-style parking rules on a walkable commercial street.

I think it's pretty simple. Identify the best parts of the city (and this stretch of 19th St is one of them), and allow people to build places in the same style.

Both the setback variance and off-street parking variance are on this week's agenda. The proposed building is a 3-story building, with the 1st story set back 6-ft from the building line (the 2nd story would overhang), and the 3rd story being about half patio. Total retail square footage is right around 10k. Ch 26 would require 41 off-street spaces, but the site will only include 4. There are a lot of anti-urbanist requirements in our development rules, including a minimum width of unrestricted reserve (60-ft), front setbacks, and on-site off-street parking, that must be waived in order for this building to fit in with the rest of its neighbors. This is a real test of the planning commission's commitment to walkability and urbanism. Interesting to see if they will continue to outlaw re-creating the most beloved parts of the city.

At least the parking (and it's a LOT of parking) isn't along the street, but this is a real wasted opportunity. Would make more sense to continue Chestnut and Gentry streets across Burnett to get some smaller block sizes, then build all the way to the lot line. This much surface parking this close to downtown is kinda gross.

Spoiler alert: it'll be parking.

And every restaurant where valet parking is really the only option is effectively paid parking. Even when it's "complimentary". And I'm not sure the robot parking system is any less trustworthy than your average valet parking operator.

Oh, and there's ALREADY paid parking on White Oak. The lot on Threkeld is $7, I think.

They don't (necessarily) have to charge for parking for this to make economic sense. Consider the project announced late last year for the site between Fitz and Barnaby's. That was for a 2600 sf restaurant on a 12,500 sf lot. If you move the required 26 spaces for that project, plus another 78 into the new structure, you can now build 4 restaurants on that site instead of 1. Building ~100 spaces in this parking structure is like creating an ADDITIONAL 37,500 sf of develop-able land. At $70/sf, HCAD's current valuation, that means that if you can build parking at less than $28,000 per space, you come out ahead, even if you don't charge a nickel for it. Some lazy Googling indicates that robotic parking systems can come in around $20k-30k per space. I assume that includes margin for the provider of the parking system, but in this case, the developer is also the provider, so the actual cost may be even lower. Why do this in Houston, instead of NY, DC, SF or other places with much higher land values? I can think of a couple possibilities: 1 - In Houston you can change land use and add density by right, without having to ask for zoning changes, so it may be possible to get a demonstration project like this in place faster than in other jurisdictions. 2 - The land value in those other cities is already high enough to justify traditional structured parking for any new development, whereas this part of Houston has a land value right in the sweet spot: not quite high enough to justify traditional structured parking, but high enough for robotic parking to make sense.