Houston19514

Houston Center also has plans for Six Houston Center. No doubt they are shopping those plans for potential tenants as well. Sad that our major paper's real estate reporter is so clueless. Also, despite the impression given in the article, don't be surprised if Hines moves forward without a signed lease.

The Stowers Building has windows on all 4 sides. I walked by it last night to confirm.

I don't think you will find many truly comparable townhouses (if any) priced at 1/2 this price level.

Any idea if there are plans for the site?

Wasn't sure where to post this. It is relevant to when we might see new construction in downtown Houston, so I thought I would stick it in here. Transwestern's 4th Quarter 2011 Office Market Report is out. Downtown had more than 1.5 million square feet of positive net absorption of office space in 2011 and ended the year with a direct vacancy rate of 9.5%. Total vacancy rate (including available sublease space) stands at 10.6%. Perhaps more important to the subject of new office tower construction, the Class A direct vacancy rate stands at 7.0% (8.6% with sublets). There is only a total of 2.1 million square feet of Class A space available in all of downtown. There may well be a rapidly-developing shortage of large blocks of Class A space. According to Colliers, at mid-year 2011 there were only 4 downtown buildings offering in excess of 100,000 square feet of contiguous space. Another interesting tidbit from the Transwestern report: Continental/United plans to give up only 142,000 square feet of their downtown office space (when the lease expires in 2014). (IIRC, Continental had a total of 660,000 square feet of space in downtown; earlier speculation had them giving up a much larger amount of space)

There is a parking garage on one of the four blocks planned for the southward expansion of the GRBCC. That garage was built at the same time as the Hilton-Americas and the last expansion of the GRBCC -- a little more than 8 years ago. We just have a bare-bones master plan here. It is possible the existing garage will be retained and incorporated into the expanded structure. On the north end, yes it appears that the rail line will run on that parcel. But is there any reason a parking structure cannot be built over a rail line? I can't imagine why not.

I presume it means they want a 15' setback rather than the standard 25' setback.

Looks like they will be using it.

The center will keep operating. There is zero reason at this point to expect any changes in the plans of Scott Gertner or any other tenant.

Foreclosure seems fairly likely. But that does not necessarily mean any of the stores and restaurants go away. Endng up like Denver would be a great thing. Take a look at their tenant list: http://www.denverpavilions.com/shop.php

Yes, they had some incentives in place pre-merger to get them to move to downtown Chicago. While big money to you and me, it was pretty inconsequential when charting the long-term health of the company. Just the higher taxes and costs of doing business in Chicago more than offset any savings they would have given up by moving the HQ. I believe the service going downhill in great part flows fom the HQ decision and overall handling of the merger. Put yourself in the place of a line employee working for an airline (Continental) that is widely acknowledged to have better service and a better operation than its "merger of equals" partner. Then you watch things unfold and everything you see makes it look not so much like a merger of equals but a whole lot like an acquisition of Continental by United. The name of the new airline, the HQ of the new airline, all United. The bulk of management layoffs come from Continental's ranks, not United's. If one was trying to find a way to destroy the morale of the Continental employees, it would be hard to come up with a better plan. They should have adopted the United name and put the HQ and Operations center in Houston, thus strongly sending the signal to all employees that going forward, this company will be operated like Continental, NOT like United. Instead, they sent exactly the opposite message, not just to employees, but also to their customers and investors. Brain dead.

It might have something to do with the fact that we had almost 140,000 people to our population each and every year. We've added more than 1 million additional people since the Katy reconstruction started. And let's be serious, it is NOT as congested yet as it was pre-reconstruction.

I'm not buying that there is that much benefit to being the "hometown airline" in the sense of having HQ in downtown Chicago. They could still market themselves as the hometown airline, just as Continental has done for years in the New York City market. Any possible benefit pales in comparison to the negatives of adopting Chicago as the HQ. Major companies all over Illinois are trying or at least threatening to get out of Illinois and only staying in exchange for major state tax breaks at the very time the brain trust at United voluntarily chose Chicago as HQ without even getting anything from the state for it. Putting the HQ in Chicago was a major screwup. I hope eventually they will correct that and move the HQ back to Houston. Unfortunately, by the time that might happen, much of the damage will have been done to the company and will be irreversible. Do any frequent fliers disagree that Continental service has gone downhill since the merger? (and as you said in your last line, why would they not have their HQ at their largest hub? (Houston)

Starwood has nothing downtown... Westin perhaps. Omni is going big in convention center hotels these days, especially in Texas. There is no main line Marriott.

