From CultureMap: It took a while, but nearly five months after Houston City Council approved the first citywide Parking Benefit District for the Washington Avenue corridor, the meters started charging at 7 a.m. on Wednesday. The City of Houston’s Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department hopes to solve a handful of issues with the new parking system, including [...]
Posts Tagged ‘density’
Revamped Chapter 42 ordinance finally passes
Strangely enough, in the end it was not very contentious. Houston City Council on Wednesday voted 14-3 to allow greater single-family home density outside Loop 610, while also strengthening the proposal’s already robust protections for neighborhoods concerned about unwelcome development. Council voted to drop the threshold of support needed to impose a minimum lot size [...]
Today is Chapter 42 day
Actually, today is almost certainly the day that the Chapter 42 revisions get tagged by multiple members of Council, thus pushing it back for a week. Nonetheless, this is the beginning of the end of a long, long journey. Here’s another story about what that will mean. The Fourth Ward would not look quite the [...]
It’s Chapter 42 week
We won’t know for years what the upcoming revisions to Chapter 42, the development and density codes in Houston, will mean to the city and its development and population patterns. There’s certainly a lot of hope that the changes will be positive. Southwest Houston, with its glut of apartments and condominiums, is three times denser [...]
How will Chapter 42 affect housing in Houston?
Yes, we’re still talking about Chapter 42, the local development and density code. One of the goals of revamping Chapter 42 is to make it easier and more attractive to build mid-range housing in the city limits. How do we hope that will work? “We have housing for the working poor, we have a lot [...]
Why we need flexibility in our parking regulations
Here’s the story of Coltivare. As many of you know, we are in the process of opening Coltivare, our interpretation of an Italian-inspired, American, neighborhood restaurant, at the corner of White Oak and Arlington Streets. Undoubtedly, one of the most unique aspects to Coltivare, is the potential to have a 3,000 square foot, fully-functioning vegetable [...]
Another reason why bike parking matters
This comment of the day on Swamplot points out a salient fact about bike parking. In all honesty, I only ride my bike for fun with the family on the weekends. However, after a couple of very frustrating attempts to park around White Oak to go out to dinner, I recently rode my bike down [...]
One size does not fit all, parking regulations department
This makes a lot of sense to me. A proposed rewrite of Houston’s off-street parking rules could allow some areas to alter the new requirements or ditch them altogether, part of what Mayor Annise Parker said is an effort to allow tailored solutions in this “city of neighborhoods.” City planners say the off-street parking ordinance, [...]
City proposes bike parking alternatives
Nice. Bicycle advocates are cheering a city proposal that would give businesses an incentive to offer bike parking and would require some properties to provide it for the first time, saying the ideas mark a cultural shift in Houston. “This is a first for Houston and a sign of how our city is evolving,” Mayor [...]
Alexan Heights update
The developers of the Alexan Heights project on Yale will go before the Planning Commission tomorrow to get a variance that would remove a single-family restriction on part of the property. Some folks in the neighborhood have been petitioning against the variance. The Leader reports from a meeting that was supposed to be between residents [...]
The off-street parking debate
I believe the new offstreet parking requirements that have been proposed and are being debated are at least as big a deal as the Chapter 42 revisions. We really need to get this right. Under the new rules, some eateries – dessert shops, carryout restaurants – would need less parking, but requirements on most restaurants [...]
Ready or not, here comes Chapter 42
Changes are coming to Chapter 42, the section of Houston’s ordinances that deal with density and development, and to Chapter 26, the section on off-street parking for bars and restaurants and what have you. The revisions would allow neighborhoods to create special parking areas tailored to their needs, reduce parking requirements for historic buildings, allow [...]
Alexan Heights on Yale
If you live in my neck of the woods you’re probably interested in the news (via Swamplot) of the new apartment complex being planned for the empty lot on Yale between 6th and 7th. The RUDH January newsletter has details. Trammel Crow Residential is planning its first project in the Heights, at the corner of [...]
Chapter 42 is back
This is going to be fun. Sprawling, boomtown Houston may be in for another battle over land use and development, this time driven by the most significant changes proposed to the city’s building rules in 13 years. The rewrite would further a push for density in single-family development, begun inside Loop 610 when the rules [...]
Council approves Washington Avenue parking benefit district
We’ll see how this works. The Houston City Council on Wednesday formed a special parking district along Washington Avenue, intended to ease the woes associated with the bustling corridor’s mix of bars, restaurants and residential streets. The plan will add parking meters on about 350 spaces along Washington, and will make it easier for residents [...]
On the Parking Benefit District
A proposed ordinance to create a parking benefit district in the Washington Avenue corridor was on Council’s agenda this week, but it was tagged and will wait a week while everyone gets up to speed on it. District C Council member Ellen Cohen says the city has been working with business owners to come up [...]
Washington Avenue parking
The city of Houston has been trying to tackle the problem of insufficient parking in the busy Washington Avenue entertainment corridor. What to do about Washington Avenue is Houston’s latest public policy discussion of what government’s role should be in growing business, in helping a fledgling business strip turn into a destination district. The players [...]
