The Chron is rooting for that petition effort to change the alcohol rules in the historic Heights.
Today, sitting down in some of the restaurants in the Heights is like slipping through a wormhole into a bygone era when respectable Texas businessmen carried flasks of whiskey in their pockets. Waiters invite you to sign up for a private club – wink, wink – whose card-carrying members are allowed access to the establishment’s stash of demon rum.
Now, if a modern-day neighborhood reform movement succeeds, this quirky rule banning booze sales in the Heights may finally be amended. Something called the Houston Heights Beverage Coalition has started collecting signatures on petitions calling for a referendum that could allow stores in the Heights to sell beer and wine. And it’s about time.
Nothing would change for bars or restaurants, which would still have to live with those archaic Prohibition-era restrictions. And package liquor stores would still be forbidden in the old neighborhood. The new rules would apply only to selling beer and wine that shoppers would carry out of stores and drink somewhere else.
Still, we hope this proposal for a limited rollback of Prohibition in the Heights succeeds, because this area’s booze ban has pointlessly shackled retailers and inconvenienced consumers who don’t even drink.
These antiquated restrictions on alcoholic beverage sales are a major reason why some people who live in the Heights have to drive out of their way to buy groceries. Beer and wine sales are a crucial source of income for grocers, an industry scraping by – according to data from the New York University Stern School of Business – on net profit margins of less than 2 percent. Although a comparatively small Kroger store survives in the Heights without beer and wine sales, expanding supermarket chains have conspicuously opened new stores outside the boundaries of the Heights.
See here and here for the background. If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, you know that as a rule I support efforts to repeal Prohibition-era anti-booze laws. This effort is no exception – I’d sign the petition and vote in favor of the ensuing referendum if I lived in the affected area. There’s no good argument against allowing a grocery store to sell beer and wine in this part of town. I can’t help but think that this referendum effort is going to walk through a minefield of legal technicalities just because it’s such an oddball situation, but I say take them as they come. I wish the Houston Heights Beverage Coalition PAC good luck in their quest.
Who made the determination that 1500 valid petition signatures are what is required? I hadn’t seen a firm number until reading this editorial, and The Chronicle didn’t cite a source.