Really glad to see this is moving forward. Yeah, it looked like some big HVAC equipment.

and westbound traffic on I-10 with southbound traffic on the Grand Parkway

Re: the video posted above where they laid rail in an intersection in a 72 hour period... It is looking like they are about to do the same thing in the intersection of Fulton and Cavalcade on the North (Red) Line. They have been intensely preparing the space where the rails will be laid on either side of the intersection and have removed all of Cavalcade going through the intersection except for 2 narrow lanes of asphalt. Looks like the intersection will be completely re-done with rails by the end of this week.

A huge number of passengers pass through IAH without ever setting foot outside the airport or experiencing Houston in any way. That is the primary market I was aiming for.

The new Apple Store in Highland Village is pretty close to being completed. According to Swamplot, we are getting a VERY cool store. http://swamplot.com/highland-village-apple-store-will-have-glass-ceiling-front-and-back/2011-12-07/

I refer you back to my post #65 for consideration on this topic.

While interesting, the concentration information Simbha calculated is not terribly useful in determining an airport's status as an international gateway because it is inherently subject depending on where one draws the lines. For example, what would be Miami's passenger concentration if we drew the line to combine Latin America and the Carribean (a completely reasonable line)? Similarly, what would IAH's concentration be if we drew the lines strictly along continental boundaries? An analysis of concentration broken down to the route level would be more useful (although a whole lot more work).) Just found a cool US DOT table: As has been mentioned before IAH is the 8th largest US gateway, making Houston the 7th largest US gateway city, by passenger traffic. Interesting to note: Even if we were to disregard all Latin American traffic (as nonsensical as that might be), IAH would still be the 12th largest US gateway airport. (Of course if we played games of disregarding various regions of the world, we could have all sorts of fun making up incoherent and irrelevant rankings) ;-) Table 6 : Top 40 U.S. Passenger Gateways to the World, Scheduled Passenger Service US Foreign US Foreign 12 months ended Sept 2010 Gateway City - Apt. - Passengers - New York, NY JFK 22,424,658 Miami, FL MIA 15,902,787 Los Angeles, CA LAX 15,098,801 Newark, NJ EWR 11,152,288 Chicago, IL ORD 10,338,987 Atlanta, GA ATL 8,997,205 San Francisco, CA SFO 8,079,700 Houston, TX IAH 8,038,591 Washington, DC IAD 6,074,944 Dallas/Ft.Wth, TX DFW 4,948,143 Philadelphia, PA PHL 3,702,652 Boston, MA BOS 3,545,267 Honolulu, HI HNL 3,508,217 Fort Laud, FL FLL 3,012,646 Orlando, FL MCO 2,883,964 Detroit, MI DTW 2,754,214 Guam, TT GUM 2,613,086 Seattle, WA SEA 2,589,949 Charlotte, NC CLT 2,572,107 Minneapolis, MN MSP 2,202,612 Phoenix, AZ PHX 2,066,108 Las Vegas, NV LAS 1,994,535 Denver, CO DEN 1,840,705 San Juan, PR SJU 1,230,919 New York, NY LGA 852,018 Saipan, TT SPN 592,100 Salt Lake City, UT SLC 461,719 Portland, OR PDX 408,837 Baltimore, MD BWI 374,627 Tampa, FL TPA 359,647 Cincinnati, OH CVG 281,377 Memphis, TN MEM 269,224 Washington, DC DCA 251,762 Cleveland, OH CLE 242,495 Oakland, CA OAK 225,799 San Diego, CA SAN 225,373 Fort Myers, FL RSW 203,636 Anchorage, AK ANC 201,908 Kahului, HI OGG 195,627 St. Louis, MO STL 174,102 Source : U.S. Department of Transportation T-100 Segment Data Page 1 of 1 1/ Ranked in descending order according to latest year ended data. YE Sept. 2010 YE Sept. 2009

At basement level will be The Cellar, a beer and wine bar. The basement will also serve as an event space.

Yeah, it's a no-frills discount grocery. They also own Trader Joe's.

I completely agree with this. And we could also do a much better job of marketing. I cannot believe the Convention & Visitors Bureau does not work with Bush Airport to capitalize on the enormous traffic that passes through every year. It is better than it used to be. Not long ago, one could pass through IAH without every seeing a clue as to what city one was in. But it needs to be MUCH better. I love going through O'Hare, for example, because one gets such a flavor of Chicago, in art displays, welcome signs, concessions, etc. etc. 40 Million + people pass through there every year and they are captive (and bored) for some time. IAH should be covered in Houston promotional material... photo displays, historical displays, displays about the Museum District, Theater District, Medical Center, NASA, the Port, welcome signs, mini-branches for MFAH, HMNS, Childrens Museum, etc., etc., etc.

Yet more evidence that Houston is, in fact, a gateway city to the world, even aside from Latin America: Houston to be 6th city in US for A380 service. The new list of US cities with A380 service: NYC, Miami, LA, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Houston.