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Elsewhere in Houston

River Oaks Theater renovations set to begin

A bit of good news.

The next step in River Oaks Theatre’s comeback starts this week. Construction on renovations to the historic movie theater will begin soon with an eye towards reopening by the end of the year.

Movie-loving Houstonians will recall the venue’s saga that played out in 2021 and 2022. Landmark Theaters closed the three-screen theater in 2021 due to unpaid lease obligations that accrued during the pandemic. Houstonians demonstrated outside the theater, calling for it to be preserved.

When it seemed like the theater might never reopen, Culinary Khancepts, a local company affiliated with Star Cinema Grill that operates State Fair and Liberty Kitchen, announced last February that it had leased the space with plans to renovate it. Now, that work is slated to begin.

Plans call for preservation of the theater’s signature Art Deco look, signage, and name while making necessary improvements to the overall interior. One of the major changes will be upgrading the kitchen to provide for in-theater dining along with cocktails and wine.

When it reopens, the theater will screen art house movies and host live performances, according to a release. Hopefully, that includes the interactive Rocky Horror Picture Show performances that had been a signature of the River Oaks Theatre. Whatever the specifics turn out to be, the company understands the significance of the space.

“We felt as Houston’s only owned and operated cinema companies that it was our duty to save this masterpiece. We look forward to serving our community with the best-in-class cinema experiences,” River Oaks Theatre president and CEO Omar Khan said in a statement. “The last year was spent working through design, city approvals, historical preservation, landlord coordination of building improvements, including a brand new roof and prepping the theater for a sprinkler system.”

See here for the background. It’s always a pleasant surprise when something iconic in Houston gets preserved and renewed, isn’t it? The Chron has more.

The 2023 Kinder Houston Area Survey

One of the great things about Houston.

Housing costs and the economy topped Houstonians’ concerns this year in the 42nd annual Kinder Houston Area Survey, which also showed a coalescing desire to close the income gap as residents reported widening disparities in their financial outlooks.

While some issues remain nationally divisive, that isn’t always the case in Houston. Ruth López Turley, director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said she is hopeful as locals have increasingly reached consensus on a variety of economic and social issues.

“On the one hand, the inequalities are persistent. On the other hand, I find it very hopeful that now a majority, a large majority, want that to change,” López Turley said. “We haven’t seen any action taken, really, but the fact that more people want to see action taken, that’s the first step.”

[…]

The Houston area is also becoming more socially liberal, with younger population driving the direction of public opinion, researchers said.

The number of people who support the right to abortion has remained largely unchanged over the years – 56 percent in 1988 and 59 percent in 2023 – but beliefs on morality are changing. Houstonians felt abortion was “morally wrong” through the 2010s, but the answer split evenly in 2021.

This year, 58 percent said abortion was morally right and 42 percent said it was morally wrong, with older people were more likely to feel it was wrong.

Around 90 percent of the panel’s respondents supported abortion in cases where woman’s health at risk, and 80 percent supported the right to abortion when a serious birth defect is detected, according to the survey results.

People also support gun rights with restrictions – 76 percent said it is very important or somewhat important to protect the Second Amendment, but more than 81 percent favored federal laws requiring handgun registration. Another 93 percent supported universal background checks regardless of where a firearm is purchased. And two-thirds said they find it “very important” to control gun ownership.

Houstonians who were surveyed also overwhelmingly support providing pathways toward legal citizenship for individuals living in the U.S. without documentation, at 80 percent. About 70 percent say immigrants strengthen American culture rather than threaten it, and the share reporting that immigrants contribute more to the economy than they take out has grown from 42 percent in 1994 to 71 percent in 2023.

There’s more, so read the rest of the story and read the survey itself. The Kinder Houston Area Survey is a huge asset to Houston and we should be really grateful to have it. The Press has more.

Houston still doing well sheltering the homeless

Good news.

As she waited for the results of a yearly census of the Houston area’s homeless population, Ana Rausch clicked open an email detailing the soaring number of eviction filings in Harris County. This March, 6,600 households had evictions filed against them, compared to a pre-COVID average of 3,800.

As the vice president of program operations for the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, which coordinates the region’s homelessness response, she viewed the data with some worry. She hoped the count wouldn’t show a corresponding increase in homelessness.

Now that the results are in, she is relieved, she said. During a year that saw both evictions and funding for Houston’s programs combating homelessness soar, 2023’s overall count stayed flat from the year before, with the number of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation down and the number of people in shelters up.

Every year, thousands of volunteers fan out across the country to take stock of their regions’ homeless populations. It’s this census, known as the Point-in-Time Count, that has brought Houston national recognition for its success in reducing its homeless population by roughly two-thirds since 2011.

The 2023 results, released Wednesday morning, showed the count of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation dropped 17 percent in the Houston area, to 1,200 people from 1,500 the year before. At the same time, the number of people living in shelters increased 18 percent, to 2,000 from 1,700. In the past year, shelters lifted the social distancing measures that sharply reduced the number of beds available during the pandemic.

[…]

Mayor Sylvester Turner also trumpeted the reduction of people living on the streets, in vehicles or in other unsheltered situations. Such a result “does not happen by mistake,”  he said in a release. “Rather it’s the result of making it a top priority, enhancing our invaluable partnership with Harris County and the community, and strategically funding data-proven, holistic housing solutions.”

In 2022, Houston, Harris County, the Coalition for the Homeless and their partners poured resources into a strategy of closing down homeless camps by offering everyone in them housing. The strategy has required opening a navigation center, where people moved out of a camp can stay while awaiting their permanent housing, and renting out units where people can stay longterm with supportive services such as caseworkers. The city, county and their partners housed 2,500 people in 2022, and more than 9,000 people who had been without homes were housed through their programs on the night of the count.

In a year when inflation spiked and many eviction protections ended, “We suspect that we might be somewhat unique and remarkable in the fact that we saw our unsheltered count go down,” said Catherine Villarreal, director of communications for the Coalition. However, many cities have yet to release their results from this year’s count, so it’s to be seen how Houston’s results compare.

See here for some background. These counts aren’t perfect – people couch-surfing with friends and acquaintances will be missed, for example – but the big picture is there, and it’s a good one for Houston. There will always be more work to do, but we have done a lot to improve this situation for thousands of people. We should be proud of that. Axios has more.

How much downtown parking do we need?

I don’t know the answer to that, but this is how much we have.

Downtown Houston dedicates more than a quarter of its land to parking spaces, surpassing the percentages in most major U.S. cities, a new report shows.

A photo from the 1970s that went viral last year showed Houston’s downtown nearly engulfed by parking lots at the time. While less extreme today, 26 percent of the city center still serves as parking spaces, ranking Houston seventh in parking density among 50 major American metropolitan areas analyzed by the Portland-based Parking Reform Network.

Houston isn’t alone in Texas when it comes to high parking concentration, the report shows. San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth closely followed the Bayou City in ninth, 11th and 12th place, respectively. Topping the list is Arlington, which sees a staggering 42 percent of its land occupied by parking lots and garages.

In contrast, New York City, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Boston dedicate only 1 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent and 6 percent of their downtown areas to parking, respectively.

A car-centric downtown often leads to a less pedestrian-friendly environment, according to the network, whose research shows that an increase in central city parking typically results in a significant decrease in walkability.

“With all this parking, little land was left for anything else, making housing more expensive, less dense, and farther apart,” the report read. “It’s clear that if we want to have walkable cities, we need cities that are less parkable.”

As more than half of Houstonians consistently express their desire for a more walkable urban design in surveys, the city has taken steps towards this goal in recent years. These initiatives include expanding Houston’s network of sidewalks, implementing pedestrian-friendly rules for new developments in select neighborhoods and permanently closing down traffic on parts of Main Street.

In 2019, Houston also eliminated minimum parking requirements in parts of the Midtown and Downtown East neighborhoods — an exemption that already existed in the central business district — in order to prevent an excessive number of parking lots from consuming too much urban core space.

Meanwhile, some parking lots in Houston have started to vanish in the past decade. Between 2010 and 2022, 21 lots were demolished and replaced with buildings, Axios reported. These new developments include Discovery Green, Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Partnership Tower, Marriott Marquis, Hampton Inn and Suites and Aris Market Square.

I generated the Houston downtown parking map here and embedded it above. Some of the parking indicated is multi-level, which isn’t great from a pedestrian-experience perspective, but at least takes up less surface area. I’m not sure what more can be done to squeeze in more actual buildings, with useful things in them, but at least we’ve taken some steps to increase what’s available. Ginger noted this tool in the April 7 Dispatches from Dallas; I couldn’t resist adding on when I saw the Chron story.

So yeah, climate change is bad for Houston

Some science for you.

As Houston continues to grapple with extreme weather conditions, scientists find record-breaking sea level rises in the U.S. Gulf Coast, which could leave cities such as Houston more vulnerable to severe storms and flooding in the coming decades than previously anticipated.

Since 2010, sea levels along the Gulf Coast and Southeast coastlines have been rising by roughly half an inch per year due to a combination of human-caused climate change and an extended period of unfavorable natural conditions, according to a new study published by the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Although half an inch might not seem like a lot, it can have significant consequences for coastal communities. A NASA analysis determined that for every inch of sea level rise, about 8.5 feet of beachfront vanishes along an average coast. In fact, these rates are on par with the “worst case” scenario if greenhouse gas emissions continued to surge throughout the 21st century.

Higher sea levels also can cause more flooding even on sunny days, often leading to considerable damage to properties and infrastructure, according to the paper’s lead author, Sönke Dangendorf, at Tulane University. This latest research joins a long list of recent studies highlighting the negative effect climate change could have on the Houston area.

“These rapid rates are unprecedented over at least the 20th century and they have been three times higher than the global average over the same period,” Dangendorf told the Tulane News. “The results, once again, demonstrate the urgency of the climate crisis for the Gulf region. We need interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts to sustainably face these challenges.”

The findings by Dangendorf and his team were consistent with those of Jianjun Yin, a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona. In his recent article in the Journal of Climate, Yin used satellite observations to estimate the total amount of sea level rise in the East and the Gulf Coasts from 2010 to 2022 was about 5 inches. The drastic rate has made disasters such as Hurricanes Michael and Ian more devastating than they otherwise would have been, he told The Washington Post.

