Angostura

On 1/14/2020 at 8:13 AM, Angostura said:

 

 

I suspect the real story is that Post increased the rent, so she decided to move, because the actual reasoning makes zero sense.

 

Masson replied to a facebook post about this. Turns out...

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The landlord sent renewal papers to me with a number that I laughed at, $65/sq foot. Seriously, that's a lot of freaking cookies to bake. So, with that I set out looking for a new location.

...though there were issues besides rent (and parking):

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Being part of a mixed use building also comes with it's own set of issues. We have had major flooding due to apartment tenants (try being closed for 3 months because water rained down from the 3rd floor for 3 hours.). We suffered major plumbing damage because the next door tenant let his grease trap erode away and destroying the plumbing to me and the restaurant on the corner. All of this happening and the landlord throwing up his hands and saying "it's not our fault, figure it out and oh, where's our rent." Top that off with paying double digit triple nets for horrible security and non-existent maintenance of common areas. Lastly, I am tired of being broken into (which I know won't change when I move) and having homeless guys (with actual crack pipes in their hands) walking into my bakery, stealing tips and digging through the garbage.

On 2/21/2020 at 4:37 PM, H-Town Man said:

 

You could build an actual mountain with a 12,000 foot summit height that would be snow-capped year round and within a generation it'd be one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Houston.

 

To be fair, building an actual mountain may be easier than eliminating parking minimums.

18 hours ago, Luminare said:

 

Yeah, but they aren't wrong when they said its a wasteland. Its just not politically correct to say so. That doesn't mean it doesn't have potential. The fact of the matter is that area is just too large in scale without the right plan to bring it all together. Most people can wrap their heads around a city block, but most can't wrap their heads around an area the size of some actual small towns. 

You could plat it out with (mostly) narrow streets (30-ft RoW), small-ish blocks (~200-ft), small plots (mostly 25-ft frontage, with some 50 and 100-ft lots), require zero front setbacks, allow zero-ft side setbacks, institute a height limit (say, 50 ft), and exempt the area from parking minimums. Within a generation it'd be one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Houston.

19 hours ago, crock said:

im amazed these aren't already owned by Rice or one of the hospitals.  

 

Rice owns the (empty) corner lot next door.

The lots ARE deed-restricted, but the restrictions allow for multi-family on these lots, with design approval.

The two buildings have a total of 8 apartments, at an average of around 1000 sf each, and apparently not in great shape. Property taxes alone are $400+ per month per unit. Owners are probably facing either a renovation or a teardown.

The two lots combined have an appraised value of around $1.5M. If they renovated the structures to a value of $200/sf, they'd need $1000/mo per unit just to pay the taxes, and probably $2500-3000/month to cover the debt service on the land + reno cost. Almost certainly doesn't pencil. It would also be an improvement to land value ratio of about 1:1, which is way underbuilt.

Helvetica wine!

20 hours ago, H-Town Man said:

 

I think this is an interesting post but I don't see why a façade distance of 90 feet is a problem in this context. Montrose and Westheimer are major boulevards, hence one would expect "grand boulevard" urbanism rather than "intimate neighborhood" urbanism. Façade distances on Parisian boulevards are often well in excess of 90 feet, with Boulevard St. Germain at 100 feet and Champs d'Elysees at 210 feet.

 

Yes, there are wide streets in these places, and one would expect streets like Westheimer and Montrose to be relatively wide, but if you take a few steps off of one of the grand avenues in Paris, and you'll find yourself on streets that are 30 feet or less between facades. There are no such streets in most American cities. 

Take rapidly-densifying EaDo: all the streets are 70-ft ROW, plus a 5-ft building line (mininum), which means the distance between facades is never much less than 80 feet, almost 3X that of a typical pre-19th century side street. So the ONLY place you can put this kind of space is internal to a development.

20 hours ago, s3mh said:

https://www.chron.com/entertainment/restaurants-bars/article/Katz-s-Deli-to-open-in-the-Heights-in-fall-2020-15031794.php#item-85307-tbla-10

 

Renderings for Katz's.  Michael Hsu seems to now be the architect in residence for the Heights.  

Convenient, I guess. The firm's Houston office is only a few blocks from the site.

