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    Real Estate Round-up

    Sites for sore eyes: The value of a Waterwall and prison to paradise

    Ralph Bivins
    Feb 8, 2010 | 6:00 am
    • The newly named Gerald D. Hines Waterwall Park is a magnet, of sorts, fordevelopers who want to develop high-rise properties.
    • Having a tall tower next door to the Waterwall park guarantees a great viewbelow of the Galleria area’s best green space.
    • An aerial photography of Telfair in Sugar Land, a master planned community byNewland Communities.
    • The bridge that leads into Telfair

    Millions of Houstonians as well as international tourists affirm the Waterwall is a cool place to visit. It’s also a magnet, of sorts, for developers who want to develop high-rise properties. After all, having a tall tower next door to the Waterwall park guarantees a great view below of the Galleria area’s best green space.

    One new project adjacent to the Waterwall has just been proposed by Skanska USA, a subsidiary of a large Swedish construction firm. Skanska hopes to build a 14-story, 300,000-square-foot office tower near the corner of the West Loop and Hidalgo. Skanska’s desired site is a 2.3-acre parcel that was formerly the location of Tony’s Ballroom. The developer has contracted to buy the land from Hines Real Estate Investment Trust.

    Skanska has been telling people that it will finance construction of this new building with cash. No bank loan needed, thank you. That’s good, because it would be pretty hard for any developer to get a loan to build an office project in today’s credit crunch. To get this built, Skanska will have to write a check for more than $50 million.

    Developers have also been lusting over the land just west of the Waterwall. It’s three acres at the northeast corner of Hidalgo and McCue. The site would have been the location of Turnberry Tower, a high-rise residential tower. Turnberry was going to be a super-luxury tower with most units valued at $1 million and up, says land broker Stan Creech, who is marketing the land.

    “It probably would have been the nicest residential project ever built in Houston,” Creech says. Pre-sales for the Turnberry were good, Creech says, but the sour economy killed the deal and the developers have put the land up for sale.

    Nevertheless, Turnberry residents would have enjoyed a great Waterwall view, if it had been built. The Turnberry site is a nice parcel, but selling land in today’s economy is no piece of cake. So the pristine parcel sits there vacant – and very available.

    By the way, since the Waterwall opened in 1985, most folks assumed that it was a city park. People played Frisbee there, relaxed on lawn blankets and even got married there. (Former Houston Oilers quarterback Dan Pastorini was married at a Waterwall ceremony in 1987.) But all along, the Waterwall and the adjacent grassy lawn was actually owned by the Hines company – until just recently.

    About a year ago, Hines sold the property to the city at below market price and the venue was renamed the Gerald D. Hines Waterwall Park.
     
     Telfair: From Prison to Paradise

    In a scant six years, Telfair has gone from being 2,000 acres of excess prison land owned by the Texas Department of Corrections to somewhat of a success story. And success stories are hard to find in today’s home building market.

    The Telfair master planned community in Sugar Land reported a 10 percent gain in new home sales in 2009, with 449 houses sold in 2009, up from 408 in 2008. It was the strongest year for new-home sales in Telfair since the community opened in 2006.

    Telfair, according to developer Newland Communities, was modeled after Savannah, Ga., which is known for having homes lining an abundance of small square parks and plazas, and uniform grid street patterns. Savannah, with its walkable neighborhoods, is one of model cities held in high esteem by the many architects and New Urbanist planners today.

    Telfair’s nod to history is incorporated into its new Telfair Central Hall building which will draw architectural inspiration from the old prison dormitory there. For the residents of Telfair, located near the intersection of Highway 90 and Texas 6, the design of Central Hall will be a cut above the typical community center.

    Where did they come up with the name “Telfair”? The community was named for Telfair Square, a park in Savannah. Interesting coincidence: in Helena, Ga., there is a penitentiary named Telfair State Prison.
     
     Fort Bend Keeps Growing

    Poor? Destitute? Down on your luck? No problem. Just hop in your car and drive out the Southwest Freeway where economic Nirvana awaits.

    Boosters of Fort Bend County are touting the fact that their community was ranked No. 1 in the “Best Places to Get Ahead” -- a national study by Forbes. Forbes looked at job growth and income growth and put Fort Bend at the top of the national heap. Our southwest suburban friends in Fort Bend had a 10 percent gain in income between 2007 and 2008, Forbes reports.

    Not missing a beat, the Fort Bend Economic Development Council followed up the Forbes article immediately by firing out a press release headlined: “Fort Bend County, Texas, Provides a Premier Place to Relocate, Open a Business.”

