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    Real Estate Round-up

    Hijacking the Heights

    Ralph Bivins
    Oct 31, 2009 | 3:13 pm
    • Historic 19th street continues to thrive even during the recession, so it's nowonder developers are trying to replicate the small town feeling of The Heightsin other parts of Houston.
    • Plans for Heights Marketplace, a 40,000-square-foot shopping center, include arooftop bar with views of the downtown skyline.

    The battle cry of Houston residential real estate marketing is: “Can’t get enough of a good thing.”

    So if a Craftsman-style front porch works in The Heights, it’s gotta work in outer suburbia, right?

    Cinco Ranch, an enormous master-planned community in the Katy area, is trying to import The Heights to its residential prairie way out west. Cinco Ranch is opening what it calls “a nostalgia-flavored neighborhood called Park Place, complete with an esplanade-lined boulevard inspired by historic Heights Blvd.”

    Everybody likes the beautiful vintage homes in The Heights and the leafy boulevard. So it makes sense that people will want to replicate that, even if it falls short on authenticity.

    Cinco Ranch has brought in a newly formed home building group to pull it off: J. Kyle Homes. The new company is led by Jason Hammonds, son of veteran Houston builder Ron Hammonds, who founded Hammonds Homes, once ranked as one of the biggest builders in the nation. The new builder will be constructing Cinco Ranch houses with front porches and high roof lines, trying to get the retro look.

    Sometimes these attempts to put old-looking homes in brand new communities work all right. Sometimes, they don’t. Simply put, if it’s not done right, it will look phonier than a Kanye West apology.

    People in The Heights groan when a house is torn down and it is replaced with a Victorian-styled new dwelling. Losing historic housing stock is painful and I hate to see it, too. Tearing down historic homes should be outlawed. But if a new house has to be built in The Heights, it’s better to see one with a retro design that fits in.

    But what about the flip-side? Export The Heights to Katy?

    Why not? Katy already has enough squarish brick McMansions.

     Orr Coming Back for More

    Two years ago, Bobby Orr had some grand aspirations for his tract on Heights Boulevard.

    It is, after all, a very nice piece of property – five acres with frontage on Heights Boulevard and Yale, between Washington Avenue and Interstate 10.

    Orr’s firm has a very successful track record, developing dozens of mid-size shopping centers around Houston. The Heights tract deserved something special, so Orr Commercial announced plans for a $70 million mixed-use project with 200,000 square feet of retail space topped by more than 200 apartments.

    That was before the national economy crashed and lenders went into full retreat. Orr, like many developers around town, put the deal on hold. Orr then talked about selling the land outright, but the market for land is not real strong either.

    Now, the plan is to build a 40,000-square-foot shopping center called Heights Marketplace on the tract, according to Joan Collum, senior vice president with Orr. Plans call for Heights Marketplace to have a rooftop bar with unreal views of the downtown skyline.

    I’m sure the shopping center will be top-quality, but the mixed-use project that Orr wanted to put there at first would have been truly noteworthy.

     19th Street Hanging in There

    Merchants and restaurants in The Heights’ historic 19th Street district are performing just fine, thank you, despite the recession.

    Over the years, the 19th Street retail buildings have been through a few economic downturns, including the Great Depression. So it looks like they will pull through the current economic mess.

    “There are few, if any vacancies,” says Greg Lewis of Lewis Property Co. “19th Street remains a vibrant commercial neighborhood, thriving just like it was 100 years ago.”

    Lewis, who recently redeveloped the 19th Street Market retail building, has deep roots in commercial development in The Heights. In the early 1900s, Lewis’ great-grandfather developed several commercial properties in The Heights, including the Carter & Cooley deli building on 19th Street.

    It’s important to note that 19th Street remains a friendly place for the pedestrian shopper. The recent revival of the area did not destroy the environment for people on foot – an enduring lesson for developers.

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

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    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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