15 hours ago, zaphod said:

Does anyone think this thing embodies bad urban planning principals?

 

I think pretty much the exact opposite.

Like most American cities, Houston suffers from overly wide rights of way. Distance between facades near this project on both Westheimer and Montrose is 90 feet or more. It's very difficult to create a low-stress pedestrian-focused environment when the RoW is so wide. One of the very few ways to create human-scale pedestrian areas, therefore, is within large blocks. (See the Laneways development in Midtown, for example.) 

The other thing you see with this layout is that the central courtyard is much more like a traditional European square than it is an American park, since it's surrounded on all sides with buildings, not streets. This gives it a much more intimate, quiet feel. And the grade separation from the two busy roadways should help.

Finally, all of this doesn't come at the expense of a hostile streetscape. The outside-facing facades appear to be transparent and activated, and the setbacks are right up against the pedestrian realm. And at this address, they should be able to find tenants for the retail. Even the parking is underground or otherwise hidden from view. 

Some of the materials and massing might not be entirely to my taste, but from an urbanism standpoint, it's pretty outstanding.

Here's a better shot of the SF totals:

This is probably something like 700+ total residential units, between MF and condo, plus maybe 150-200 hotel rooms

The 3D diagram would also seem to indicate 3 levels of underground parking 😲  

Very ambitious. Probably something like a quarter-billion dollar build, on top of the land cost (which is prob worth low-8-figures).

On 1/26/2020 at 12:11 AM, hindesky said:

 

 

 

 

Love that zero-foot building line.

18 hours ago, Luminare said:

are the other parking lots owned by separate entities? or is it all Sand Dollar?

The overhead views show the building footprint covering everything from the corner up to and including the new-ish Memorial Herman building. That's 424 feet of frontage, 200 of which was the Sand Dollar property. The other lots are (were?) owned by the Baptist Temple (that fronts 20th).

Presumably the agreement between LevCor and the Temple will include use of the new parking garage for Sunday services.

19 hours ago, HNathoo said:

Here are some more images from the brochure: 

Is there a link to this brochure? Hard to read the text in the images.

...but this makes a lot more sense now. Two floors of retail, topped by two floors of parking, then two floors of office. 

That top image may be off, though. The plan view shows the 5th floor decks facing the back, whereas the renderings show them facing the front (which would make more sense). 

Also, it looks like the curb cut in the rendering is in the wrong place. On the 1st floor plan view, it shows vehicle ingress from 19th, along the western edge of the building.  There also appears to be access from the alley, so maybe the 19th St vehicle entrance can be eliminated.

6 hours ago, Luminare said:

 

Great to see some interior shots, but did nobody seriously look at this before it went out the door and say...maybe we should lower those HVAC ducts by about 1' 6" before we send this out? They are incredibly distracting and once you see it you just can't look away haha.

You mean the ones running straight through the I-beams? I'm sure it's fine.

22 hours ago, s3mh said:

This looks a bit too SimCity to be real.  It looks large enough to go all the way from Yale to Rutland.  It also looks very purposefully vague as to whether it is office or multifamily on top of retail.  I suspect this is just an attempt to see what kind of leasing interest there would be in the property and not an actual rendering of a project that is ready to build.

The property has 200' of frontage (200 x 132 = the 26,400 sf shown in the brochure). Scaling from the people in the rendering, it looks like about 20-ft between columns, which would make this about 280 feet across the front, which is about half the block, and would require them to acquire the Baptist Temple's parking lot next door.

I also agree that this rendering (and the brochure) is too vague to give any kind of indication what Levcor plans to develop here. The ground floor is laid out kind of like retail (front-facing entry doors every 30 feet or so, but then there's what looks like an office building lobby entrance in the middle. The 2nd floor has only two small entry doors from the colonnade/deck, and looks more like a hotel conference facility. The third floor (or is it 3rd and 4th?) looks like a parking garage with a 40-ft atrium in the middle of it. And the top floor looks like a pair of very large bar/restaurant spaces.

And yet the site only says 18k sf of leaseable area.

11 hours ago, s3mh said:

Fluff Bakery relocating to Shady Acres and adding breakfast.  

