High-rise building info

[highrise_fan]

Hi All - I am looking for a list of the highest residential buildings in Houston (condos or apartment buildings).  There was a website a while ago that had good data but it's gone.  Anyone have any idea where I can do this research?  

[hindesky]

The Brava is at 46 stories at 549' in Downtown Houston.

[Montrose1100]

Skyscraperpage.com has a few drawings you can compare heights with and see the rankings. But you have to know which buildings are residential.

On Page 2 of Houston Link, it shows the Brava as number 1. Would also reccomend looking up the heights from sources. The information on that page is provided by users and doesn't always have the source.

1. Brava - 167.3m

2. 2929 Weslayan - 162.5m

3. The Huntingdon - 153.3m

4. One Park Place - 152.7m

5. Parkside Residences - 146.3m (or The Post Oak if you count Hotel mixed use with residences).

 

Perhaps the @editor can advise, but there used to be a source on HAI and it would list buildings by type. appears to not work

[highrise_fan]

Thanks @Montrose1100 - I did find a list on the skyscraper page - very useful.  I do know which are residential - seems to have all the info I need!

[editor]

I'd avoid using heights from either Skyscraperpage or Emporis.  As @Montrose1100 noted, the information is partly or mostly crowdsourced, and therefore inconsistent in its reliability.  The same is true for Wikipedia, for the same reasons.

Notably, even architecture firm web sites can sometimes be wrong.  This is because the web sites are often outsourced to marketing companies, or simply not updated regularly because architecture firms have more important things to do than update web sites.

HAIF's sister sites used to use building permits whenever possible for building heights.  In cities like Chicago, building height changes of even a couple of feet require city approval, and the information is readily available online.  I don't know if Houston has anything similar.

FAA records are usually good, but can be hard to find, and only cover the tallest structures.

I consider The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat reliable.  When new buildings go up, sometimes it actually sends people onto the roof to measure them.  You can see a Houston list here.   The problem with CTBUH is that to get at all of the information, you have to be a member.

For older buildings, historic fire insurance maps can be useful.  The Library of Congress has a number of them online.  Here's the ones available for Houston.

For buildings on the National Registry of Historic Places, the heights are often listed in the nominating documents, which are usually online, especially if the nomination was in recent years.

Federal government office building heights can sometimes be found in the documents of the General Services Administration.  The feds hold onto buildings for a long time, so they are often renovated, and that's one of the opportunities for documentation to be created.

All of this information used to be on towrs.com, but I closed that a few years ago.  I would like to revive it some day, and I still own the domain, but I simply don't have the time to do it.

 

[Tumbleweed_Tx]

emporis is the one that is gone.

We should have that info somewhere on this site. If we don't, then maybe someone with a little time on their hands can step up....

[ChannelTwoNews]

8 hours ago, Tumbleweed_Tx said:

emporis is the one that is gone.

We should have that info somewhere on this site. If we don't, then maybe someone with a little time on their hands can step up....

Yes, it has been since last September. Still wishing I had backed up a lot of the information from that database before CoStar took over.

There were hundreds of older, unbuilt project profiles that existed only there, as well as numerous heights for buildings and other structures that were not listed elsewhere. I probably still have a good number of my notes from the field when I was doing in-person visits or making calls, and tons of microfilm copies of articles I used for research on the older buildings & projects... but like you inferred it would take time to get it all entered into one spot again.

I would love to start a new database - preferably Houston / Houston-metro specific since that's where I could tell you the most complete & accurate data per project was represented on a consistent basis on that previous site. Don't have the first clue how to approach such a task though. Maybe someone else does?