“The faster (sea level rise) on the Southeast and Gulf Coasts … coincided with active and even record-breaking North Atlantic hurricane seasons in recent years,” Yin said in his study. “As a consequence, the elevated storm surge exacerbated coastal flooding and damages, particularly on the Gulf Coast.”

The study and an abstract are here. I don’t think the premise or the conclusions will surprise anyone who has lived through the last decade or so here. It’s more a question of how much worse it gets, and how much of a risk that is to everyone living here. And, in a more hopeful vein, what we can do to mitigate that and protect ourselves.

Ashby 2.0 cleared for groundbreaking

It’s actually happening.

Did you miss me?

Along-embattled residential high-rise project in Boulevard Oaks is set to move forward, with one Houston City Council member calling the news “terrible.”

The Langley , a new luxury rental community jointly developed by El Paso-based Hunt Companies, Inc. and Dallas-based StreetLights Residential has just been given the green light to break ground by the City of Houston.

As neighbors are well aware, The Langley (1717 Bissonnet St.) is the new iteration of the hot-button mix-used development that was long dubbed the Ashby high-rise. A turf war between the Ashby’s developers and Boulevard Oaks residents and representatives dates back some 15 years. (The occasional “Stop Ashby High-Rise” bumper sticker can still be spotted in the Inner Loop.)

Locals filed a suit against Buckhead Investment Partners, a judge eventually sided with developers in 2016.

The Langley, a more intimate version than the original high-rise, is meant to appease residents who opposed the large development’s footprint and effect on traffic and flow. As the Houston Chronicle reported, the city of Houston approved StreetLights Residential’s permit for site and foundation work in March.

Now, it appears the The Langley is cleared to break ground. No word yet if Hunt Companies and StreetLights Residential hope to complete the project by 2025, the original target date.

City Council Member Abbie Kamin minced no words on Thursday, April 20. “This is terrible news and I won’t sugarcoat it,” she wrote in an email to constituents. “Residents and I have been fighting this grossly out-of-scale development – and its negative impacts on traffic, congestion, safety, and quality of life for neighbors – with both hands tied behind our backs.”

Hunt Companies and StreetLights Residential are “taking advantage of Houston’s lack of zoning,” Kamin continued. She added the developers are “using state vested rights laws to disregard new residential buffering standards, and other neighborhood protections that have been fought for and passed by City Council during my time and before.”

Kamin, for her part, vows to fight for residents. “Let me be clear: I stand strongly opposed to this development and others that do not incorporate and include the measures we have put in place to make development better for neighborhoods,” she wrote. “I will continue to advocate for and alongside our residents to mitigate the impacts this construction project is going to have on the neighborhood.”

See here and here for the background. It’s hard to know what CM Kamin and the rest of the opposition can accomplish at this point, but it can’t hurt to try. We know from the previous experience with this property that a vocal group of homeowners in a nice neighborhood can do quite a bit. As I’ve been on this train for a long time, I’ll ride it till it reaches its destination. Never would have thought it would still be going after all these years, and at this point clearly with some more to go, but here we are.

UPDATE: From the Chron story:

Pete Patterson, an attorney representing some neighbors who oppose the Langley, said the neighbors sill don’t think plans meet the requirements outlined in the 2012 agreement with the city.

“We’re very disappointed,” said Patterson. “We’re reviewing our options and we’ll be making a decision with respect to legal action in the near future.”

Litigation would certainly extend this ride even more. Who knows how much longer I’ll have to keep an eye on this?

On vying for the 2028 RNC

I get competing for this, but that doesn’t make me enthusiastic about it.

As part of Houston’s push to win the Republican National Convention in 2028, the George R. Brown Convention Center could be expanding.

State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, passed legislation out of the Senate this week that would allow Houston to use hotel occupancy taxes to make improvements and expand the convention center, though he did not detail what those plans might look like.

“Houston needs to modernize and expand the George R. Brown Convention Center to remain competitive and attract large conventions, such as the 2028 Republican National Convention,” Whitmire said in his push for the legislation.

[…]

If Houston were to win the convention, it would be in July or August 2028 with most of the activity at the Toyota Center and the George R. Brown Convention Center. However, when conventions are held in a city, there are dozens of offshoot events that can happen all over the region in hotels and at college campuses.

Holly Clapham, chief marketing officer for Houston First, didn’t detail plans for a potential expansion but said if the legislation Whitmire is pushing becomes law, “it would help ensure Houston remains a Tier 1 convention destination for years to come.”

Houston Republican State Sen. Paul Bettencourt is among those opposing Whitmire’s bill because of how it is allowing hotel occupancy tax revenue to be used for expenses that weren’t originally intended. Bettencourt said he doesn’t want the Legislature to set a precedent for taxes collected for one purpose to be shifted to some other use.

“I am concerned about the long-term implications of it,” Bettencourt told Whitmire.

Whitmire, who is running for mayor of Houston, said similar legislation was previously passed to allow Dallas and Fort Worth to use hotel occupancy taxes to expand their convention centers, and he just wants Houston to have that chance so it can better compete for big national conventions.

See here and here for some background. I survived the 1992 RNC, and as noted in those earlier posts my plan for the 2028 RNC if we get it is to be out of town. I support the idea of allowing the George R. Brown Convention Center to to expand and upgrade, so that’s fine as far as that goes. Maybe we can get that and also not get the 2028 RNC. That would be fine.

The benefits of going fine-free

I love this story.

Two months ago, a Houston resident walked into the city’s public library and returned three long-overdue books from the 1990s.

The trio of the returned books included “Tenth Dimension” by Jeremy Bernstein on elementary particle physics, “The New Ambidextrous Universe” by Martin Gardner about the asymmetric DNA helix, and “Archery: A Sport for Everyone” by the Athlete Institute. These books had been missing for so long, the library had removed them from its system. They didn’t have a barcode, only a checkout card stamped with the due date: Nov. 13, 1992.

The customer had apparently forgotten about the books and only recently discovered them in her attic, according to Houston Public Library Communications Director Carmen Abrego. But instead of having to pay a late fee, she was welcomed back to the library and given a renewed membership for the first time in 30 years.

In January, Houston followed in the footsteps of other major Texas cities like San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth, eliminating late fees for its library system to encourage more residents, particularly younger and low-income Houstonians, to use its 40-plus locations. Since then, residents have returned a total of 23,420 books and other items valued at $468,302, Abrego said.

The library also hosted its first amnesty event since 2014, from Jan. 18 to Feb. 17, allowing residents to request the removal of all past fines. The physics and archery enthusiast was among the 3,098 customers who cleared their overdue accounts during the month-long period.

Late fines don’t necessarily motivate people to return books on time and can actually deter those owing fines from using the facility again, with communities of color and low-income residents disproportionately affected, a Syracuse University study showed. For instance, when Chicago eliminated fines in 2019, the library system saw a 240 percent surge in book returns.

See here for the background. Harris County’s library system followed suit a few weeks later. According to the story, nearly half of the long-overdue books that have been returned were children’s books. The point here is for people to use the library and then bring the books back. Looks like this new system is working great so far.

“One Clean Houston”

Hope this works.

Mayor Sylvester Turner on Wednesday unveiled a $17.8 million illegal dumping initiative aimed at expediting cleanups, increasing surveillance and enforcement, and prioritizing areas hardest hit by Houston’s roadside trash problem.

Standing beside an illegal dumpsite strewn with discarded furniture and garbage bags in Greater Fifth Ward, Turner outlined his new “One Clean Houston” plan. With a $17.8 million budget for the next two years, mostly from federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, he said the initiative’s goal is to address the recurring blight that keeps appearing in distressed areas.

“Unfortunately, this community, like many others, has suffered because of countless illegal dumpsites that have created blight and become a major problem in our neighborhoods,” Turner said. “What we find oftentimes is that we can come clean it up and things will come right back a week or two later. … We need a comprehensive approach.”

In 2022, Houston saw 4,650 reported cases of illegal dumping, down from 6,251 complaints the previous year. Despite the decrease, officials said they face a daunting workload, including an increase in proactive collections in addition to cleanups prompted by calls to the city’s 311 helpline. The city’s new “dumping tracker” shows nearly 1,000 proactive trash removals in February, compared to 115 in September 2022.

The challenge is compounded by the city’s aging waste trucks and an overburdened and short-staffed Solid Waste Management Department where employees have spent years working mandatory six-day weeks just to try to keep up with trash backlogs.

To address those issues, most of the new funding, $14.5 million, will go toward trash collection equipment and services. It includes $11.5 million to support existing collection efforts, $3 million to purchase single-operator grapple trucks and $200,000 to increase hiring incentives for drivers.

The objective is to speed up dumpsite cleanups, reducing the average resolution time from about 24 days to a target of seven to 10 days, according to the Mark Wilfalk, director of the Solid Waste Management Department.

“The two greatest assets of our department, it’s going to always revolve around employees and equipment. Without either one of those, we can’t get anything done,” Wilfalk said. “And we’ve been able to improve and increase that efficiency and reduce the waiting times because of that extra support that we have been given.”

Another $2.4 million will be used to bolster enforcement, including hiring six code enforcement officers and six Harris County deputies, deploying 120 covert cameras, and funding Houston Police Department overtime. The intention, Turner said, is to make clear that illegal dumping comes with consequences.

It all sounds good, and the story quotes neighborhood residents who are pleased with the announcement. I don’t know how much equipment and other resources this money will buy, but anything should help. Dumping has been a problem for many years now, and I wish the story delved a bit into the past history of attempts to combat it. Maybe there isn’t much to say – offhand, I can’t think of anything along these lines, certainly not that much money being spent. I hope the city measures and reports on its progress, and I hope there is sufficient progress to merit celebration.

Checking in on the Astrodome

With the Final Four in town, we have visitors at Reliant Stadium looking over at its unused predecessor and wondering what’s going on with it. The short answer is, not much.

Ready and waiting

The state of the dome and prospects for its future weigh on the minds of those who scout the surrounding NRG Park for special events, according to Ryan Walsh, the CEO and executive director of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation, a governmental nonprofit that manages the complex on behalf of the county.

“It’s coming up in conversation more and more about, ‘What are you guys doing with that?'” Walsh said. “When people come and tour these facilities, for these large events, it’s, ‘What about that large building over there? What about the Astrodome?’ Unfortunately, it’s been the same answer we’ve had for, gosh, a decade or more now.”

That answer is nothing and no changes are imminent. The Astrodome was condemned by the City of Houston in 2009 and does not have a working HVAC system or plumbing, according to Walsh, and a series of ideas to refurbish and repurpose the building since that time have not come to fruition.

