cottonmather0

I don't remember whether Sheila was quoted in this particular article, but to hijack a little bit, I agree that she's also entrenched and could use a little competition. Thing is, I don't think her politics are necessarily as racially based like Coleman's. She knows that her district (I share it with you, Coog) was created for her specifically and that a majority of the district - black, white, gay, generally weird, whatever - agrees with whatever she says as long as it's left of center. She hardly even campaigns anymore (I saw exactly ONE yard sign for her last Fall) and she puts on the entitled Queen act because she can and she knows that whatever geeky white-guy-in-a-tie that wins the Republican primary has no chance of beating her in the general election. Like I said, I don't think it's a race thing, though, it's a partisan thing. My wife and I are white and have a combined household income of $300,000+ and while I can't stand Sheila and her politics, my wife loves her for the same reasons I don't. BUT, to steer this back on topic, the demographics of the district help her because it's majority black and she knows she can rely on those votes. It all adds up to her being very firmly entrenched as long as she wants to stay in Congress. (my goodness, that was a rambling reply)

I cannot find the article online, but I remember reading something recently in the Chron about the 3rd Ward that quoted Garnet Coleman talking about his "concern" for the residents and the effect that gentrification would have on the neighborhood and it's historical place in the black community. If I remember correctly, as a respons to this "problem" the article mentioned that there machinations afoot in Austin and City Hall to try and make it harder for existing property owners to sell, or at least sell to developers and speculators. The article was pretty evenhanded, it presented the sides of both the developers and the historians and of residents who wanted to stay and residents who wanted to cash out. My immediate reaction was that the politicians' opposition to gentrification seemed particularly craven - change the demographics of the neighborhood and all of a sudden Garnet Coleman doesn't have a job with perks like storing his broken Mustang for free in the Hobby Airport parking garage. I don't mean to be so entirely cynical, but it was just the whole tone he and some of the others were taking that an increase in property values and efforts to clean up and redevelop the neighborhood was somehow supposed to be a bad thing that irked me so much.

I now live well north of that line - almost to 18th street - and on certain nights you can hear the trains from my house. Granted, we also hear a lot of the traffic in the Eureka Yard (under the TC Jester overpass) and the BNSF line just north of 34th street, but the UP line that you are referring to is much busier than either of those and there are trains going through at all hours. That said, I used to live in an old house in the Southdale section of Bellaire that was 1.5 blocks from the train tracks and I hardly ever noticed the trains, even at night. You get used to that kind of stuff. One thing to keep in mind about the rail line in the OP is that the architecture of some of those old mills and industrial buildings along the route are tall and built right up to the tracks in some places so they act like big echoing canyons. It is especially loud in the Sawyer street area near the new Target store, FWIW.

Because there is hardly any left that is economic to recover and what there is that's left has already been discovered and is being pumped out. They're having some success in the Permian Basin with CO2 injection into some of the older fields that were thought to have been expended a while back, but eventually that's going to run out, too.

I also like your use of the word, "bid." I trade electricity for a living and was in a perpetual state of confusion with my realtor when we bought our house a few years ago because in my world, buyers bid and sellers offer. "Do you want to put in an offer?" "No, I'm buying the house." "But you have to put in an offer!" "You mean a bid?" "Huh?" "The price I want to pay." "You mean an offer." "No, a bid." "Huh?"

Sounds like some astute flippers looking for a sucker... but I bet they put in granite countertops and can lights!

Well, that's my point. If you had not been there to get the truck number, he would have gotten away and no one would have been the wiser. That's what I mean by no accountability - usually everyone is at work (or busy inside the house) and the truck just does what he wants.

