Before a crowd of people angry over tolls on public highways and the Trans-Texas Corridor, state senators grilled transportation commissioners Thursday.
“The State Auditor’s Office has found some huge holes in TXDOT’s grandiose plan to pave the state with a network of superhighways collectively known as the Trans-Texas Corridor.
TTC-35, the first leg of the network, will stretch from Oklahoma to the Mexican border. State auditors claim that stretch of pavement alone will cost $105 billion. Using that figure, the grassroots organization, Corridor Watch, calculates the entire network will cost a staggering $745 billion.
State auditors sampled 32 invoices connected with TTC-35 and found errors totaling $4.3 million on 21 of those invoices. The errors dealt mainly dealt with the misallocation of costs. But with the project still in its infancy, that’s not a comforting piece of news.”
from Texas Observer, TTC Sinkhole, http://www.texasobserver.org/blog/?p=119
3/02/2007
TxDOT kicked in the Asphalt
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2 comments:
I'm glad someone caught Ric Williamson being untruthful to the Citizens of Texas.Toll Roads and Light Rail aren't the solution to expected density.The true purpose of Toll Roads and Light Rail is to cause the expected density,thus ensuring increased profits for developers.
For example: Take one acre,build one house on it,sell it to one buyer and you get only one price/profit for it.But if you take one acre,divide it into ten lots,build ten houses on them,sell them to ten buyers,you get ten times the price/profit out of the same piece of land.By using Toll Roads and Light Rail to force people to live,work,play,etc.,near the transportation corridors,whoever owns those properties can use the Toll roads and Light Rail to force the people of Texas to accept such "density driven development",ensuring huge profits for developers,and thus the Toll Roads and Light Rail don't solve the density "problem",they actually cause it.
Someone needs to research whether or not the "Rick Twins" have any offshore bank accounts,secret Swiss bank accounts,or just a freezer full of cash.
Surely,they are not doing this to the citizens of Texas because they actually believe it is the right thing to do.
Following will be the complete text of an article that appeared in the Houston Chronicle,March 4th,2007.
Note the repeated connections between Transit and transit corridors,and Density driven development.
The developers are using our tax dollars to build transit,in corridors the developers own,in order to FORCE density upon us,thus enormously increasing their profits.(see previous post)
March 4, 2007, 12:33AM
RESHAPING NEIGHBORHOODS
Communities inside the Loop suffer growing pains
City is devising policies to accommodate population density and quality of life
By MIKE SNYDER
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
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DEALING WITH DENSITY
Most cities direct growth and control development with zoning — laws that define what type of construction is permitted in given areas. Houston never has had citywide zoning. Here are some ways the city controls development now, and some possibilities on the table as density, usually expressed as population per square mile, grows inside the Loop.
Deed restrictions
•Houston's historical approach to land-use control puts provisions within deeds, mostly for residential properties, requiring owners to follow certain building guidelines and not operate businesses from their homes. The city has enforced deed restrictions since 1965, although many restrictions are decades older than that. . The restrictions have expired or never existed in many older neighborhoods.
1999 ordinance revision
•The city made major changes in its development ordinance, known as Chapter 42, designating areas outside Loop 610 as suburban and those inside the Loop as urban, where density was capped at 27
housing units per acre. Some planners say this is no longer a useful approach considering the increasing urbanization of areas outside the Loop, such as the Westchase district.
Possible future approaches
•The city is considering revising rules that deal with building setbacks, parking and other issues to encourage dense, urban-style development along transit corridors or on the edges of residential neighborhoods. Officials say these changes will involve new regulations as well as incentives for developers to follow certain design guidelines.
Hundreds of children turn out to join Little League teams that once attracted just a few dozen. Neighbors rally to save a beloved park threatened by development. Cut-through traffic clogs residential streets.
Increasing density is reshaping neighborhoods inside Loop 610, where Houston-Galveston Area Council computer models indicate population has increased by more than 20 percent since 2000.
As demographic and market forces continue to draw people toward Houston's center, city officials are working to develop policies that can accommodate this growth without aggravating traffic congestion, continuing the disruption of established neighborhoods or devouring the remaining open spaces.
"We'd like to encourage density happening in appropriate places," said Marlene Gafrick, the city planning director, adding that "some people associate density with a decline in the quality of life."
