'neighborhoods in transition'

I was really happy dad and Neri got a place close to downtown, on the outside edge of the neighborhood known as Rice Military instead of a suburban mcMansion out in the sticks. The neighborhood is really interesting. It’s almost all housing, but what makes it interesting is the contrast between an older existing neighborhood, what would have been a low-density first ring suburb from the early 1900s, and the slow and steady replacement of that neighborhood, parcel by parcel, by 700k luxury townhouses.

This dichotomy is radical and striking in the contrast of the housing stock. The entire neighborhood is full of instances where you will have one small bungalow style 1920s house with a clapboard sides and a wooden covered porch in the front, perhaps 1000 square feet in total, sitting in a fairly generous lot, and right next door, looming over it, pushed the lot lines, four to six townhouses each four stories tall. And the income levels are manifest as well.

The roads in Houston are, in general, in third world condition. A collection of jackasses, over a long period of time, apparently decided that road maintence was a folly and a waste, so the drivers of Houston, already marvels of Darwinian evolution, have to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid having their entire cars plunge into the gaping chasms. And that’s in the NICE neighborhoods. This neighborhood doesn’t even have edges to the street- the asphalt kind of disintegrates into nothing as the ground slopes into a crazy dive into the 3’ open ditches on the sides of the road. Forget meeting ADA, the rare sidewalks that cross these ditches have long falls on either side of them. And I don’t mean that they rarely cross- the sidewalks often cross the ditches, but its rare to find sidewalks at all.

The water pressure is terrible, and the last time I saw a power pole with so many tap lines coming into it, I was in a favela in Rio.

The bottom line is luxury houses are being planted into a neighborhood with minimal accompanying upgrades to infrastructure. Broken asphalt to epoxy garage floors and travertine.

The mix of income levels doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I’ve read studies that indicate mixed income neighborhoods are actually some of the most stable and safest. What I find extremely distasteful, however, is how many of these luxury townhouses have high fences and locked gates. Remember that these townhouses are typically built to 5’ of the property line. So I’m coming across townhomes that have a 5’ wide ‘yard’ separating their fence and front door. I think people who move here look at some of their neighbors and get worried. There is nothing as hostile as a fence to me. A locked gate and fence says “I remove myself from this neighborhood. I don’t want to have anything to do with you or your life, and I will make damn sure you don’t have anything to do with mine. I wouldn’t even trust you with a locked front door.” It pretty much kills the pleasantries of walking in the neighborhood too. Who wants to walk by a wall of security fences?

However, I am kind of intrigued by the possibility of creating tiny cul-de-sac communities with the crammed in townhomes. It’s actually pretty funny to see a bunch of tall luxury townhomes squeezed into the space where one house was before: its like a large group of Americans squeezed into a tight elevator- everyone is scrupulously careful not to touch each other, even though they have to contort to get everyone in. Dad’s house is separated from his neighbors by about eighteen inches On the other sides, the other houses are about ten feet away. Huge windows look out onto massive blank stretches of stucco which bounce a lot of indirect light around. For me, that’s one of my biggest complaints about the house. Not enough natural light.

I am however, encouraged by the density of the neighborhood which is being created. When you replace a 1000 square foot house with four 2500 square foot townhomes, you’ve multiplied the capacity tenfold. And when you have density, you can do anything. We’ll see how the houses hold up over the long run though. It’s all cheap stick and stucco as far as I’ve seen so far.