SpringTX

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nb/woo...ws/4405150.html

Ah, yes, that's better - $189.8K. When I zoom in all the way, I see that zip code is colored in green, not red. Which tells me it's right at the median? So maybe it's lumped into a range which contains the median. And what is the median for our "region", by the way? (The website says: "The median home price is the median selling price of a home in the region.") Maybe they think the median for the region is $220K, according to the map legend?

This is a damned good point. If Houston were an island with its borders just outside of the beltway, or if there were a ring of uninhabitable mountains around Houston, just outside of the beltway, would the population density inside the loop double? Heck no. Half the employers would leave, because they could only find half as many workers as they needed. Half the population (predominantly those who have kids) won't settle for high-rise living, renting, small lots, townhouses without yards, fast-paced urban environments, high population densities, "starter" homes costing $700,000, crime, pollution, etc. If you live inside the loop and don't have kids, ask yourself - would you current housing arrangement suit you if you suddenly had 3 school-aged kids tomorrow? You'd probably need a decent-sized yard for the kids to play in, so high-rises and townhomes would be out. You'd probably need 4 bedrooms, which means you'd need at least 2,000 to 3,000 square feet. You'd want to own, because you'd be there for a while, so renting would be out. You'd want decent public schools. You'd want a safe neighborhood for kids to play in the street and in nearby parks. You would need a neighborhood with other kids in it, so that your kids would have friends to play with. And since you'd be shelling out additional tens of thousands of dollars a year in utilities, food, clothing, ballet lessons, etc., your household budget would be stretched so that your house would need to be affordable as well. Where would you find all that? If you're earning a salary of $300K/year, you can find all those things in River Oaks. But if you're earning considerably less than that, which most of us are, you're going to start looking farther and farther out into the "spawl" until you find it.

In homes from the 1970's and 1980's, when looking at square foot for square foot, and year built for year built, the homes in Ponderosa Forest whup the ass of the homes in The Woodlands. Hands down. As you say, pre-1990, The Woodlands was a struggling upstart. The owners of The Woodlands have recently admitted that, as late as 1990, it was touch-and-go whether The Woodlands would ever make a profit and survive. At that time, Champions, Ponderosa, and Northampton were the high-profile communities on the north side of town. The Woodlands built some larger homes (now $400K+) in that period, usually near golf courses, but you can find homes like that in the "back" of Ponderosa (now the flood zone) and in Northgate Forest and so on, and the latter stand up very well to the ones in The Woodlands, if not surpassing them. Moving from Ponderosa Forest to Panther Creek in a house of approximately the same price, we took a half-step down in terms of quality. Square footage was 200 less. Everything was slightly less nice. It was the schools that brought us. But it has been the amazing community, from a people perspective and from an urban planning/aesthetic perspective, that have really surprised us. Ponderosa Forest used to have a tight-knit, active community that was unmatched in all of Spring ISD. And we saw that slipping away when we lived there. We now see a lot of that same kind of spirit in The Woodlands. When I read the biography of George Mitchell, I learned that the designers of The Woodlands were impressed by "the subdivisions along 1960" and modeled many things after them. They're talking about Champions, Ponderosa, Greenwood Forest, Huntwick, etc. In fact, the whole concept of "villages" designed into The Woodlands was meant to imitate these tight-knit and proud communities along 1960. My point is that, in my eyes, The Woodlands is a descendent of Ponderosa Forest and Champions, not a competitor. There's a common ancestry there. The Woodlands is "picking up" where Ponderosa "left off", in a sense. And someday, maybe not too far in the future, some other community will pick up where The Woodlands leaves off. The awesome community spirit that existed in Ponderosa Forest is all but dead now...but it has been reborn in nearby communities. In fact, there's a ton of ex-Ponderosa residents who have moved to The Woodlands, Northampton, etc.

I agree with our Northwest neighbors on this forum. The problem isn't these "riff-raff"; it's that these "riff-raff" are in too high of concentrations, and shoved into the wrong places at the wrong times by noble-minded do-gooders meddling with the free market. And the result is an inefficient, un-economical distribution of resources.

If we don't keep growing economically and population-wise, China will become the world's largest economy. As a nation, we don't want to be #2 in anything. So we got to keep cranking out the puppies and the profitable-but-poorly-made SUV's. It's a matter of national pride.