I agree with the OP - I am perpetually frustrated with the garbage collection in my neighborhood. 311 is worthless because there is no accountability. If they don't want to pick something up, they won't, and you are stuck with a load of heavy trash in your front yard. There is no one to call and since they come do this at random times during the day when I'm usually at work there is no one to chase down the street to complain to. Similarly, a few weeks ago my wife and I generated a LOT of extra trash when we were moving back into our house - 25 bags worth of packing paper and dead tape and bubble wrap, so I went to Fiesta and waited in line for 20 minutes behind people paying their phone bills in cash and sending money to Mexico and shelled out $1 apiece for the bag tags in a transaction that took 30 seconds. I put stickers on the bags and then placed them out on the curb... and as I was leaving for work it was starting to rain. I get home and there are 25 WET garbage bags still sitting on my curb next to my now empty dumpster. So I called 311. "I'm sorry sir, maybe there is another truck on the way." "No ma'am, I have used these tags before, they are picked up by the same guy who dumps the dumpster. He gets out of the truck to load the bags. I just think he didn't want to get out in the rain." "Oh. Well sir, your case # is _______." "Great. Is someone going to come pick these bags up today?" "Oh no sir, it's after 4:00." "OK, is someone going to come tomorrow?" "Is tomorrow your regular trash day?" "No. Today is. That's why the bags are in front of my house TODAY." "Oh, well then no, they are on a rotation and won't be in your neighborhood tomorrow." "So when will these bags get picked up?" "On your next regularly scheduled trash day." "So why did I even bother calling you?" "Well sir, I am a customer service representative." "Is there someone else I can talk to? May I please speak to your supervisor?" "No sir, I am the only person you can speak to on the telephone. You can contact the department in writing." So then I hung up. And the bags sat out there for a week until the next Monday, and on that day, I called in late to work and sat in the house until the garabage truck showed up. And then I walked outside and stood on the dark porch watching. The driver pulled up, dumped the can, then started to pull away, and THEN he saw me standing on the porch and stopped again and loaded the bags. Yes, I get great city services for my tax dollars.

Eh, I would say Westpark's problem is the, um, "international" character of the other drivers and their procilivity for Grand Prix style driving antics. "We don't need no stinkin' lane striping!"

I was in California about 10 years ago and was naively surprised at how the usual weaving/braking/flooring type drivers just used the unsegregated HOV lane as another left lane to be used whenever necessary. Then a few years later when I heard that Culberson was going to indulge the Cinco Ranch Soccer Moms with unsegregated HOV lanes, I thought to myself, "Whatever. Those things aren't worth spit." And now that they have been completed and I've driven on both I-10 and 59, I can confirm that yes, they are not worth spit. The rice rockets and motorcycles and prosthetic penis F-150's don't care about no stinkin' double white line!

Yep, I was walking down Main St a couple of weeks ago and came across the trailer and thought to myself, "dang this trailer sure has been here a long time, I wonder when they'll ever build this thing?" Then I saw a dead rat underneath the trailer and figured the project was a goner. Didn't even have to read this thread to know that.

I only had to see that Loren Steffy wrote that Chron article to know that it would be full of half-logic and innuendo. He is absolutely the worst business columnist I have ever seen. Just terrible.

A thousand times NO. We don't need it.

The stretch down Fannin through through TMC is always crowded, although I think what you saw was specifically rodeo traffic. A lot of people park downtown and ride the rail to Reliant and back throughout the day.

True that - I have a friend who owns a house on Waverly a few blocks from there. When he bought the house back in 1999 we would make beer runs to that old Kroger on days when we were helping him tear out the old walls. It was indeed pretty dumpy and they did improve it quite a bit when they remodeled the store. My friend's house looks great these days, too.

We used to go to the Kroger in Oak Forest all the time when we moved into Timbergrove, but then we just kind of shifted towards the one on 11th because it's about 1/4th as far away. I didn't know they were renovating the other store, might have to go check it out. I always thought it was only slightly nicer than the store on 11th, but maybe that's changed. I haven't been up there in about a year or so.

Oh GAWD, I agree. Seems like every house I have ever visited in Shadow Creek Ranch has one or two of those doorways and they stick out (at least to my eye) like a sore thumb, especially when the rest of the house is overdone with excessive door casing and trim and these arched doors are just rounded drywall.

I drive through there almost every day on my way home from work - about the only thing that neighborhood has going for it is the proximity to downtown and to the freeways. As mentioned, the south side is nicer than the north side. Problem #1 is the railroads - you have lots of train noise from the existing tracks and the empty ROW's are constantly being proposed and reproposed for use as bike trails, commuter rail, and the infamous Heights toll road. Something is going to get built through there and my guess is that it's going to be something loud. Problem #2 is the infrastructure - especially on the north side of the freeway the streets are very narrow and with open ditches on either side. As stated, none of the houses in there are architectural gems, but the lots are small and the existing structures have almost no setback from the ditch. The area could be gentrified, but since it's being done piecemeal by individual developers they are cramming three-story townhouses onto the individual lots without rebuilding the streets or improving the stormwater drainage. I know this isn't a huge problem for development in the Heights, but the lots are smaller than the Heights from what I can gather and those ditches really need to be improved and covered so the streets can be covered. It's ugly. Problem #3 is the freeway itself - TXDOT really REALLY wants to connect the access roads between TC Jester and Washington and last year proposed building really tall overpasses over the railroad tracks on either side of the freeway, so tall that they would have towered over the neighborhood park and added a lot of traffic noise to the neighborhood. There was a lot of opposition from the neighborhood group and those plans were dropped, but I would not be so sure that TXDOT won't try again someday in the future. I think the area could really benefit from some wholesale redevelopment - the location is OUTSTANDING - but as it is the streets are tiny and cramped and it's full of undesirables. Someone needs to buy out the neighborhood en masse and dedicate a lot of resources to fixing the infrastructure before anything gets built. I don't know if the piecemeal townhouse development that's going on is really the right way to do it.