Former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett led a $105 million proposal to convert the county-owned Astrodome into a multi-purpose event space with under-the-floor parking, which county commissioners approved in 2018, but the project fizzled out after Emmett lost an election to Lina Hidalgo later that year. There were concerns about the plan’s long-term cost and viability, according to Hidalgo and Harris County Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who voted in support of the proposal but said he always had reservations about it.

Ellis, who represents the part of Houston where the Astrodome is located, said there is no longer an interest in spending taxpayer money to refurbish it as construction costs have escalated and county leaders have more pressing priorities such as flood control, community healthcare needs and a backlog in their criminal justice system. Walsh said the county spends about $150,000 per year in utility and insurance costs for the Astrodome as a part of the larger NRG Park complex, and Ellis said any additional funding would need to come from the private or philanthropic sectors.

A plan to resurrect the Astrodome also would need the support of the NFL’s Houston Texans and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which are NRG Park’s primary tenants. Tearing down the mostly revered domed stadium – an idea for which many Houstonians have expressed support over the years – is off the table after the Astrodome received a state historical designation a few years ago that largely protects it from being demolished or significantly altered.

[…]

Walsh said his nonprofit is starting to have conversations about the future of NRG Park with the Texans and rodeo, which have leases at NRG Stadium through 2032, adding that the Astrodome will be part of those talks. Rodeo president and CEO Chris Boleman, who recently wrapped up the 2023 event, said he wants to see the Astrodome become a usable space and would support a plan that benefits the rodeo and its operations.

The Astrodome Conservancy, a private nonprofit which formed in 2016 at the urging of Emmett, is gradually working to solicit public input, conduct market research and vet outside proposals to get the building up and running again. Executive director Beth Wiedower Jackson said she fields multiple inquiries per month about the Astrodome.

She added that the conversancy, which has a fundraising run scheduled for April 15, has a “very lean budget” and is “very much in the process” of finding a viable solution. Ellis said it’s likely to be at least a couple more years before an idea could be galvanized and set in motion at the Astrodome, which is paid for and “structurally solid as a rock,” according to Jackson.

The conservancy conducted a public-input campaign in 2021, with Jackson saying an overwhelming majority of the 7,500-plus respondents wanted to see the Astrodome utilized in some capacity.

“There is very much the public will, and even the political will, to do something with this building,” she said. “But there is not a vision right now, today currently, for the public or the politicians to rally around or get behind. There is not even something to say, ‘No, that’s not it.’ We’re trying to come up with that vision.”

Indeed, the last updates I have relating to the Astrodome are from 2021, and before that a post from 2019 about what’s going on with the Dome. There’s never been a shortage of ideas of what to do with the Astrodome, it’s always been about how to pay for it. I think at this point it’s going to take the Conservancy to mostly finance whatever will be done, with only a modicum of public funds being used. How we get there and how long that might take, I have no idea. This has been your semi-regular look at What’s Going On With The Astrodome.

A more nuanced look at the finances of hosting the Final Four

I’ve made fun of articles in the past that breathlessly and credulously repeated claims that various big sporting events like a Super Bowl or a Final Four would yield untold millions in sales and hotel tax revenue for the state and the host city, despite the lack of objective evidence. With that in mind, I want to give credit to this Chron story about the upcoming Final Four in Houston, which takes a much more critical view of things.

Tens of thousands of fans are expected to swamp Houston later this week for the Final Four championship and unload their wallets in the city’s hotels, restaurants and bars.

Final Four organizers and researchers say Houston has a lot to gain from hosting the four-day college basketball championship, but a stubborn question emerges in every host that lands the event: Does it bring a financial windfall for the city?

A review of sales and hotel occupancy tax data from previous years Houston hosted the Final Four does not show a notable bump compared to years the city did not stage the event. When you add in extra costs the city takes on, like additional policing, infrastructure improvements and cleanup costs, the economic benefits get more muddy, researcher said.

“Sometimes we just list this really large number of economic impact, but we don’t talk about the investment that’s required,” said Jeremy Jordan, Temple University vice provost and former dean of the School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management. “Planning and executing a large event for millions to watch requires large costs.”

Event organizers, boosters and city officials insist the broader benefits of the tournament extend far beyond the numbers. College basketball’s marquee event showcases the city to thousands of visitors and millions of fans tuning into the games across the country.

“Any time that we can put Houston in the spotlight is a great opportunity for us to be able to tell our story,” said Michael Heckman, CEO of Houston First, which operates several of the city’s convention, arts and entertainment venues.

The story then goes through a lot of different numbers to show that it’s hard to find an effect. My eyes glazed over after a few paragraphs, but it’s the process more than the specifics that really matter. My point in my earlier postings, which go all the way back to Super Bowl XXXVIII, is that it’s easy to make claims and difficult to produce evidence in support of those claims. Which the claimers usually avoided by not bothering, and which the stories often left unquestioned. That wasn’t the case here.

In the end, I do think there’s benefit to hosting large sporting events, even if the dollars and cents are hard to parse out. The benefits may be more intangible – and thus even more difficult to measure – and they accrue almost entirely to the limited set of people who care about the event in question. Having big attractions – in sports, music, culture, food, the arts, and so on – are benefits of living in a city, and the people that live there expect that over time there will be a number of such events that interest them. I don’t think it has to be more complicated than that.

“More Space: Main Street” permanently extended

A good outcome for a good idea.

Houston will close down traffic on seven blocks of Main Street permanently to allow businesses to maintain outdoor seating spaces initially established during the COVID-19 pandemic, with plans to expand the concept to other commercial strips in the city.

City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to permanently extend the “More Space: Main Street” program. First approved as a pilot in November 2020, the initiative converted portions of Main’s vehicle lanes between Commerce and Rusk into seating areas for bars and restaurants struggling amid the early days of the pandemic when residents had been urged to remain in their homes to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

So far, the program has enabled participating businesses to add a total of 45 tables and 154 seats on outdoor patios, according to Houston’s Chief Transportation Planner David Fields. Bars and restaurants also reported increases in revenue, employee retention and customer satisfaction, he said.

“We surveyed the businesses. All of them said this was exactly what they wanted. They requested the city extend it,” Field said. “And people felt safer being out on Main Street because there were more people out on Main Street.”

The goal, Fields said, is to expand the concept citywide eventually, although it will require more research and conversations with local businesses to identify specific commercial strips that could be a good fit for the program.

“We definitely want to expand this once we get the permanent version up and going,” he said. “This is not something we would ever impose. This is something that we really want a commercial strip, possibly a group of businesses near each other, to see this downtown as an example and say, ‘Yeah, we would like to do that. Can you help work with us on that?’”

While “More Space” initially was designed as a tool for businesses to cope with COVID-19 policies, it has benefits beyond the pandemic and has helped create a more vibrant downtown culture, according to Melissa Stewart, executive director of the Greater Houston Restaurant Association.

“For so long, we would come to downtown, do our work and then run for the hills. That continues to change,” Stewart said. “We’re continuing to see, much even to my surprise as a native Houstonian, more and more people willing to dine outside all year around. Houston is becoming a lot more like the big cities that we see in other parts of the country.”

[…]

Main Street’s unique conditions — limited traffic flow, few nearby residential buildings and the rail line providing convenient spots for barriers — made closing down the seven-block stretch of road a relatively smooth transition. Applying the same model to other parts of the city, on the other hand, could come with additional challenges, Stewart said.

“You might think Midtown, Montrose, the Heights, but it’s really going to require a space-by-space study because, let’s say you were to implement this on a part of Yale, the workaround might be really difficult for that community and that traffic pattern,” she said. ”So, we want these solutions to be adaptable to not only the business model but also to the neighborhood.”

See here and here for the background. I love this idea for where it is. I’m happy for the same thing to be considered elsewhere in town, though I will say I’m not sure where else it could work. (Yale Street, I will say with confidence, would not work.) Downtown in general and Main Street in downtown in particular are a special set of circumstances. But by all means, be open to possibilities.

On the source of Houston’s greenhouse gas emissions

This story is a lot more complex and nuanced than the headline would lead you to believe.

It may come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time on Houston’s roads at rush hour that just over half of all the city’s reported greenhouse gas emissions come directly from traffic. This is the greatest share among the largest U.S. cities that volunteered emissions information to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

The data was collected by survey in partnership with CDP and ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and contains self-reported amounts of methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide as well as other notable greenhouse gasses and carcinogens. The data is broken out by 51 categories submitted by more than 1,100 cities, states and municipalities around the world.

Data like this is considered primarily a preparedness tool according to Katie Walsh, head of cities, states, regions and public authorities for CDP’s North America division. By compiling and submitting this data and by answering questions about climate change mitigation policies, Walsh says cities get a chance to assess where they stand and where they need to go to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In a city reporting vehicle-oriented emissions as high as Houston’s, local governments and nonprofits can use that data to design initiatives that target specific  needs. One example, Evolve Houston, which grew out of the city’s climate action plan, is working to reduce carbon emissions from personal vehicles by pushing electric vehicle adoption and infrastructure.

The 2022 CDP submission marks the 11th year Houston has reported data to the CDP.

Stationary emitters like homes and businesses, as well as power plants, typically make up the lion’s share of emissions in cities, according to CDP city-level data. But despite a large oil and gas industry and booming housing developments, this is not true for Houston – traffic is king.

Although traffic is undoubtedly a top greenhouse gas emitter across the nation, its spot at No. 1 in Houston may have more to do with how well it’s tracked and how poorly other sources are monitored. For example, emissions from the Port of Houston – one of the largest ports in the US, mover of 55 million tons of annual cargo and representative of 20.6 percent of Texas’ total gross domestic product – are not accounted for in the city’s reporting. The city hopes to include emissions from “waterborne navigation” in future reports.

Looking at a city’s share of emissions by “sub-sectors,” which are the smallest buckets that emissions can be categorized by in the CDP data, reveals unique inventories for each city. These inventories can help city officials identify the most problematic sources of pollution as well as where they have deficiencies in emissions reporting.

There’s more, so read the rest. The main thing I took away from it is that categorizing the data can be helpful in telling cities where to prioritize efforts, but there’s a lot of subjectiveness in it, which limits the usefulness of those categories. Cities only have control over so much of the emissions in their vicinity as well. Having good data is helpful, but getting good data is easier said than done, and there’s a lot of room for improvement now. But it’s better than nothing.