Sprawl is the most natural drive known to mankind since our earliest nomadic ancestors. We've all been to pet stores before and seen cats and dogs living in cages. How do they look? What is quality of their coats like? How about their behavior? When they live for a while in a confined space, without contact with other animals and a natural environment (fresh air, trees, etc.), is anyone surprised that they start to show more and more signs of bad health, mentally and physically? How about animals in zoos? Some of them can't even reproduce when paired with potential mates. For humans, is there any wonder that high population densities are associated with higher rates of crime per capita? Higher rates of illness? Higher rates of every social ill? You can mathematically arrange for 6 billion people to live in Texas. But you can't re-program the DNA in our bodies to make us happy, healthy, or productive in an arrangement like that. I'll pose this question to every inner-looper on this board: if you had the ability to "teleport" (like Star Trek) to work every day from anywhere in the world, would you still live inside the loop?

I think you make a great point. A year ago we looked at some amazing, awesome communities in Klein ISD. Streets that looked every bit as nice as stuff in The Woodlands. And Klein was my first choice because of the shorter commute. But the one thing my wife stressed about The Woodlands was that, regardless of whatever the free market might do to affect communities in Northwest Houston 10 or 20 years from now, The Woodlands will always have the ability to control development within its boundaries. Not many communities in Houston have that kind of power. Living in Ponderosa Forest, it was depressing and stressful to watch the community have to rise up in arms to try to fight off bad developers trying to build more low-income apartment complexes on our doorstep. It got tiring after a while. The wonderful thing about The Woodlands is there is a heartless, greedy, multi-million dollar corporation looking out for our interests. So we can sit back and worry about our kids or our gardening or whatever, and leave the cut-throat game of Texas real estate development to the pros. Any community that can cough up $60 million to bribe the city of Houston to get off their backs (annexation) - now that's a community where I feel like my long-term investment will be safe!

There isn't anything necessarily wrong with being affordable. The Woodlands is twice as affordable as River Oaks. But I don't think River Oaks is twice as good. In fact, I'd pay twice as much to live in The Woodlands than River Oaks. The Woodlands has some ghetto dwellers and some blue collar types, and that was George Mitchell's plan and I don't mind it. When I used the term "upscale", that's a value-laden term. Some people hate "upscale" communities with a passion. Others prize them like gold. Ultimately, a community is worth a whole more than just what supply and demand produces. Location, location, location is the biggest factor, as evidenced by superior housing values inside the loop.

(posted by Trae)

Sorry, I needed to catch up on this thread... Is this true about the older sections of The Woodlands as well as the newer sections? In the older sections, there's all kinds of Life Forms Homes and Jerry Kirkpatrick homes and all kinds of other custom-built homes. I'm going to start a new thread about sprawl for you. I wasn't thinking about the builders. But we can start a new thread under Real Estate if you want to continue this interesting discussion. You make a good point about the competition on the sellers' side, but I wonder just how efficient the real estate markets are in Houston.

Every time a new low-income apartment complex goes into the 1960 area, nearby subdivisions try to stop it from happening (in the courts). There is some sort of statute saying that, if there are "too many" low-income apartment complexes concentrated in an area, that more cannot be built. The definition of "too many" is open to interpretation, though. The Cranbrook subdivision in Spring ISD many years ago fought an apartment complex from being built and they succeeded in stopping it. The Ponderosa Forest residents were gearing up to fight that same battle a couple years ago but the developer ran away when he saw the public resistance mounting.

I just checked 77450 and it says "$94,500"? Here's the link: http://www.neighboroo.com/?see=ZipHouseInc...7450&zoom=6

I've seen this kind of stuff, too. But I've also seen: * I've seen white residents whisper and talk disparagingly about renters (young, white, male professionals) who had moved into the neighborhood. * I've seen white residents whisper and talk disparagingly about gays who had moved into the neighborhood. * I've seen residents talk disparagingly about muslims who had moved in. * I've seen residents talk disparagingly about neighbors who had had mental problems, drinking problems, divorces, financial problems, or other troubles that are often perceived to be due to "bad character". * I've seen many parents in The Woodlands who were less eager to let their kids befriend my kids once they learned that mine are stepchildren. * I've had parents steer their kids away from my kids because we were too religious for them, or not religious enough, or the wrong religion. * I've seen parents steer their kids away from other white kids because they lived in the "wrong neighborhoods" or lived in apartment complexes, or were from single-parent households, or had fathers who had blue-collar jobs, or had mothers who worked. Things may seem all rosy on the surface for those of us born with white skin, but I can assure you that, once you get past the race criteria, there are just 1,000 other equally-harsh criteria for people to judge us on. People are extremely viscious and discriminating. And about the most meaningless things. That's why I spend a lot of time on online discussion forums like HAIF. No one can tell if I'm a one-eyed Japanese leper with a lisp.