 

http://houston.culturemap.com/news/restaurants-bars/01-13-20-fluff-bake-bar-new-location-the-heights-shady-acres-rebecca-masson/

I wish her the best of luck, but a couple of things in that article made my eyes roll.

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“I’m so sick of Midtown,” Masson says. “The biggest issue is parking. Even though there is a humongous parking garage behind the bakery, no one knows it’s there. No one takes the time to look for it. They drive by, they don’t see a parking spot, they don’t pull over.”

She was on a block with four restaurants. With several others within a couple-hundred feet. Seems like you oughta be able to sell desserts to some of those people instead of choosing a location where people will have to make a special trip to get to you.

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Moving into the middle of a neighborhood will result in one important change. Fluff will open at 7 am with a new line of breakfast goods, including kolaches, cinnamon rolls, and, most importantly, Masson’s signature croissants — previously only available occasionally as part of her Saturday morning bake sale pop-ups. 

There are HUNDREDS of apartments literally RIGHT ON TOP of the Midtown location. Do these people not eat breakfast?

I suspect the real story is that Post increased the rent, so she decided to move, because the actual reasoning makes zero sense.

2920 is the address of the Lucky Food Store. 

There was at some point a restaurant concept that would have occupied the rear half of that building (I recall a drawing showing a door facing the parking lot just West of the building. Not sure if the whiskey bar will take over the whole building or just the rear half.

6 hours ago, HNathoo said:

You can technically have 8 end caps with 4 corners 

Can you, tho?

I suppose with diagonal internal walls, you can have 8 spaces that come right up to the corner, but then they wouldn't really be end caps in the sense you have two exterior walls "to promote an open atmosphere" (as the rendering copy says). Maybe there's retail on the 2nd floor, but the rendering doesn't look like it.

Not sure how a building with 4 corners can have 7 endcaps, unless some of them are mid-block endcaps, which seems like a strange use of the term.

11 minutes ago, Twinsanity02 said:

 In that category we clean Paris's clock. I believe the Katy freeway is the widest highway in the world.

 

But seriously the Champs Elysees  "begins" at the Triumphal Arch in which the remains of a unknown French solider is interred and lit by an eternal flame. The avenue is used for bastille day celebrations. It has been the scene of many historic events: Charles deGaulle and the liberation of Paris, the US 28th infantry division marching through to go to battle. In addition the Tour de France ends there. The avenue ends at  the  Place de la Concorde, stunningly beautiful and with much historical significance, which leads to the Louvre, the world's largest Art Museum and former palaces of the Kings and Queens of France. I left out gardens and several other things.  Duplicating the avenue in our great city is impossible.

 

As switsig previously mentioned we can have a Park ave. or Rodeo dr. That in my opinion is very doable.

I read somewhere that one of the tests for a city is if there were a city-wide protest or celebration, would everyone instinctively know where to go to participate. I'm pretty sure Houston fails this one.

Wow, 430 units.

18 hours ago, swtsig said:

 

Houston will never have anything that compares to the Champs Elysees. 

You mean an overly wide right-of-way dominated by automobile traffic? Houston has plenty of those!

23 hours ago, Luminare said:

 

Most Boomers in their late twenties and early thirties didn't have this issue at all, so many of their first encounters with this kind of debt was a mortgage on a home. For the millineal generation it was education. Though the jury is still out on whether for most it was a sound investment. 

Observing the income premium from having a college education and concluding that we need to send everyone to college was a very "wet streets cause rain" moment. As was observing that home ownership correlated with good economic outcomes and concluding that we need to make everyone a homeowner. The latter caused the 2008 financial crisis. The full reckoning of the former has yet to come.

18 hours ago, bobruss said:

If I had to rate the best foot traffic areas in Houston i would start with Westheimer from Smith to 610. There is more action on Westheimer and continuous retail, service and residential on Westheimer than any street in Houston. It also has a considerable amount of activity and vitality.

I would put the whole Rice Village area in at #2, and 

a couple of areas in the Heights right up there also.

Eado could develop into a more walkable retail and entertainment area once they have finished dissecting it with freeway plans.

I think any list that doesn't have the CBD and Midtown at #1 and #2 is probably a little off.