Why not a university?
Tory Gattis has an interesting suggestion for that 136 acre tract of land east of downtown. This parcel of land could be the last opportunity for Houston to add a major college campus to the city. We should consider something similar to what NYC just did with Roosevelt Island, where after a long evaluation process [...]
A streetcar for the East End?
It could happen. As the once solidly industrial East End transforms with a 4-month-old soccer stadium, a light rail line under construction and the imminent sale of a 136-acre plot that could signal coming lofts and boutiques, boosters are studying the possibility of reviving the streetcar in Houston after an absence of more than 70 [...]
Ashby everywhere
Nancy Sarnoff notes a trend. Homeowners in the Memorial area held a meeting last month in the lobby of a nearby medical office building to discuss what to do about a large apartment complex being planned in their neighborhood. They said the project – and other new developments in the area – would lead to [...]
What would you do with 136 acres near downtown?
Something urban, mixed-use, and transit-oriented, one hopes. A rare opportunity lies in 136 acres just east of downtown Houston. The Buffalo Bayou-front parcel, a longtime industrial and office complex, went on the market earlier this summer – a move bayou enthusiasts, East End residents and real estate developers had been anticipating for years. Some of [...]
Discussing the Z word
I have three things to say about this. The go-ahead for the Ashby high rise has left me feeling really depressed. If affluent residents with all their political and social connections can’t keep a 21-story skyscraper out of their bucolic neighborhood, what hope is there for the rest of us? When Mayor “I’m against the [...]
Still waiting on the new density rules
With all that went on last year in Houston, one item that had been on the table was a revision of Chapter 42, to redefine the rules about density and other codes for developers. The planned revisions never made it to Council for a vote, and the city is starting over with a new cast [...]
A deluxe efficiency in the sky
The hot trend in real estate is small apartments. Apartments in Houston are shrinking. As rents have gone up, developers have been building smaller units and a lot more of them to meet growing demand from apartment dwellers who want to live in cool new complexes but can’t afford larger units. In many new properties, [...]
Thinking outside the box on the city’s finances
We’ve seen the ideas generated by the Long Term Financial Management Task Force, which I thought lacked a certain amount of breadth to its perspective. Here’s a taste of what else might be out there to think about. Good Jobs Great Houston, of which the Houston Organization of Public Employees is a member, held a [...]
Chapter 42
Other than the updated highrise ordinance, Council has not yet taken up the proposed revisions to the city’s planning code, also known as Chapter 42. That will be on the agenda soon, and the Chron has an overview of where things now stand. Now, officials want to extend that urban area and its accompanying density [...]
Council passes high rise ordinance
And with that, Council is done for the year. After four years of planning and discussion, the Houston City Council on Wednesday approved new restrictions on residential high rises. The restrictions, which passed after a failed proposal to delay a vote on the ordinance, would require that neighborhood high rises be built at least 30 [...]
Council taking up highrise ordinance
And the Chapter 42 overhaul gets underway as the revamped highrise ordinance makes it onto Council’s agenda. The proposed rules, inspired by a planned 23-story high rise at the corner of Ashby and Bissonnet, would require that buildings over 75 feet tall in residential neighborhoods be at least 30 feet from the houses around them. [...]
Downtown suburbia
Lisa Gray writes approvingly of a forthcoming urban development in Sugar Land. A far bigger project in the works is the Imperial, a 715-acre development that includes the site of the defunct Imperial Sugar refinery – the factory that built Sugar Land, the old industrial center of what was once a company town. The walkable, [...]
Apartment boom coming
I have many things to say about this. High occupancies and rising rents for apartments are driving a new wave of development in Houston’s high-end urban neighborhoods. More than 3,500 units in a dozen complexes are under construction primarily inside the 610 Loop and around the Galleria. Nearly 8,700 more are proposed, according to Houston-based [...]
Ashby rises again
It’s baaaaaaaaack. The Ashby high-rise is making a comeback. The developers of the proposed luxury residential tower that has enraged residents of the upscale neighborhoods around it resubmitted construction plans to the city Wednesday, requesting another permit to start building their project. The plans represent the same 23-story design the city approved two years ago, [...]
More on directing density
We know that the city’s Planning Department is prepping a draft ordinance that would add some restrictions to highrise construction in parts of the city outside designated areas. Here’s the Chron story about it. The proposed ordinance was written in response to the controversy over the project known as the Ashby high-rise, a real estate [...]
Directing density
This looks interesting. A new draft ordinance prepared by the city’s planning department aims to make it tougher to build tall buildings next to single-family homes. The proposal is called the High Density Ordinance, but many of its restrictions would apply to any structure more than 75 feet tall, no matter how tightly packed or [...]
Downtown living
There are two things about this Chron story about the residential population of downtown that I find curious. Twenty-five years after the residential development of downtown Houston began in earnest, fewer than 4,500 people reside in the city’s central core, an area bounded by Interstates 45 and 10, and U.S. 59. The exact number isn’t [...]