Cul-de-sacs are prized by families with young children because it is thought that children can play safely in the street without "through" traffic running them over. I have kids that play in the street and, from what I have seen, I agree. (Gated communities are perceived to provide this same benefit.) I have also seen in The Woodlands that cul-de-sacs form natural mini-communities of neighbors that are very tight-knit socially. And many cul-de-sacs in The Woodlands, depending on how they are designed, create mini-islands. Filled with trees and often having benches, these create little mini-parks for the kids to play in. I can't say enough good things about cul-de-sacs for families with young kids. Some of the older inner loop neighborhoods have a ton of mature trees. But they've had 50 or more years more to let them grow. Out in the suburbs in some of these new communities where they're clear-cutting, and they're only planting 1 twig (crepe myrtle or whatever) in each yard, it'll be at least 2 generations before it looks anything like a wooded neighborhood. And I can't say enough about trees. I keep referring to the research done by Frances Kuo on the effects on trees in communities. And it isn't just the trees - it's the noise buffer, the air quality, the shade, the sounds of birds, the other wildlife. There's a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And we haven't even talked about the bike trails (100 miles of them). This isn't like biking around a park. These are trails winding through the neighborhoods. There are no sidewalks. It isn't even like being out in the country. In the country, there are telephone polls, billboards, farms, trailers. My descriptions don't do The Woodlands justice at all. The best way to get a sense of it is to see it in person.

The new Wunsche magnet school in Spring works the same way. It completely removes a student from the "general inmate population" more so than the honors classes even did. You can return to your home school for after-school activities like Band, Golf, Tennis, or other "safe" activity. Or you can do private activities if you don't even want to set foot on your home campus. (I've set foot on the Westfield High School campus not long ago and I wouldn't blame anyone who isn't carrying an automatic weapon to want to avoid that experience.) I'm not sure which program in Klein is the way to achieve this: VISTAS, IBA at KF, or both. I don't see any TEA data for either yet. I see that VISTAS is located on Bammel N. Houston - about as far south in the district as you can get. It could be that one of these programs eventually evolves into something like the Spring and Aldine magnet high schools. I actually attended an inner-city magnet high school up north aeons ago. Good magnet schools can be as good or better than typical upscale suburban high schools. There are advantages and disadvantages, but it's definitely one avenue to get a decent education. Mrfootball is also right about a magnet middle school needed. In Spring ISD, Bammel is downright scary. And you can't expect people to spend $35,000 to send their kid to a private middle school for 3 years when they're already paying $5,000/year in school taxes. Last I heard, Spring ISD was planning a magnet middle school: something arts-related. But with the last bond failing to pass, I wonder if that's even on the calendar any more. Spring ISD is in a world of hurt right now and will be even worse if the next bond fails to pass.

That made me wonder, too. But then I realized that Tiki Island is only part of that zip code.

Yeah, the 2nd and 3rd quotes were from Ltawacs and the 4th quote was from Gank. I reused your quote tags accidentally.

Yes, it's called VISTAS - someone posted a link to it earlier. I hadn't heard of it until then. It's new and it's just 300 kids for starters. Basically, you can imagine it's all the Greenwood Forest and Huntwick kids.

