Progress? I dunno.
Jill Karnicki/Houston Chronicle
Less than two weeks after posting – and abruptly pulling down – a list of federally owned office buildings to be sold, the U.S. General Services Administration has released a much shorter list that includes one property in Houston.
A fresh list of eight properties to be sold was posted on the GSA website, including two in Texas: the LaBranch Federal Building at 2320 LaBranch just south of downtown and the San Antonio Federal Building West on Cesar Chavez Boulevard in San Antonio.
“We are accelerating the disposition of the following assets,” the agency said on the site, and invited submissions of non-binding terms sheets for the properties.
Built in 1946 for the Veterans Administration, the LaBranch building now is home to local uniformed federal police.
The GSA, landlord for the federal government, on March 4 posted a list of properties it intended to sell on its website. The initial list contained more than 440 buildings across the U.S., including three in Houston and another 21 in Texas.
The roughly 75,000-square-foot LaBranch property was not among those in Houston targeted for sale in the initial list, which included the Mickey Leland Federal Building at 1919 Smith, the Alliance Tower at 8701 S. Gessner and the Houston Custom House, which fills an entire downtown block at 701 San Jacinto and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
See here for the background. It’s always hard to know how seriously to take these idiots, but if something is written down on an official website it does carry some weight. Under more normal circumstances, I’d allow for the possibility that this idea has merit regardless of my opinion of it, but we are way beyond the outer boundaries of the benefit of the doubt. Assume the worst, come to realize you didn’t assume worst enough, and go from there.