Ashby Highrise 2.0 gets a permit

It’s happening!

Did you miss me?

For years a controversial proposal to build a high rise in the wealthy enclave of Boulevard Oaks appeared to be dead — a lesson in how land-use battles can erupt even in a city with virtually no zoning.

But after six years of sitting on the proposal — and the vacant, proposed site at Ashby and Bisonnet sitting dormant — the owners, Hunt Cos. of El Paso, last spring resurrected efforts to build the tower. They brought on a new development team, Dallas-based Street Lights Residential, to create a scaled-down version of the high-rise, now called The Langley, that they hope would win over neighbors who had fiercely opposed the earlier project dubbed The Ashby.

Almost a year after StreetLights filed updated plans with the city, the developer says it is weeks from breaking ground on the 20-story apartment building. The city of Houston granted StreetLights Residential a permit for site work and foundation work Monday, though it still is waiting approval to start vertical construction.

Stephen Meek, developer at Street Lights Residential, said the approved work could begin in early April.

“(The site now) is a brown field that looks like a black eye right at the entry of beautiful neighborhood,” Meek said. “What we’re proposing is bringing something beautiful and something as architecturally significant.”

The spacious units and high-end design of The Langley are aimed at attracting well-heeled empty-nesters, and Meek believes some neighborhood residents would want to live in The Langley if they decide to downsize but want to stay in the area.

Many of the neighbors, however, remain opposed. Several houses around the project site are adorned with bright yellow signs with a menacing carton caricature of a high-rise and the phrase “Tower of Traffic” and “Protect Our Neighborhood” — a nod to past protests against the previous high-rise proposal.

A small group of concerned neighbors have been quietly working to pressure city officials and Street Lights Residential to abide by a 2012 agreement reached between the city of Houston and the site’s owners that set certain parameters for size, traffic, noise and other concerns. (StreetLights rejects, saying it is following the 2012 deal to the letter.)

Neighbors also argue StreetLights should be required to follow updated city ordinances — rather than being built according to laws that were in place at the time Hunt Cos. and Buckhead Investment Partners first applied for building permits in 2007.

As of Tuesday evening, it wasn’t immediately clear if the city’s legal department had determined whether The Langley could be grandfathered.

See here for the background. As the story notes, some residents and neighborhood groups aren’t trying to stop The Langley – I will try to use the new name, but in my heart it will always be the Ashby highrise – but just want it to abide by the new 2012 rules. Which, hey, more power to them. The original 20-story concept never made much sense, but that doesn’t mean that some multi-story building there wouldn’t be a good fit. Could this story finally have a happy ending, or at least a tolerable one, for all? Maybe! Hopefully it won’t take as long to find out.

The Rodeo is more accessible now

Good to hear, though I’m honestly surprised this is a thing that has just now happened.

People with disabilities trying to get into and enjoy the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo will have an easier time this year because of an access compliance crackdown by the U.S Justice Department.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas on Thursday announced that the the livestock show and NRG Park had worked to make parking lots, bathrooms, ramps and countertops compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The changes were made after the Justice Department conducted a three-day investigation of the rodeo and its venue over ADA compliance complaints made during the 2022 event.

The findings from that investigation were used to make changes during this year’s event, according to a press release

“[The rodeo] did the right thing and made its facilities accessible to the entire community, including those with disabilities” said U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani. “With the cooperation of the [rodeo] and NRG Park, and after my office’s investigation, all individuals in the district will have a chance to enjoy the Rodeo.”

The investigation found “significant barriers to accessibility,” according to the press release.

To fix the issues, the rodeo increased the number of porta-potties and add more accessible dining areas, seating and paths. Some obstruction were modified or removed and a stair lift was installed in NRG Arena. NRG Park also increased the number of accessible parking spaces and drop-off points, and added a shuttle to the Orange Lot on Circle Drive, according to the press release.

The story comes from the aforementioned press release, which among other things notes that the investigation was opened last year at the start of the 2022 Rodeo. I had noted the Rodeo’s return last year but don’t recall seeing a story about this review. I’m glad it happened, I’m glad the Rodeo cooperated, and I’m very glad that the situation has improved, but I’m surprised that it took until the year or our Lord 2022 for it to happen. I don’t have a good explanation for that. Better late than never, but still.

Houston suspends “sister city” ties with Tyumen

Of interest.

Houston Mayor Turner Sylvester on Friday suspended the city’s partnership agreement with Moscow and its sister city relationship with Tyumen, Russia, on the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine.

Turner said that while he believes in the value of city diplomacy in times of crisis, Russia’s decision to censor the media and crack down on anti-war protesters has made it impossible to maintain city-to-city relationships.

“In challenging times, city to city, and people to people, diplomacy can sometimes be the only opportunities for exchange,” the mayor said. “This is the purpose of Houston’s more than 90 foreign consulates, including those from Ukraine and Russia and of our 19 sister cities – to create and maintain opportunities for global dialogue.”

Since Russian launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, at least 8,000 civilians have been confirmed killed, including 487 children, with the actual numbers likely to be substantially higher, according to estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. More than 14 million people have also been displaced from their homes as the humanitarian crisis widens, further straining diplomatic ties with Russia.

“Russia has blocked the people’s access to social media and global news outlets, cracked down on protests and any form of discontent, and criminalized public opposition to the war,” the mayor said. “It is clear that we have lost the ability to have an open dialogue.”

Meanwhile, HTX4UKRAINE, a local nonprofit that raises money and that advocates for Ukraine’s cause, organized a rally Friday afternoon in front of the Russian Consulate in Houston to commemorate the war’s one-year anniversary.

My first reaction on reading this headline was “wait, we’re just doing this now?” Having read the story I get the rationale, and I understand wanting to maintain a diplomatic relationship even in times of war, but it’s still a little weird. I also had no idea this relationship existed. I knew we had a few “sister city” partnerships, though I couldn’t have said much about what that means beyond some fumbling about exchanging culture and stuff like that. I knew we had a few such relationships, with the one with Chiba, Japan, being the one that stuck most prominently in my mind, but again couldn’t have told you much beyond that. The list of Houston’s sister cities, which includes a brief overview of what that means, is here, though now that will need to be amended. I wonder if we will keep them there but consider them to be in a timeout, or if we will fully cut ties and go looking for a new sister to replace them. Maybe that will be a question for the Mayor’s race. Anyway, now you know.

The Houston coyotes

No, not another sports team. A bit of wildlife that has found a home in the big city.

As the Houston region continues to develop over the next few years, wildlife removal experts say that interactions between coyotes and humans will steadily increase until their encounters are a more common occurrence.

Coyote sightings in Houston used to be rare and could be the subject of viral moments, like the video last year of a coyote scaling a fence and roof in a Richmond backyard.

Mark Browning from Houston’s Elite Wildlife Services said that years ago coyotes would normally only be seen on the outskirts of undeveloped properties. But as more areas get developed, there has been an uptick in calls for coyote removal services in more urbanized zones.

For instance, a few weeks ago Browning said that his company received a call about a coyote on the top floor of a downtown parking garage, calling the ordeal a “spectacle” with people afraid the coyote was going to bite someone. There were also recent reports of coyote sightings near Memorial Park in Houston.

“They are absolutely increasing, and they’ve become very urbanized,” Browning said. “They learn our habits, like when we take our trash out. And they really don’t have any natural enemies so there’s really nothing to control the population.”

Brad Gurrerra from Quality Pest & Wildlife also says he’s been hearing a lot more concerns from residents living in the Heights and the Woodlands about coyote sightings.

“Even myself, I’ve had two outdoor cats that have been killed by a coyote,” Gurrerra said. “And we live in a suburban neighborhood. They’re pretty much everywhere.”

[…]

The Humane Society recommends hazing to attempt to change coyote behavior, such as yelling and waving your arms while approaching coyotes and using noisemakers, projectiles and other repellents to attempt to keep coyotes afraid of humans. TPW also urges people to not feed coyotes, keep pet food and water inside, secure garbage and compost piles, keep fruit trees fenced or pick up fallen fruit and not feed feral cats that coyotes can prey upon.

You can click on the embedded image to go to the Texas Parks and Wildlife page on coyotes. While your odds of encountering one of these critters has increased as the urban landscape has overtaken their original habitat, they’re not likely to be much bother. As a smug urban elitist I would of course prefer to not have to think about wildlife at all, but this is the world we live in now. Learn to cohabitate, our space is going to get more crowded as we go forward.

City donates to Winter Street relief

Good to see.

Nearly two months after dozens of artists saw their work and gallery spaces burnt away, the city of Houston offered a step toward recovery.

Mayor Sylvester Turner on Thursday announced that the city would donate $250,000 toward recovery efforts at the Winter Street Studios, which in December was destroyed, allegedly by an arsonist targeting one of the artists who worked there.

“I am so, so sorry for what happened.” Turner said. “To lose a lifetime’s worth of your artistry, hard work and livelihood is a hard pill to swallow, and the community and I will continue to rally around you as you move forward.”

The money was donated to the Houston Arts Alliance’s disaster recovery fund. While giving the check, Turner challenged other Houstonians to donate to recovery efforts and match the city’s donation.

“When we have faced tragedies in all different walks in our lives, this city has always responded,” Turner said. “These artists are Houstonians, and they are valued members of our city and our community. We want their work to be demonstrated and shown and showcased.”

See here and here for the background. Good for the Mayor and good for the city. I too would encourage you to make a contribution to the Houston Arts Alliance relief fund if you can. Every little bit helps.

The Evergreen Negro Cemetery

Wow.

City and METRO officials have discovered 33 burial sites, including three that appear fully intact, near a historic Black cemetery on Lockwood Drive, which the city apparently missed when it tore through the site to expand the street in the 1940s and ’60s, Mayor Sylvester Turner said Monday.

The remains were discovered in the esplanade that was installed between the lanes during the Lockwood expansion, which split the Evergreen Negro Cemetery in two and caused it to languish until a nonprofit restored it in the 1990s. The Fifth Ward cemetery includes remains of Buffalo Soldiers, the first Black police officer killed in the line of duty, and World War I veterans.

Turner said it was a “concerning and disappointing” discovery. It was one thing, he said, for the city to desecrate the cemetery in the first place by running infrastructure directly through it in the mid-20th century, but it appears Houston officials and contractors also failed to account for all of the bodies that lay there. Now, he said, it is up to the city to right that wrong.