Not to take sides in the debate going on (which I'm not following), I just wanted to focus on the particular sentence quoted above, because it touches upon a philosophical point which has been on my mind from another thread. Let's say a community gets built which is just plain senseless and would poorly suit anyone who could afford to live there. Would there be any demand for this community? 1. People have to live somewhere. There are only so many houses. In theory, if all the builders in a town made crummy houses (like the Model T Fords all painted black), people would still have to buy them. 2. There are only so many houses on the market at any given time. If all the good ones get snapped up, that leaves only the bad ones for the late birds. If you buy in the late summer or early fall, for example, you may be looking at the "scraps" that have been "picked over". 3. If you're in the market to buy a home, you usually have a narrow window of opportunity before you're forced to make a decision. If that window closes, you're forced to sign a 12-month contract on a rental unit and put your stuff into storage. 4. If a real estate can "sell" it, that doesn't mean that it actually provides any value to the buyer. It just means that the buyer perceived value at the time of purchase. The buyer and his family may have been better off living in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass. There is no eOpinions.Com for the real estate market (of which I am aware). From my experience, real estate agents aren't always exactly honest. 5. Sellers have cost margins that must be covered or they simply can't sell. If you haven't built much equity in your house, or if you have unpaid home equity loans, you can't sell for much less than you owe on the house. Or you have to reach into your pocket at closing ("upside down"). If you don't have savings or convertible assets, you'll let the house sit on the market for as long as it takes until a buyer comes along who will pay the break-even amount. 6. Once you buy a home, you can't return it. And you usually can't sell it someone else for at least a few years. So you learn to live with it the best you can. It's amazing what people will put up with if they have no choice. 7. When people shop around for a house, they don't exhaust all options. There is always something potentially better that remains unseen. No one has the time to look at hundreds or thousands of houses. People are lazy. Many buyers look at fewer than a couple dozen houses, all in the same couple neighborhoods, before they decide to buy. Many buyers don't even use the Internet. Some buyers buy on homes that they've seen on the Internet...without ever actually looking at them in person. 8. Homebuyers aren't always that smart. The criteria they use to buy homes often has no bearing on what value the home would actually provide them in real life. Some buyers must have a fireplace. Or must have a white house with columns. A lot of it is emotion. Emotion is the strongest influence in making any decision.

The current situation is a kind of tragedy. You have all these communities like Ponderosa Forest and Greenwood Forest which have large, custom-built, well-made houses with lots of bedrooms, large lots, mature trees, lush ladnscaping, and reasonable prices (reasonable land values). These house are relatively young (built in the 70's and 80's) compared to stuff inside the loop, mostly well-maintained, and often upgraded. These were designed for families. You can't find subdivisions like these in the inner loop. And simply because of the way the school districts are drawn, and because developers crammed way too many low-income apartment complexes into an area (which can actually be stopped on legal grounds for that very reason), families with kids can't live there. The home values aren't high enough for the private school crowd. And the values aren't low enough to attract low-income families who don't mind violent and low-performing schools. These communities are trapped, catering mostly to older people without kids...who happen to want really large houses with lots of extra bedrooms. The communities attract middle-class blacks and middle-class Hispanics, but from my experience, these families have been fleeing just as fast as (if not faster than) the middle-class whites. More of the houses are becoming rental units. An increasing number are being abandoned. Some of the houses are being seriously neglected. And every year, the real estate agents in the area sucker more unsuspecting victims who aren't familiar with the area. And most of these buyers turn around and try to get out within a couple years, inevitably at a huge monetary loss. And the realtors clean up again. When we moved last year, there were 13 For Sale signs on the 2 blocks of our street. It was ridiculous. It's just a big real estate shuffle, and the only ones getting rich are the real estate agents. From an economic perspective, it's a completely inefficient situation. Great housing stock being left to rot. And the root of the problem is simply the school district lines. In HISD, families can choose different schools. The new magnet schools are a step in the right direction. Until some solution comes along to address the insane school boundaries for these communities, it's going to continue to be a tragedy.

From www.city-data.com: The Woodlands is 2% black Katy is 4% black Sugar Land is 5% black Pearland is 5% black I haven't performed any tests for statistical significance, but those numbers only have a spread of a couple percentage points. In comparison, Houston is 25% black. Even if you call these couple percentage points significant, what is it about Katy, Sugar Land, and Pearland that make them more attractive to blacks than The Woodlands? You said The Woodlands was "bland". Are you saying there's more retail or more nightlife or more amenities in those other communities? Cul-de-sacs are prized by families with kids. When I drive down the Hardy Toll Road and see the new communities going up, where they've clear-cut the land, and place homogenous little boxes in a row, and fill in every last square foot with development (instead of leaving 30% as green space), I'm glad I live where I live. If "trees are good" is all that The Woodlands offers as an example to other communities, I think that alone is commendable. I posted a thread about how studies show that presence of trees reduces crime and has all sorts of other benefits. Spring is a neighborhood in "transition". Another word for that is "white flight". There were virtually no blacks or hispanics a generation ago. Now those groups are growing rapidly every year. In another generation, Spring's demographics will look very similar to its neighbor to the south: Aldine. If you're looking for an example of "stable" diversity, Spring doesn't fall into that category, unfortunately. And that community did nothing to welcome those minorities in, unfortunately. Those minorities have simply come in because of geographic proximity, affordable homes, access to amenities, etc.

