Real Estate Round-up

The Heights Walmart tops the list of things to be thankful for in 2010 Houstonreal estate

Even if the Heights Walmart never looks like this rendering, it will be muchbetter than what was there.
The Prudential Building is still standing for now.
Photo by Ralph Bivins
Ed Wulfe's_Meyerland Plaza is an example of the postitive impact he's had ongreater Houston.
Photo by Ralph Bivins
A fountain statuary at the Prudential Building
Photo by Ralph Bivins
Ed Wulfe's_Meyerland Plaza
Photo by Ralph Bivins
At least, we don't have to root for the Dallas Cowboys.

Foreclosures have been horrible. Home sales have been down. Real estate loans are hard to get.

Do we have anything to be thankful for as we consider Houston’s real estate market in 2010?

Well, Thanksgiving Day is almost here. So we’re rounding up a few bright spots and silver linings in the dark clouds to generate a list of positive things in keeping with the spirit of this Pilgrim-spawned holiday.

Who knows, if we can find something positive to say about the Houston real estate market, then maybe Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh will finally say something positive about President Obama. Well, not really. We know that will never happen.

I’m thankful that: The developers of the “Heights Walmart” are improving the West End neighborhood. The controversial site, Yale Street at Koehler, had been used as a factory location for decades. The developer of the new Walmart anchored development, the Houston-based Ainbinder Company, scraped off tons on contaminated dirt from the brownfield site, says Ainbinder principal Bart Duckworth.

I’ve seen a photo of some nasty-looking 55-gallon drums that were reportedly abandoned there and recently removed. Don’t get me wrong. I won’t be doing my Christmas shopping at Walmart. I don’t like shopping at Walmart because their employees make me feel like a shoplifting suspect.

But this Yale Street land was an industrial site next to railroad tracks, not a virgin forest with a mountain stream, or even a block of Victorian homes. Ainbinder’s Walmart project won’t be a Highland Village or the Galleria, but at least the site is cleaner now from an environmental standpoint.

I’m thankful that: Foreclosures in Houston never got to be as bad as they were in the 1980s. A lot of the younger news reporters in town have been eager to report that foreclosures went up significantly in the last three or four years. But we can put it into perspective by looking back at 1987, when things were really bad.

In a 10-month period, January through October of 1987, Harris County had 26,812 foreclosures. That’s 56 percent more than the 11,770 foreclosures over the comparable 10 months through October of this year, according to Foreclosure Information and Listing Service. And Houston was a smaller town, with fewer houses, back in 1987.

Yes, foreclosures have been bad and the real estate market is not rosy right now. But the youth movement in Houston’s news media should look back in the 1987 archives before declaring our current mess to be an unprecedented catastrophe.

I’m thankful that: The Astrodome is still standing. When it opened in 1965, we called it the "Eighth Wonder of the World." Our leaders have spent millions to build Reliant Stadium and Minute Maid Park (nee Enron Field) to replace it.

And they recently opted to build Dynamo Stadium for soccer instead of repurposing the grand old Dome. So now, there are discussions of demolishing the Astrodome. Houston we have a problem: we keep tearing down our history.

Doesn’t anybody care that Mickey Mantle hit the first home run in the Dome? Elvis, Selena, the Supremes, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones all played there. And we know that some 25,000 Katrina evacuees were certainly thankful to have the Astrodome’s shelter in dire times. Save the Dome. Preserve our history, for a change.

I'm thankful that: the Prudential Building is still standing. But it won’t be there much longer, though. It’s in the Texas Medical Center and M.D. Anderson needs it to be torn down so they can build a bigger and better building.

A chain link fence surrounds the sad old tower now. The wrecking ball looms. The Prudential Building, which has a fountain with a wonderful frontal sculpture of a man and woman holding a baby, was built in 1952. It is considered one of the finest designs ever conceived by Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim. Drive by 1100 Holcombe Blvd. for a last look. Then call up our wonderful governor, James Richard Perry, and complain, since after all, M.D. Anderson is part of the University of Texas System.

I’m thankful that: Houston developers have been restrained this time around. In last Houston economic crash in the 1980s, overbuilding was extreme. Fueled with money from now-defunct savings and loans and etc., developers built enough office buildings, retail centers, apartments and residential lots to last decades. Then, they sat vacant in see-through emptiness until hit with foreclosure or bankruptcy.

Today, there are a few overbuilt sectors, Houston suburbs where too many retail centers or apartments were constructed, but it’s mild in comparison to the 1980s. Office building development, with the exception of a couple of new downtown towers, has nearly come to a halt. Only 2.4 million square feet of office space — a tiny amount — is under construction, half as much as a year ago, according to the Transwestern real estate firm.

With construction at a standstill, the market should stabilize soon.

I’m thankful that: Ed Wulfe plied his trade in Houston. Wulfe, who once considered a run for mayor, has specialized in Houston shopping centers for many years.

Wulfe’s developments are notable. He resurrected Gulfgate, a big center in the East End that was nearly dead before Wulfe bought it and lured new tenants. Wulfe & Company also redeveloped Meyerland Plaza, which required unraveling a maze of liens and obligations from various savings and loan institutions. His work in progress is BLVD Place, an ambitious mixed-use project under development on Post Oak near San Felipe.

Wulfe, 76, recently named Bob Sellingsloh as president of his company. Wulfe will continue to work as chairman and CEO. Wulfe’s work hasn’t been perfect. It seems like Wulfe built too many retail buildings in Meyerland’s parking lot, causing a shortage of parking. But overall, his mistakes have been minor.

Anywhere you shop in Houston, chances are your experience is impacted by Wulfe’s work. A lot of the retailers selected their locations based on Wulfe & Company’s advice. The jury is still out on BLVD Place, but overall, Wulfe has been a positive force for Houston.

Lastly, I am thankful that Houston is a far better city than Dallas, our rival to the north. And I hope the Dallas Cowboys lose to the New Orleans Saints on Thanksgiving Day.

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

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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