“We owe it to those who were buried here and, quite frankly, to those who have yet to come, to remember these families and give them a final resting place with dignity and respect,” Turner said. “It is unfortunate we are having to address this in 2023.”

[…]

The city initially expanded Lockwood Drive in the 1940s, bisecting the cemetery. In the 1960s, it widened it further to include a median between the lanes at Market Street, Turner said. That work included moving hundreds of bodies and burial sites, and the city promised descendants it would move all of the bodies to the cemetery’s remaining sites.

Workers from the city and the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County found the remains as they prepared for work on the University Line, a new bus rapid transit route that will follow along much of Lockwood. The beginning stages of that work included an archaeological investigation, which led to the discovery.

Thirty of the 33 sites have what officials called “burial remnants” — coffin bottoms and other hardware, tiny fragments of bones — that indicate they were exhumed during the original work in the mid-20th century, said Mindy Bonine, a consultant from AmaTerra Environmental, who was the lead archaeological investigator on the project.

Three had “significant” remains, indicating they had been missed altogether and never exhumed or properly moved. Workers protected and reburied them until they could plan how to move them respectfully, Bonine said.

Turner said officials now will work with Project RESPECT, a nonprofit group that has worked since the 1990s to rehabilitate and maintain the historic cemetery, to do so. Metro Chairman Sanjay Ramabhadran said the transit agency would halt all work in the area, ensure the remains are respectfully moved and reinterred, and place a monument in the esplanade to recognize the significance of the site.

I’m glad that these remains were discovered before more damage could be done to them, and I’m glad they will be handled with care. May they rest in peace. Go read the rest, and read the earlier story about the origins of Project RESPECT. And maybe tell a Republican legislator that this history is worth teaching in our schools.

Houston Landing

Meet the new kid on the local media block.

More than a year ago, researchers studying local news in the Houston metro area learned something critical to the launch of the Houston Landing.

“The community often times feels left out of the news,” said a nonprofit director in east Harris County, who was one of hundreds of residents who participated in the study. “I think there’s a lot of feelings of being forgotten, being left out, and the light not being shined on the community since [Hurricane] Harvey.”

It shouldn’t take a natural disaster to make our communities feel heard, seen and valued.

It just takes a vision that is as big and bold as Houston.

This is why we are announcing today the launch of Houston Landing, an independent nonprofit news organization devoted to public service journalism that will be digital-only and nonpartisan.
introductory column by former Chron reporter Maggie Gordon. (Not surprisingly, a number of their staffers are Chron alums.) They also have an email newsletter that I got subscribed to either by someone else or by them having a starter list of either “media” contacts or Chron/Texas Tribune newsletter-getters. Which is fine, I was happy to hear about their existence directly, just a bit unexpected.

I don’t know what to expect from their coverage yet, but as a non-profit media source they have obvious models to follow, like the Texas Tribune, the San Antonio Report, the Fort Worth Report, and El Paso Matters. I consider the San Antonio Report to be the gold standard among the city-focused publications – if they can replicate that, they will be of great value to me. They have not yet announced an opening day for their stories, so we’ll just have to wait. If this sounds interesting to you, check them out and subscribe to their newsletter as you see fit.

(Shout out to Bob Dunn’s late, lamented Fort Bend Now, the real innovator in this space, and unfortunately about a decade ahead of its time.)

Can you print a house?

We’re gonna find out.

3D printing is taking home construction to new heights. In Houston, a giant printer is building what designers say is the first 3D-printed two-story house in the U.S.

The machine has been pouring a concrete mix from a nozzle, one layer at a time, in hot weather and cold, alongside a sparse on-site workforce, to create a 4,000-square-foot home.

While construction 3D printing has been around for over a decade, the technology has only started to break ground in the U.S. homebuilding market over the last couple of years, said Leslie Lok, the architectural designer for the project. Several 3D-printed homes have already been built or are currently in the works across a handful of states.

Lok, who co-founded the design firm Hannah, says her team aims to eventually scale up their designs to be able to efficiently 3D print multifamily homes.

“This Houston project is a step towards that, being a pretty large single-family house,” she said.

The three-bedroom home is a two-year collaboration between Hannah, Germany-based Peri 3D Construction and Cive, an engineering and construction company in Houston.

Proponents of the technology say 3D printing could address a range of construction challenges, including labor shortages and building more resilient homes in the face of natural disasters.

With the Houston home, the team is pushing the industrial printer to its limits to understand how it can streamline the technology, in the quest to quickly build cost-effective and well-designed homes.

“In the future, it has to be fast, simple design in order to compete with other building technologies,” said Hikmat Zerbe, Cive’s head of structural engineering.

The story doesn’t say where in Houston this is, so for all we know it could be anywhere in the greater Houston area. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know how much of a demand there is for concrete houses. From a design perspective, that seems awfully limited. That doesn’t mean this couldn’t catch on, I’m just not sure how big the market for this might be. But I’m sure the tech will improve, and from there who knows. What do you think?

Have you chipped your pet yet?

The city will begin enforcing its new ordinance requiring dogs and cats to be microchipped.

Houston is offering free microchips for dogs and cats before it begins enforcing a new ordinance that requires pets to have the identification devices.

City Council passed the law last year as part of broader effort to revise animals laws, but the city offered a yearlong grace period to educate residents about the new requirement. That ends Wednesday.

Pets owners in Houston already were required to register pets with the city and prove they have been vaccinated against rabies. The registration requirement historically has had low participation; city officials have estimated just 4 percent of Houston pets are registered.

The registration, microchip and vaccine requirements now form a three-step process to license a dog or cat with the city. Officials said that process helps protect and identify your pet if it is lost. The cost to register generally is $20 for neutered or spayed pets, and $60 for those that are not. It must be renewed every year at the same cost. It is $2 for a senior citizen, and free for service animals.

The city [offered] free microchips from 8 to 10 a.m. Tuesday at its animal shelter on 3300 Carr St. It will offer them during the same hours on Monday, Feb. 6, and Tuesday, Feb. 7. The city usually offers to install the devices for $15.

The microchips will enable animal control officers to return lost pets directly, without bringing them to a shelter first, according to Greg Damianoff, the shelter director for the city’s Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care.

See here for the background. I confess, we haven’t gotten our indoor-only dog chipped, but he does have a city registration tag from last year and a rabies vaccination tag from the vet, so I would think he’d be ID’ed easily enough if he managed to escape. Really, this is a good risk mitigation for you and a good cost savings for the city. Take advantage if you can.

“I bless the drains down in Africa”

Whoever came up with the Adopt A Drain program is a damn genius.

When it comes to naming storm drains, it seems Houstonians have a hard time keeping their minds out of the gutter.

In 2018, the city of Houston launched the Adopt-A-Drain program as a flood-mitigation effort in partnership with Keep Houston Beautiful. The premise was simple: Houston residents adopt a local storm drain through the Adopt-A-Drain website, give the drain a nickname, and commit to cleaning debris such as leaves and trash from the drain four times a year.

But without any clear oversight, what started as a fun, drain-related pun-off in naming the drains has morphed into a grab-bag of explicit jokes and politically-charged messages on a government website.

About 1,900 of the 80,000 storm drains in the Houston area have been adopted as of January, and about 1,750 of those adopted drains have been given nicknames by users. Though the majority of users chose harmless names for their drains – many of the names include puns – in our review of the program’s website, the Houston Chronicle found about 50 drains with explicit references in their names and 50 that had politically-charged messages in their names.

You can read on, and you can visit the Adopt-A-Drain website to see an active map. The guy who named a drain after his CashApp handle and the sex toy shop that adopted 200 drains to help promote their business are cited as some of the more cautionary examples, but the Chron didn’t print any of what they claimed to be the more salacious names, so we’ll just have to use our imaginations. The pun list at the end was funny – the one in the headline is my favorite – but I have to say, if no one took the opportunity to name a storm sewer after Ted Cruz, then what are we even doing here? Feel free to correct that oversight if you are so inclined.

COVID rates tick down again in Houston

Always a good headline to read.

COVID-19 data from the Texas Medical Center this week suggests the current wave may be subsiding, though experts urge caution as a new, highly infectious variant continues to circulate.

The average number of daily hospitalizations in the medical center had been rising steadily for a month, but dropped last week by about 20 percent, from 182 to 146. Regional COVID hospitalizations also have dropped from a five-month high of 1,002 on Jan. 5 to 836 on Monday, according to the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council.

Most significantly, the viral load in the city’s wastewater — the most reliable indicator of future virus spread — dropped by about 34 percent last week, according to data published Tuesday.

“I would be very surprised if we saw this (trend) reverse at this point,” said Dr. James McDeavitt, senior vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine.

Even with a hopeful outlook, researchers cautiously are eyeing the progress of XBB.1.5, which public health officials say is the most transmissible form of COVID yet. It quickly has become the dominant strain nationwide. The variant accounts for 80 percent of cases in the Northeast, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though it has yet to beat out other infectious strains in Houston and much of the South.

Here’s that wastewater dashboard again. We’re still at a very high level compared to the July 2020 baseline, but at least we’re going in the right direction now. Hospitalization rate is the bigger concern, but again as long as we’re now trending downward, the overall picture is improving. There’s an argument to be made that we shouldn’t obsessively track each new alphabet-soup variant, at least not while they’re all about the same level of lethality. The fact that successive versions are more transmissible than their predecessors are just how viruses work. I’m not sophisticated enough to make a judgment about that, but I have limited my worry to the prospect of a deadlier strain.

There are still other things to worry about:

The United States has faced a triple threat of respiratory viruses over the past few months, with COVID-19, the flu and RSV driving infections and hospitalizations in the Houston area and elsewhere.

Each of the three are capable of causing mild to severe illness by themselves. But it’s also possible to contract more than one virus at a time — and a new study suggests a coinfection may lead to more severe illness in young children.

The term “flurona” became popular on social media last year as a surge in COVID-19 and the re-emergence of the flu caused a wave of infections. However, doctors were seeing patients — particularly young children — with coinfections before the pandemic, said Dr. Amy Arrington, medical director of the Special Isolation Unit at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“It’s not uncommon that we see younger kids getting co-infected,” she said. “I think a lot of parents today in Houston can say they feel like their child’s been sick for the past few months straight.”

Younger children might be more susceptible to coinfections because they haven’t been exposed to a respiratory virus before, Arrington said. They may be getting infected at daycare, or from an older sibling who picked up the virus at school.