This reminds me of a story - When I moved here from Boston almost (gulp) 9 years ago, I met a girl at the office on my first day of work who within 5 minutes was telling me about buying a new house in Cinco Ranch with her husband. She explained that they both grew up in Alief and were sad they couldn't live in the old neighborhood, but (she whispered after looking around to see if anyone was listening), "now it's all black."

See, that's the deal with Sharpstown - all of those units on the Southwest side were built in the 70's and early 80's because the population of Houston was growing so fast that the city needed housing for all of the oil jobs and other workers that were rapidly being created during that particular economic boom. Most of the people filling those jobs were young and either couldn't afford houses or simply didn't want to buy a house, so these singles-oriented apartment complexes sprung up to serve them. And they all started out nice and luxurious. But then the oil crash came and the demand for the units dried up while supply stayed constant. So prices dropped and poorer people and their corresponding troubles moved in. Then the economy shifted again, the geography of the whole city kind of shifted, and no one wanted to live in Sharpstown anymore anyway, so the area stayed poor and scummy and those units became ghettoized. By comparison, the Galleria is the Galleria and there is plenty of demand to keep rents high and complexes nice. I'm not sure exactly what the main lessons for Pearland are from this, but avoiding overbuilding is definitely towards the top of the list. Some apartments are necessary, but not a whole lot.

When I was in college in Boston, our men's and women's track teams would come to Houston every year during spring break and spend a week training at Rice. A couple of girls on the team ALWAYS wanted to go to Jamaica Jamaica but never did... then one night during our senior year we were given a night off to go out and these girls wanted to go to JJ on their last chance to do so - so we even told our coaches that's where we were going to be later that night if they wanted to join us out. Subsequently, some of the Rice athletes warned us away from there and we didn't go - but it was too late for our coaches - they showed up that night and went inside and had a drink and waited around for awhile before they decided they couldn't stand it anymore and quit waiting on us. Funny story, that's what I will always think of when I think of Jamaica Jamaica.

Yes, I agree, sometimes they do, but it's very hit and miss.

Well, the HEB on 18th is too small to have much of what we want and the selection at Foodarama is aimed at a slightly less affluent demographic, so Kroger is it for now (the Randall's on 34th is too far away). I was very disappointed that HEB didn't move into the old K-Mart space and open a bigger store, so it's Kroger for now. Trust me, I wish we had a real HEB for real shopping rather than just for Saturday morning milk runs.

Our regular grocery store is the Kroger on 11th & Durham and I would love to see that entire stretch of Shepherd and Durham cleaned up. Change is happening - slowly - but it would be nice to see a coffee shop and maybe a Kinkos and a nicer restaurant or two sprinkled in among the Ross Dress for Less and Big Lots stores that are over there. The other side of Shepherd (and north towards Tommy Vaughn) has some pretty crappy little buildings (pawn shops, lawn mower repair, used tires, immigrant tennements) that I wouldn't be sorry to see gone, too. I guess I'm just parroting everyone else in saying that it would be good to see some nicer commercial development along the main streets in the area and that it could be done without sacrificing the character of the residential areas. And as far as 19th street goes, leave it alone. As with any area, tenants will come and go, but the buildings and the footprint are great and shouldn't be touched. There's lots of opportunity elsewhere in the neighborhood for that kind of commercial redevelopment.

That might not be far off - it could be that they're planning on salvaging a lot of the material - copper, panel doors, doorknobs, radiators, other hardware, a/c unit - and if you don't pay extra you don't get those things. Seems like he could have been a bit more clear and up front about it, but that has to be it - they must be planning on taking some stuff with them if someone doesn't pay up for the higher price.