I've seen first-hand that overcrowded schools (Bammel Middle School in particular) are exponentially more dangerous in terms of physical violence. My daughter and her friends and classmates were victims of some very bad stuff when Bammel was at its peak enrollment back in 2002 (I think it was 1,800 kids in the old building). I'm talking about kids getting jumped and being hospitalized. The district finally built another middle school (Claughton) and a lot of the violence was reduced the moment they reduced the numbers on campus. If someone votes "no" as some misguided means of trying to "send a signal" to the district, they're not just being counterproductive...they're recklessly increasing the danger to those kids in those overcrowded schools. Maybe it would be a different case at middle-class schools that become overcrowded. But when ghetto schools become overcrowded, they become war zones. Bammel was like a military zone of stringent rules to try to control the kids: rigid dress code, staircases and halls segregated by age, assigned seating at lunches, pep rallies discontinued, strict bus line procedures, harsh punishments for minor misconduct, etc. But even at higher socioeconomic levels, overcrowding hurts: whether it's test scores or skipping school or petty vandalism or whatever. When they built the second high school in The Woodlands and finally relieved the pressure of overcrowding, academic ratings went up. And allegedly a lot of rowdiness went away. And blaming the school district for reacting slowly or ineffectively against an influx of ghetto residents is a bit harsh. No school district is ever well-prepared for a situation like that. And no school district ever wants to have the appearance of being racist. And no school district can ever really avoid feeling like, no matter what action they took, they couldn't please everyone. Not to mention that these demographic changes sometimes happen very quickly, and in unpredictable patterns, and school districts are often very conservative organizations. While re-zoning good neighborhoods in SISD and KISD to better schools would be nice, no matter how you do the math, you're going to wind up short. You can't create a 90% black high school with 3000 students and a 60% white school with 1000 students without Reverend Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson showing up outside your administration building with picket signs and TV cameras. The only proven successful formula is the one they've been using in HISD and other inner-city districts for years: magnet schools. Spring and Klein both have magnet schools now. And apparently the one in Spring is very good. I can't wait to see its state rating later in the year - if it gets a Recognized or even an Exemplary rating, you can bet that alone will increase property values 5% overnight. One of the magnet schools in Aldine gets Exemplary ratings from time to time. If you live in Ponderosa Forest or Greenwood Forest, you need to stop worrying about the lost cause...and start focusing on the daylight. And the daylight is your new magnet schools.

Back in the old days there were discriminatory real estate agents, discriminatory sellers, discriminatory lenders, discriminatory landlords, etc. Basically it was rigged to keep African Americans out of white communities. But that's been shattered to pieces by the changes in our country in the last 50 years. You rarely hear about stuff like that happening any more. There are too many laws against that stuff, too many internal rules to watch out for stuff like that, too much public disapproval of that, too much media as was said, and too many minorities themselves in positions of responsibility. So can anyone answer: why aren't African Americans choosing to live in The Woodlands? And what can or should The Woodlands do differently (if anything)?

("It's not as easy as you think to just 'move' from that area. I lost a fortune on that house and it took me three years to sell it. That's what happens when you buy a house in a weekend with a bad realtor.") That's pretty much what happened to us. I'll never buy a home again without spending months researching the area. And I'll never trust any realtor ever again. As for Klein ISD versus Spring ISD, I'll can say are these 2 things: 1. Northland Christian school considers honors in Spring ISD equivalent to regular (on-grade) classes in Klein ISD. 2. We know folks who had kids in honors classes in Spring ISD, and moved to Klein. And they got hammered in honors classes there, and had to downgrade to regular classes just to survive. 3. Our kids transferred from honors classes in Spring ISD to The Woodlands, and they got hammered. No comparison. Much, much more accelerated/demanding/competitive. All our kids took a major hit. One had to downgrade to regular classes just to survive. Another slowly had to work her way back up over the course of a year. It may be different at the kindergarten level, but in the higher levels, I don't see any comparison with Spring ISD schools. I think they're way behind the other districts. Not because of poor teaching. But because the quality of the students is so much lower. In Ponderosa and Bammel, while we were there, there was often talk about discontinuing some or all of the honors classes ("Tier 4") because of lack of interest/candidates. Mrfootball is correct that, even if Northgate doesn't have any kids, being zoned to a more favorable school district would help real estate sales there. Basically it would allow the old farts in Northgate who are bickering to sell their houses without incurring huge losses. I say that if have a $500,000 home, and if they can only sell it for $400,000 right now, I don't think they're going to starve to death. Maybe they can sell their beach house, sailboat, or antique car to cover the difference.