Coinfections are uncommon, but doctors might be seeing them more frequently this fall and winter for a few reasons, said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases at UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann Hospital.

The collision of COVID-19, the flu and RSV, as well as other respiratory viruses like rhinovirus and enterovirus, has created more opportunity for infection, he said.

“Tripledemic” was the word I heard. Fortunately, RSV and flu rates have been dropping as well. You can still get a flu shot, and for sure you can and should get your bivalent booster. Hell, I’m ready for whatever the next generation COVID booster is now. I’ll be among the first in line when that becomes available. You are your only real defense here, so do what you need to do.

A new Adickes statue is on the way

Been too long since there was some Giant Presidential Head news.

Where to start with all the David Adickes sculptures dotting Houston landscape? Perhaps his 44 gigantic heads paying homage to our U.S. presidents (still no Trump)? His giant cello downtown, a local landmark? His oft-photographed/Instagram fave We Love Houston sign? His 36-foot Beatles statues at 8th Wonder Brewery? Or the apropos Mount Rush Hour located at a notorious Houston bottleneck?

Indeed, the 95-year-old (yes, really) creator of iconic, white artworks (take his 67-foot, cement-and-steel statue of Sam Houston, which serves as a welcome off I-45 to his hometown of Huntsville) has become Houston’s resident artist of giant works. Apropos, his latest pays tribute to a worldwide giant.

Adickes will soon install a giant, 5-ton bust of the late President John F. Kennedy, the nation’s 35th president, on JFK Boulevard. Aside from a fitting nod and locale for the global figure who spent his final full day of life in Houston, the statue will also serve as a “welcome mat” to those visiting Houston and nearby George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the artist notes.

The JFK bust, which is hollow on the inside, is composed of two pieces; the head and shoulders are separate and will be welded together and then covered in plaster, according to Carlos Silva, chairman of the East Aldine Management District and its East Aldine Arts Coalition.

Heralding the famed speech given in1962 at Rice University, the statue memorializes the great declaration JFK made to a crowd of 30,000 at Rice Stadium — and to the world — marking his goals for the U.S. space program’s mission to land a man on the moon:

We choose to go to the moon, in this decade, and do other things — not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Silva hopes to see the statue lit at night as a beacon for all who drive by and fly over. An opening ceremony is in the works, upon completion of the statue.

There will soon be a ceremony to celebrate the official installation of the statue, which Silva said he hopes to see lighted at night for people who drive by.

As you know, I’m a longtime fan of Adickes’ work. I just had a trip to IAH but the new statue wasn’t in place yet. I can’t wait to see it. The Chron has more.

More on the Winter Street Studios fire

The Chron profiles two artists that were affected by the recent fire at the Winter Street Studios.

At Winter Street Studios, red caution tape draped an X pattern over an entrance to the building, a workspace for Houston area artists. The door is gone and black stains from a fire around the outer entrance are a stark contrast on the exterior of the large white structure.

Further into the building, chunks of the pillars are blown off, revealing brick and concrete. In one hallway, clean white squares where paintings used to hang stand out against the charcoal of the wall. In the area where Montgomery County based artists Toria Hill and Rebekah Molander have their studios, hallways that were once white and adorned with vibrant artwork are now soot stained.

The scene is a heartbreaking one for them both, especially since a person who was tied to the arts community was deemed responsible for the fire. It is testing Molander’s sense of security.

“It’s a safe place. What would be safer than an artists’ community?” the 38-year-old Woodlands artist said. “Who targets a group of artists and who destroys art? Of all things, art and music bring people together. Now that feeling of safety has been damaged.”

Molander had 18 pieces on display at the gallery in Sawyer Yards when authorities said it was set on fire on Dec. 20. The arsonist targeted the first-floor worksite of Bohemian Photography, then died by suicide days later, according to the Houston Fire Marshal’s Office. Bohemian owner Jack Potts and the man who set the fire were friends and reportedly had a disagreement over $1,000 in equipment.

[…]

The fire destroyed hundreds of pieces of art at the gallery, where about 110 artists rent space among the 77 studios to create and store their work. Some of the artwork may be salvageable, Hill and Molander said. All the artists are sharing notes on how to recover their work.

Hill will soon turn to an art restoration group, hoping her work can be salvaged. She suspects, however, that nothing is resellable. She had what is called “show insurance” that covers six pieces. But that only covers the supplies, like paint and brushes.

“They all smell like they’ve been sitting in someone’s chimney,” Hill said. “We’re learning it’s hard to get the smell of smoke out of your canvas without ruining the work.”

She’ll be focusing on creating more work before big shows like the Bayou City Art Festival in March and The Woodlands Waterway Arts Festival in April.

Molander, part of an artist collective called The Seekers who work out of the Taft McWhorter Art Gallery, couldn’t get in the building until the week following Christmas. She and her husband donned masks because the smoke smell was so thick. They took the 18 pieces that were on display, wrapping them with commercial grade plastic.

Once home, they’ve been airing the pieces out in intervals.

“One issue is that some soot, especially from the back of the canvas, could seep in and further damage the paintings in the next six months,” Molander said.

She also purchased a tool called a soot eraser — a dry chemical sponge — to clean the canvas.

“When you swipe down, the sponge comes out black. It’s incredible the way it works,” Molander said. “Right now everyone is trying to be as positive as they can. This isn’t anything I’ve ever dealt with but it’s giving me a lot of hope.”

The Houston Arts Alliance has activated its emergency relief fund, first created in 2020 to support artists during the COVID-19 pandemic, to help those whose studios were damaged. Donors can contribute to the fund at the alliance’s website https://ready.haatx.com/.

See here for the background, and please do consider making a donation to the support fund. I went looking for more stories to see what news there has been in the intervening weeks, and I found this from about ten days after the fire. There’s a lot of background about the studio and its history and purpose, but what really caught my eye was towards the end, about its immediate future.

The arson victim was a behemoth of a building: the 75,000 square-foot space at 2101 Winter Street, a historic brick-and-concrete structure dating from 1928, originally built by E.A. Hudson for the Houston Transfer Company. The rambling two-story fortress later become Harris Moving & Storage, before being turned into studios for rent for professional artists by developer Jon Deal in 2005. Deal took a chance on rehabbing the rambling elephant of a building, betting artist-generated income could be financially successful.

The developer also had to convince the permitting department, which granted the building the first permit ever under the groundbreaking Artist Studio Ordinance in the City of Houston.

Flash forward 17 years, and Winter Street had become the bedrock of what would morph into one of the largest communities of working artists in the country. The thriving Sawyer Yards complex, that has also birthed under Deal and other partners, a plethora of pendant properties for artists, other creatives, stores and restaurants, led by Spring Street Studios, Silver Street Studios (home to the international biennial of photography FotoFest) and The Silos at Sawyer Yards. Winter Street Studios has also been the headquarters, thanks to generous owners, of countless fundraisers, mostly notably the art auction benefiting affordable housing and artists, the iconic Art on the Avenue presented by Avenue CDC.

[…]

What Deal once did to rehab the raw, cavernous space of Winter Street — later replicating that model throughout Sawyer Yards — makes many confident that he can and will do it again.

We reached out to Deal the Friday before Christmas. Within hours he emailed back details to PaperCity of his new plans that provide uplifting news to not only the Winter Street Studios artists, but also members of the Houston art family at large.

“Definitely arson,” Deal tells PaperCity of the cause of the devastating fire. “I reviewed some of the video with the arson investigators and it was a targeted theft and firebombing of a specific studio. With our building and campus cameras we were able to follow the thief/arsonist’s steps from the time he entered campus to the entry into Winter Street Studios then directly to the studio door without hesitation at any turn.

“Clearly he had been in the studio before (photographer Jack Potts’ studio). On the video you can see him leaving the studio at a rapid pace and then seconds later the explosion.”

“The eastern 1/3 of the building, Section C, looks like a war zone on the first level,” Deal details of the damage. “The remainder of the building (Sections A & B) suffered severe smoke damage, which left a thick soot. The second level of Section C shows signs of structural damage due to the heat of the fire.”

Now that a plan is in place. Deal has a timeline in mind.

“Our plan is to have Sections A & B (2/3 of the building) cleaned and ready for the artists to move back in in February,” he tells PaperCity. “Section C will require some structural repairs and complete rebuild of about one half the studios in that section of the building. We are estimating that it will be six months before we are able to get those studios ready for the artists to move back in.”

As to who will rebuild Winter Street, Deal dispatched his own crews immediately.

“The fire occurred at 5:20 am Tuesday, December 20,” Deal details.” We had crews on site at 7 am on Wednesday, December 21, and have already made it possible for artists to enter their studios in Sections A & B. Many already have. We made the decision to remediate in-house (Dealco) as we felt like we were able to mobilize quicker with more manpower and equipment than the remediation company could.”

Another silver lining is the nearby presence of warehouses under the Sawyer Yards umbrella.

“Silver Street opened up warehouse space that had recently been vacated and is allowing the Winter Street artists to store their artwork there until we can get them back in the building,” Deal shares. “We are prepared to open two of our warehouses a little further away if needed.”

And wall space will be provided, Deal notes.

“Alexander Squire, Sawyer Yards creative director, will be coordinating with management and other building artists to help the Winter Street artists to display what artwork they have left during the second Saturday event in January and in February if necessary,” Deal tells PaperCity.

You can click over to see some pictures. I’m very glad to hear there’s a plan in place to rehab and recover, and I look forward to the grand re-opening. The Leader News has more.

A walk through four districts, part 3: Try this at home!

In Part One I described my weird idea to take a stroll into four Congressional districts, something I decided I could do after taking a close look at the new map in Houston. In Part 2, I took you on that walk with me. Now I’m going to show how this could be done elsewhere and with different types of districts.

We do redistricting every ten years, so you might wonder why I picked Congressional districts as the object of this little obsession. Congressional redistricting had national implications, of course. As this recent DMN story points out, Texas Republicans squeezed out four more districts than the overall electoral numbers suggest they were entitled to, giving them nearly all of the seats needed to achieve a majority in the House. I wasn’t thinking of that a year ago, of course, but I definitely spent more time thinking about the Congressional map than about the others. It was that new Congressional map that I had zoomed in on, to see what things looked like in my immediate area, that gave me the inspiration.

