Sarnoff: Land long held by family
Helmers near Irvington and the North Loop. Sellers were Quasar Land and Irvington Holdings. The company demolished a building on the property. Detering is also renovating a 25,000-square-foot building on the property that it plans to occupy as well.
The move was compelled by Detering’s growth plans and a “disjointed” Washington Avenue facility that included multiple buildings, said Boyd, who also represented the company in its expansion and relocation.
The Washington property had been held by the Detering family since the early 1900s, when Herman Detering ran a grocery store there. His son, Carl, opened the building supply company on the land in 1926. Rethinking things
Plans to redevelop Uptown Park, the rambling shopping district along the West Loop at Post Oak Boulevard, are being reevaluated, officials from the property’s new owner, Edens Investment Trust, said last week.
About a year ago, the then-owner of the 17-acre property, which comprises a series of retail buildings broken up by parking lots, announced plans for a sweeping redevelopment of the center, including replacing many of the low-slung buildings with high-rise towers to hold residences, hotel rooms, offices and shops.
“We’re pausing long enough to re-evaluate,” Edens chairman and CEO Terry Brown said Friday.
He said the reason is primarily due to the change of ownership, but oil prices’ effect on Houston real estate is another.
The Columbia, S.C.based company recently closed on its acquisition of AmREIT, the publicly traded real estate investment trust based in Houston that owned Uptown Park and a number of other centers in Texas as well as some out of state.
As a private company, Brown said, “wecan afford to take a longer-term view.”
Brown envisions Uptown Park as a thriving center that draws families and Houstonians seeking shopping, dining or entertainment.
Chad Braun, the company’s managing director for Texas, said some of the former plans “may stick. Some things may change.”
Other redevelopment projects planned before AmREITwassoldare also in limbo, including a proposed residential tower at the northwest corner of San Felipe and Post Oak and a joint venture in an office and retail project at the site of the Inverness Townhomes at the northwest corner of Post Oak and Uptown Park boulevards. District in legal tangle
Commercial property owners of the Five Corners area of southwest Hous- ton will face off with its improvement district in a Harris County courtroom.
The trial, which is set to start Monday, centers around a lawsuit filed in 2012 against Houston’s Five Corners Improvement District, which encompasses a sprawling area primarily west of Texas 288 and inside Beltway 8. Business owner Mehdi Banijamali says boundaries were drawn to exclude certain businesses. This is the second time Five Corners has been sued. The district previously settled with business owners by releasing them from assessments.
Banijamali also says that out of 1,400 property owners in the Five Corners area, it required only 25 signatures to start the district. He said the lawsuit claims the owners who signed did not know what they were agreeing to or that the petitions were not completed properly. A management district oper- ates by assessing commercial property owners.
In court documents, the management district denied the property owners’ allegations. District executive director David Hawes declined to comment further.
Special purpose districts have been the center of grass-roots efforts for years. The districts have popped up rapidly over the last two decades, devised as a way to drive development and improve infrastructure while generating revenue specifically for libraries, municipal utilities, community colleges and the like.
The Legislature created the districts and granted them powers to impose taxes or assessments, issue debt and, in some cases, condemn property through eminent domain.
Erin Mulvaney contributed to this report. nancy.sarnoff@chron.com twitter.com/nsarnoff Realtors Industry Smart Social Media Marketing Seminar: Hosted by SCORE Houston. 10 a.m.-noon, Houston Association of Realtors, 3693 Southwest Freeway. Registration: www. scorehouston.org.
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