Anxiety about density, which was the most contentious issue in a 1999 overhaul of the city's development ordinance, persists in dozens of neighborhoods where townhomes and condominiums continue to spring up alongside cottages and bungalows.
The H-GAC's population projections, which assume the continuation of current trends and are based on Harris County Appraisal District land-use data, show that density inside Loop 610 could increase by more than 1,700 people per square mile by 2035.
High-density development, often in the form of two or three townhomes on a lot where one house formerly stood, is most common in neighborhoods without deed restrictions and close to downtown, including parts of Montrose, the Heights and the Third Ward.
Some deed-restricted residential areas just inside the Loop, such as Afton Oaks near the Galleria and neighborhoods along Braeswood, have avoided an incursion of townhomes. But Afton Oaks has experienced increased cut-through traffic from adjoining neighborhoods where weaker deed restrictions have permitted townhome construction, said Richard Whiteley, president of the Afton Oaks Civic Club.
Families, too
Neighborhood leaders tend to associate greater density with increased traffic congestion, noise and a loss of neighborhood character. But planners say urban density can be an asset when it occurs in the right places — on the edges of residential neighborhoods rather than in their center, for example, or along transit corridors.
City officials say that by this summer, they hope to recommend changes to Houston's development rules that would encourage high-density, mixed-use projects along transit corridors where people could live, work and shop without having to drive. A committee of the city Planning Commission is working on similar issues.
The effects of growth and development pressure are evident in Timbergrove Manor, a subdivision northwest of downtown where residents organized a campaign to save the West 11th Street Park, and in west Montrose, where workers swarm over new townhome sites on almost every block.
While much of the growth in close-in neighborhoods has been attributed to empty-nesters and young professionals without children, families with children are a growing part of the mix as well, said Ed Gonzales, a Realtor and longtime civic activist in Neartown, a coalition of neighborhoods south of downtown.
The Neartown Little League started in 1999 with 40 players on three teams, said Will Weber, the league's board president. It now has 220 players on 17 teams, he said, and recently added a new field behind Wharton Elementary School.
View changed
In many neighborhoods, owners of older, single-family homes coexist uneasily with buyers of the new townhomes, lofts and condominiums surrounding them. Often, resentment toward builders and developers is displaced onto the new residents, Gonzales said.
When the townhome buyers walk into their first civic club meeting, "you can feel the chill in the room," Gonzales said.
Shirley McLeroy, 63, said she gets along well enough with owners of the new townhomes that started springing up in her northwest Houston neighborhood in the 1990s. Many are young professionals who work such long hours that she rarely sees them, McLeroy said.
McLeroy, who has lived in the same house on Prince since 1947, said 40 townhomes now occupy half the block across the street from her, where a small business operated for many years.
"Where there were two toilets, now there are 80," said McElroy, wondering whether sewer lines in the neighborhood can handle the increased demand.
The main effect of the denser development, she said, has been increased traffic and on-street parking. And she doesn't like the view of townhouses across the street from her front porch.
"They have no personality," McLeroy said. "They basically look like three-story boxes."
'In a fishbowl now'
The design of many of the new townhomes, with no porches or patios facing the street, can isolate their owners from neighbors, said Bill Schadewald, the editor of the Houston Business Journal, who has watched for years as two- and three-story townhomes replaced smaller single-family homes in his west Montrose neighborhood.
"When I first moved here, everybody knew everybody," Schadewald said.
One Neartown homeowner, who asked not to be identified because of ongoing conflicts with construction workers in her neighborhood, said townhouses towering over her single-family home have robbed her of her privacy.
"We're in a fishbowl now," she said.
Such tensions may be an inevitable side effect of growth and development, but city officials say they could be eased through policies that steer high-density housing into areas where it would not be so disruptive. In the absence of zoning, the traditional municipal land-planning tool, Houston is struggling to find the right combination of regulations and economic incentives.
City Councilman Adrian Garcia, whose district includes many neighborhoods affected by the new development, said the city must find alternatives to "wall-to-wall concrete" and development patterns that force children to play in the street rather than in parks or backyards.
"We need the density. We have to continue the growth of Houston. But we have to be much more creative in our approaches," Garcia said.
Gafrick agreed.
"We can't continue to allow the construction of buildings without looking at the impact," she said. "Growth doesn't have to be negative if you encourage and harness it in a positive way."
Chronicle reporter Chase Davis contributed to this report.
mike.snyder@chron.com
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