But what about those other maps? How about in the State House, where the districts are smaller and there are 24 of them in Harris County? (There ought to be 25, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing.) In the previous map, my neighborhood was sliced in half for no particular reason, which meant that I’d travel between HDs 145 and 148 every day walking my dog. Our neighborhood has been reunited under the new map, so I would need to travel a little farther to cross State House boundaries. That made me think, which State House districts did I pass through as I did Wednesday’s walk? Let’s take a look!

I started in HD145, entered HD147 when I turned south on Heights after walking along the boundary once I passed Studewood, and then reached the boundary with HD134 at Washington. I was fully in HD134 once I was west of Shepherd.

But look closer! With a slight modification, I could have started in HD142, on Jensen south of Lorraine, walked north to Quitman, then followed the same route to eventually get to HD134, with a terminus at the HEB just south of Washington. I didn’t fool around with Google Maps for this, but that looks like a roughly equivalent distance. I’m not surprised that this was doable in such close proximity, but I would not have guessed that these would be the four districts involved. This is why it’s fun to play with maps, kids.

That wasn’t where I had picked for what may be the shortest walk needed to be in four State House districts. Take a look at this:

Just start on Yorktown and walk till you’re past Fayette. Google Maps shows this as 1.6 miles because it won’t let you cross San Felipe or Westheimer at Yorktown – it insists on making you hike all the way to Sage, then doubling back on Westheimer to return to Yorktown – so as the crow flies it’s probably not much more than a mile. Someone who knows that area better than I do will have to tell me why you can’t just walk all the way down Yorktown. Be that as it may, even with the detours, it’s a pretty short walk.

By the way, why is that tiny rectangle south of Westheimer and east of Chimney Rock in HD137 and not HD134? I have no idea. Either it’s a super-optimization of whatever evil redistricting software the Republicans used, or someone asked for that specific change for some reason. I’ll throw the question out to you if you think you know the answer.

There are a couple of other possibilities in Harris County. Zooming out a bit, south of I-10 and east of US59 you could get from HD142 to HD147 via HDs 142 and 145, and north of 610 you could get from HD141 to HD145 via HDs 140 and 142, though you’d have to cross US59 to do it, which might be dicey on foot.

Looking elsewhere in the state, I see possibilities in San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, where I even see a possible five-district walk:

Start in that weird southern finger of HD108 and head south-ish to wind up in HD104, passing through HDs 114, 100, and 103 along the way. You have to cross the junction of I-30 and I-35, which sounds like a nightmare, but maybe it’s doable. Point is, these districts are all right up against each other.

You might think that State Senate districts would be too large for this, as there are eight fewer of them than there are Congressional districts. Challenge accepted:

Start on Piney Point Road near San Felipe and head south as it becomes Fondren, and go a few blocks south of Richmond, to have visited SDs 07, 17, 15, and 13. There may be other possibilities elsewhere, but I was happy enough with that to quit looking.

Going back to Congress for a minute, I see opportunities again in San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas as before. That DMN story highlights a couple of places where the distance between one district and another, with a third in between, is ridiculously thin, like less than a quarter mile in the Dallas case. But just to finish this post, let me show you what my original walk route looked like under the old map:

Starting a bit farther east on Quitman in CD29, I could have headed on Quitman to White Oak to either Studewood or Yale, then gone south to Allen Parkway and east to Shepherd to visit CDs 18, 02, and 07 along the way. That might even have been a slightly shorter walk. Just a reminder that this was a thing before I ever decided to try it out, and will likely continue to be a thing ten years from now when we do this all again. Now go play with those maps and plan your own walk.

PS: I should have noted sooner that John Nova Lomax did a great series of articles some years ago when he wrote for the Houston Press in which he walked the entire length of a well-known Houston thoroughfare – Richmond and Shepherd are the two I remember from the series – and wrote about the experience. Some of the walks he took were in excess of ten miles and took him all day; he had planned meal and bathroom stops along the way, out of necessity. I don’t have that on my itinerary any time soon, but I was thinking about it as I did this walk.

A walk through four districts, part 2: Now with pictures

In yesterday’s post I described my weird idea to take a stroll into four Congressional districts, something I decided I could do after taking a close look at the new map in Houston. On Wednesday, a bit more than a year after I first conceived of this silly idea, I finally did it. Here’s a little photo essay of my journey.

I started out as noted at the Leonel Castillo Community Center, on Quitman at South, just east of I-45.

CD29_LeonelCastilloCenter

This was in CD29, but I wasn’t going to be there for long. I intentionally started at a point near the boundary with CD18 – this walk was going to be long enough, I didn’t need to make it any longer. As I walked over the Quitman bridge, at some point I passed from CD29 into CD18. Where exactly that line is I have no idea – I have joked before about the crazy way that CD35 is drawn between Austin and San Antonio, and that you can cross into other Congressional districts by changing lanes on I-35 – but it’s there somewhere. We’ll discuss this a bit more later, as it’s a bit more relevant when there are houses and businesses there along the border. Here it’s just traffic.

CD29_OverI45

West of I-45 on Quitman and I am unquestionably in CD18. The White Oak hike and bike trail beckoned me to the south.

CD18_QuitmanNorth

As I passed Houston Avenue and Quitman became White Oak, I had a choice to make. As you saw on my Google map, my walking path was along White Oak. But the sidewalk isn’t consistent, there’s a lot of cars whooshing past, and the hike and bike trail will get me where I want to go as well. What would you choose?

CD18_PathNotTaken

The choice was easy for me, though I should note that the path to the left that led down to the trail wasn’t paved all the way and I had to step carefully to avoid getting all muddy. But it was worth it.

CD18_BikePathAndHeron

I didn’t even notice that heron as I was taking the picture. I only saw him later as I was putting this all together. Going this way gave me another excuse to walk across the new trail extension. The view of downtown from where the extension meets the MKT trail, especially on a gorgeous morning like Wednesday was, just can’t be beat.

CD18_MKTTrail

Don’t ever let anyone trash Houston’s aesthetics. The MKT trail put me back on White Oak the street, and soon enough I reached Heights Boulevard, which is where CD18 ends and CD07 begins. But unlike the CD29/CD18 boundary along I-45, the exact location of that invisible line matters. As in, my belief was that the east side of Heights was still in CD18 while the west side was in CD07. I know these things have to exist somewhere but that will always be weird to me.

CD07_YaleStreet

Yale Street, to my immediate right and visible as I crossed over the bayou again just south of I-10, is fully inside CD07. I started on the CD18 side of Heights but crossed to the CD07 side a bit before I reached I-10. When I reached Washington Avenue, I was at the southern border of CD18 and was going to be fully in CD07 for most of the rest of the trip.

CD07_HeightsWashington

I have to say, the sidewalks along this stretch of Washington Avenue were atrocious, especially after having been on the hike and bike trails as well as on Heights. Broken and occasionally missing, with utility poles right in the middle of a much narrower space – I could have only done this as a fully able-bodied person. I may do a separate post on that, but go see it for yourself if you can. One corollary to this is that I could have both shortened my walk and dodged fewer obstacles if I had taken a slightly different path. West of Shepherd, CD38 was only a few blocks to the south. I could have turned down Sandman, for example, and been in CD38 just before Shepherd and Durham merge together at Feagan.

CD07_SandmanShortcutToCD38

But I stayed the course, and soon enough I had reached the traffic circle at Westcott.

CD38_WashingtonTrafficCircle

That was the view from the west side of the circle, on what I believe was Arnot, though I didn’t see a street sign. It’s in CD38, whatever it was. Again, the boundary was likely somewhere in the middle of the road, in this case Westcott. Maybe if state law required that the state pay to create and install signs at every district border, we’d get slightly less goofy districts. Be that as it may, this is the end.

I’ll have a brief wrapup and a suggestion for further pedestrian research if you’re interested. Let me know what you thought of this little tour.

New year, new omicron variant

Stay safe out there.

A new omicron COVID-19 variant is spreading fast across the United States and beginning to make inroads in Houston, where the positivity rate continues to rise.

The new strain, XBB.1.5, was first detected on the east coast in late October and gained traction in December. Over the last four weeks, it has quickly edged out the previously dominant strains to make up 40 percent of cases nationally. It appears to be more transmissible than its predecessors, based on early lab results, with properties that help it evade vaccine immunity, said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases with UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann Hospital.

Ostrosky and other experts say the new strain is likely contributing to the rise in cases throughout Houston, where the percentage of positive tests jumped from 8.1 percent to 11.1 percent last week, according to the most recent data from the Texas Medical Center. The average number of weekly COVID hospitalizations also saw a sharp uptick last week, from 529 to 663, including intensive care unit admissions.

The numbers are still a far cry from the original omicron wave one year ago, but infectious disease experts worry how waning immune protection will factor into the surge.

“We are at a moment in the pandemic where a lot of people got sick over the summer and immunity is going down from natural infection,” Ostrosky said. “Vaccine rates are not great and boosting rates are abysmal in this country … It does appear we’re converging into this immunity cliff.”

Only 15 percent of Americans over 5 years old have received the updated booster shot, first authorized for adults in August. About 30 percent of the country’s population has yet to complete the primary series, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the updated booster shot may not prevent infections from the newest variant, public health experts still say it’s the best way to prevent severe disease from COVID.

Same song, next verse. The good news for now, as Your Local Epidemiologist notes, is that this latest version of omicron, like all of its predecessors, isn’t any more virulent or deadly than before. Thus, hospitalization rates remain fairly stable, though they are currently going up. Flu and RSV infections are also declining, which helps. None of this matters if you or a loved one are getting sick. Get that bivalent booster and take the usual precautions. We will get through this.

The bats survived another freeze

A bit of good news.

On the fourth day of Christmas, Houston got 600 bats back.

As the sun set on Waugh Bridge over Buffalo Bayou Wednesday, the Houston Humane Society released hundreds of Mexican free-tailed bats that had been in the group’s care after last week’s freeze.

The bats were struck down — literally — by the sub-freezing temperatures that gripped Houston, according to the humane society. The hypothermic bats were recovered from under the bridge by volunteers. They’ve spent recent days warming up at the humane society’s TWRC Wildlife Center, and even in the attic of humane society wildlife director Mary Warwick.

After a couple of days of being fed and waiting for the city to thaw, it came time for the humane society to release the bats back into the wild. The society advertised the release on social media, and hundreds of people showed up at Waugh Bridge to watch the animals fly free.

Warwick stood with a kennel full of bats on top of a scissors lift, letting the animals go by the handful. The small brown bats flitted underneath the bridge, before joining the thousands of other bats still roosting in the underside of the roadway.