    Fort Bend is working overtime to keep the growth churning. They are spending hundreds of thousands on advertising and publicity campaigns to get businesses to move there. This includes television, radio and print ads in down markets like California. It may be working. Forbes reports Fort Bend County has added about 6,000 new jobs since mid-year 2007. That’s not a lot of new jobs and 2009 was not a barnburner, but at least it’s better than the job losses reported in most parts of the nation lately.

     Ralph Bivins, former president of the National Association of Real Estate Editors, is editor-in-chief of RealtyNewsReport.com.
     

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    news/real-estate

    your friends and neighbors

    Pioneering East End development brings cohousing to Houston

    Jef Rouner
    Jul 7, 2025 | 12:15 pm
    Digital image of a a finished cohousing development with people in the foreground.
    Render provided by CoHousing Houston
    A digital rendering of the finished CoHousing Houston.

    Houston's East End neighborhood will soon welcome a bold new experiment in housing in the next couple of months, one dedicated to communal space and curing the epidemic of isolation plaguing modern America.

    Called CoHousing Houston, the development occupies a property at 114 Delmar St. that consists of 33, individually-owned units built around a central courtyard. This layout isn't much different from a modern apartment complex, but there are architectural deviations and governing principles that gently nudge the residents toward in-person interactions.

    One is the common house, a massive gathering space, kitchen area, and work station that serves as a community center and event hall. While the individual units do have their own kitchens and bedrooms, they are short on extra rooms. This encourages people to move their hobbies and activities to the common house or to the shared outdoor porches and balconies when the weather is nice.

    The idea of communal housing is as old as humanity itself and is practiced by groups as different as hippy communes and the U.S. Army. However, few Americans live in communal housing after they reach adulthood, preferring privacy and a large space to call their own. CoHousing Houston is aiming to be the best of both worlds.

    One resident is Kelli Soika, a married mother of three who lived in a similar cohousing unit in Colorado before moving to Houston in 2018. She found the cohousing model incredibly liberating, and worked to create the first one in the Bayou City.

    "You have this great place to solve problems you didn’t even know you know you had," she tells CultureMap. "I would have to go to the grocery store with the three kids, and it was hard. Now, I can ask a neighbor to watch the girls for an hour. I hear it’s like living in a small town in the past, though I'm not old enough to remember that. It's the kind of place where if you leave the door open, someone will check to make sure you're okay. In a regular house, you could fall down and it might be days before someone found you."

    Soika emphasized the power of community connection. Surrounded by multi-generational households that are funneled into the communal spaces by design, she can draw on the innovation of young couples or the wisdom of the elderly. With one kid starting college, it's nice for her to be able to talk to someone close by who has gone through the same thing. Her husband can drop into an evening bike riding group whenever he wants without having to arrange various schedules. In her opinion, little neighborly touches like that are worth the slight loss of privacy or space that are inherent to cohousing.

    "If the power is out and you don't know what’s going on at CenterPoint, you've got a group going through it with you," she says. "These things keep happening, and when I moved into cohousing, it's just not a crisis because you've got other people to help you and be with you in it."

    Isolation and loneliness is a major problem in America, studies suggest. Increased workloads and the explosion of social media have led to a sharp decline in time spent in "third places," locations that are not home or work. According to some estimates, people stopped going to third places as much as 37 percent between 2014 and 2017, and that was before COVID sent people into deeper isolation. In Houston, soaring temperatures and poor public transit keep some people out of parks and other outdoor activities even as the city invests heavily in park improvement. Some activities such as pickleball and live-action gaming centers have picked up the slack, but these still involve planning that many tired workers simply don't have the energy for.

    In that world, cohousing seems like a viable alternative to increase social engagement, though it may be too big a change for Americans, who are famously individualistic.

    Soika says that there are weekly meetings in the common house to deal with issues that affect the entire campus, such as parking disputes and insurance. Residents own their $300,000 to $525,000 homes, but there is still an HOA, and governance is democratic. CoHousing Houston tries to make sure that the majority of people can still attend and have their voices heard in the regular meetings. Those disinclined to group gatherings can still participate in small groups that handle specific matters, but like all democracy it involves more work than simply owning your own home. There's also the worry that such a governing structure tends to empower people who have time and resources to attend meetings, such as single income households.

    "You don’t want to have the decisions dominated by people who have managed to dominate the meeting structures," says Soika. "We have rounds where we laboriously go through each person and have them talk about it. It helps the quieter ones. We want everyone to be heard."

    Another concern is safety. Soika was unable to say of there was any kind of provision for what to do if a resident became a problem, such as exhibiting violent behavior against other residents.

    "I guess we would call the police," she says. Having lived in cohousing since 2012, she says she's never come across such a situation.

    CoHousing Houston is expected to open fully this fall. Soika already lives on site, and most of the units in the $300,000 range have been sold. Units in the $450,000-525,000 range remain available. Interested buyers can find more information at CoHousingHouston.com.

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