Warwick said the release was the first of its kind for the humane society. Usually the animals are released more quietly, as would be done later in the night, when a separate group of bats was planned to be released in Pearland.

“I think it was a whopping success,” Warwick said. “I’m really happy with how it turned out and glad we were able to save as many as we could.”

About 1,500 bats were planned to be released on Wednesday. Only about 100 died after being picked up during the freeze, Warwick said.

Nearly 1,000 bats were also rescued from underneath a bridge in Pearland.

If recent history is an indicator, it’s only a matter of time before some of the bats are struck down by a storm or cold again.

The pre-Christmas freeze wasn’t the first time the Waugh Bridge bats had been brought to the shelter because of Texas weather. Hundreds of bats were recovered and rehabilitated after the 2021 freeze. The bridge was inundated by floodwaters during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, leading people to scoop up bats and bring them home to dry out. The humane society is in the midst of a fundraiser to build a new headquarters, which officials hope will include a room dedicated to bat recovery.

Warwick asked people to support that effort, and thanked everyone who went out of their way to help during the recent crisis.

As noted in the story, the 2021 freeze was really hard on the bats, and that’s after their numbers were devastated by Harvey in 2017. At least we learned from the 2021 experience and were able to be more proactive this time. That’s great work on the part of the Houston Humane Society, which deserves a bunch of kudos for their efforts. You can see pictures and learn more about this recent bat rescue here, and if you want to donate to their efforts for the future, here’s the link for that.

It’s time to recycle your Christmas tree

If you’re in the city of Houston and you want your tree to get mulched, here’s how to do it.

Houston’s Solid Waste Management Department (SWMD) encourages residents to recycle live Christmas trees after the holidays. The holiday season is filled with the purchase of live Christmas trees by families which can be repurposed for mulch or other landscape materials.

On Tuesday, December 27, 2022, SWMD will open 24 residential Christmas tree drop-off recycling locations throughout Houston through Tuesday, January 31, 2023. Please find the locations listed below.

To recycle a live Christmas tree, residents must remove all lights, wire, tinsel, ornaments, nails, stands, and other non-organic decorative materials. Trees that are flocked, artificial, or painted will NOT be recycled. Your scheduled junk waste collection day can be used to dispose of any artificial trees.

Additionally, recycling is also available for live Christmas trees through the city’s yard waste curbside collection program.

Recycling trees will result in rich mulch that will be available in bags or bulk directly from Living Earth and other local area retailers.

Save the Date: Friday, January 6, 2023, and join Mayor Sylvester Turner, Council Members, SWMD, along with representatives from Reliant Energy, Living Earth, and the Houston Parks & Recreation Department for the 32nd Annual Christmas Tree Mulching event, at City Hall Reflection Pool, 11:30 a.m.

Locations and times are listed at the link. There’s almost certainly one not far from you. The regular neighborhood depositories and the Westpark consumer recycling center are included. Don’t throw your tree out, take it in to be mulched instead.

The Winter Street Studios fire

This is so awful.

A fire that broke out Tuesday morning at Winter Street Studios has damaged countless works of art and left many Houston artists without workspaces or gallery space. The fire, which began around 6:30 a.m., is being investigated as arson, according to the Houston Fire Department and numerous accounts from artists who work at the building.

The fire started on the first floor, in the studio for Bohemian Photography, a commercial photography business owned by Jack Potts. A GoFundMe for Potts states that someone broke into the studio, stole thousands of dollars worth of camera and production equipment, then set the fire. Per another artist at the studio, Potts is in the middle of switching insurance policies and is currently uninsured.

The Houston Arts Alliance has activated its Emergency Relief Fund, first created in 2020 to support artists during the COVID-19 pandemic, to help those whose studios were damaged. Donors can contribute to the fund at HAA’s websiteFreshArts has also created a list of resources, including emergency grants, for those affected.

The 100-year-old building, which was once a furniture factory, was converted to artist studios in 2005. There are 77 studios in the building, many of them shared between two or more artists.

On Instagram, the hashtag #winterstreetstudios was filled with photos and posts from artists detailing the damage to their workspaces. That includes water damage from the sprinklers and hoses, ash, smoke damage, and structural issues with the building that may require it to be demolished.

[…]

Renters at the studios were supposed to carry liability insurance, [painter Erika] Alonso said, and many of them did not have coverage beyond that. Aside from the countless, irreplaceable works of art that have been damaged or destroyed—some of which had already been sold but not yet delivered to their new owners—artists have also lost computers, materials, tools, paperwork, and other essential business items.

“There’s all these little personal investments artists make over the years,” she said. “But all the artists are helping each other, which is a beautiful thing.” Alonso said she had additional insurance, and hopes it can help recoup the cost of replacing her supplies and cleaning up her studio.

Just terrible. Winter Street Studios is a great place, a vibrant part of the community in an area where it’s often too expensive for creative types to hang their shingles. They have had regular Saturday art markets that are always fun to visit, and our elementary school used their space in the past for fundraisers. I’d really hate for this to be the end for them. The link in the story for HAA’s website is where you can make a donation to help these folks out if you’re so inclined. Thanks very much. CultureMap, ABC13, KHOU, and the Chron have more.

Grassroots pollution monitoring

Great story about a problem that deserves mush more attention from the state.

One by one, the residents filtered into the small community center and found seats in the rows of plastic chairs. Some were teenagers wearing yellow-and-black Galena Park High School letter jackets. Others were parents and grandparents juggling children. Many wore white headphones to hear the Spanish translator standing nearby. Everyone looked worried.

They had gathered on that chilly November night to learn what two new, high-tech monitors had found in the air in Galena Park and Jacinto City, neighboring towns in eastern Harris County, the epicenter of North America’s petrochemical industry. They were prepared for grim news.

“Everyone here knows pollution is a big problem,” said Maricela Serna, a former Galena Park commissioner who has one of the monitors on the roof of her tax preparation office. “But we want to know just how bad things really are. We deserve to know. And those in power, especially at the state level, need to know.”

Serna, 66, has lived in Galena Park since 1988 and the stench of chemicals is part of her everyday life. The odor inside her home was so bad one day that a visitor from outside the community thought there was a gas leak and called the fire department. Still, Serna held out hope that the news that night might be positive — that maybe, just maybe, the pollution wasn’t as bad as the odors let on.

But the data from the monitors confirmed her worst fears.

Nitrogen oxides, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has linked to asthma in children and lower birth weight in newborns, were consistently above the agency’s one-hour limit. Ozone, which can aggravate lung diseases including asthma and emphysema, was well above the EPA’s eight-hour limit. Particulate matter, which increases the risk for strokes and heart disease by settling deep into lungs and seeping into bloodstreams, hovered above the EPA’s annual limit.

The readings from Serna’s office, located a block from a thoroughfare lined with petrochemical plants, were especially high. Monthly levels of nitrogen oxides, for example, averaged 170 parts per billion from June through August — nearly double what the EPA says is safe for just one hour.

The data was presented by Juan Flores, a lifelong Galena Park resident and clean-air advocate. He oversees community air monitoring programs for Air Alliance Houston, the nonprofit he works for, and Environmental Community Advocates of Galena Park, a smaller group he helped create and where he is vice president. Over the past few years, the two groups have built a network of air monitors that gives residents basic information about the dangers they are living with.

Regulators and scientists are often skeptical of community-gathered data, because it’s usually less sophisticated than the data state and federal agencies collect. But the community data is still important, because it can be used to rally residents and prod elected officials to acknowledge a neighborhood’s plight. It can also complement the ongoing work of researchers by providing hyperlocal information about wind patterns and chemical readings of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, a diverse group of chemicals that includes some carcinogens.

“This lower-level monitoring … warrants further investigation, but it supports what we’re seeing at the city level,” said Loren Hopkins, the chief environmental science officer for the Houston Health Department. “There’s a huge educational component, too. Instead of just using traditional advocacy, they’re actually using science to support their claims.”

It’s great and necessary work being done by these residents, but they shouldn’t have to. This is what the TCEQ is for, except that it’s been neutered and corrupted to the point of uselessness. And unfortunately, that’s not going to change any time soon. In the meantime, folks like these will have to keep telling and documenting their story, so at least we can know what’s happening to them. Go read the rest.

We don’t love trash

Especially not in the bayous.

Courtesy of Buffalo Bayou Partnership

On a recent Saturday morning, around 20 volunteers gathered to clean up trash along the Houston Ship Channel. Armed with pickers and trash bags, they started tackling a small “trash beach” across the channel from a refinery. The sand was barely visible below the piles of discarded items covering the beach: tires, a child’s Croc, tennis balls, a plastic toy kitchen.

“We’re just surrounded by plastic bottles,” said Amy Dinn, an environmental lawyer and one of the volunteers. Beneath the larger items, pieces of styrofoam coated the ground, giving it the appearance of snow from a distance.

“We’ve seen way worse,” Dinn said.

The amount of trash that ends up in Houston’s waterways is substantial. In 2021 alone, Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP), one of the main organizations that cleans up trash in and along the bayous, removed nearly 2,000 cubic yards of trash – enough to fill more than 160 commercial dump trucks.

Besides being ugly to look at, trash can worsen water quality and harm plants and wildlife. It can also harbor bacteria, spread disease, and create blockages that worsen flooding.

[…]

[Buffalo Bayou Partnership field manager Robby] Robinson said one solution he’d like to see statewide is a bottle deposit where consumers receive money for returning plastic containers.

“If you give them value, you don’t find them on your shores anymore, they end up back into the system getting recycled,” he said.

Studies have shown places with bottle deposits have less litter and higher recycling rates, including reports by Australian researchers and the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful.

Oregon was the first state to implement such a system, and its program is considered to be the most successful. In 2019, the state reached a 90% return rate, meaning 90% of all items covered by its deposit program were returned for recycling.

Bottle bills have been introduced several times in Texas, but have never passed. A report prepared by an independent consultant for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in 2021, recommends further investigating a bottle bill for the state.

Beyond legislative action, Robinson said it’s also important to make people aware of the problem, which is where volunteer groups come in.

“Most people never get to see how horrific this problem is,” Robinson said.

You can click over to see more pictures if you want to get an idea of that. I like the idea of a bottle deposit, especially given its track record, but that’s still one small piece of the puzzle. We as a society need to do a better job of, you know, not littering. The solutions for that are a lot more complicated.