Willowick Park keeps open space
Inner Loop development features a 1-acre park that includes a fountain
With two midrise apartment buildings, 38 townhomes and a total of 512 units, the Communities at Willowick Park is the biggest project to date for Martin Fein Interests, a veteran Houston apartment developer.
The property at West Alabama and Las Palmas spans the equivalent of five city blocks, with a 1-acre park with fountain patterned after the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris as a central gathering place. Rather than covering the land with four-story apartments, Fein elected to go vertical on two buildings and put townhomes west of Las Palmas as a buffer to the adjacent neighborhood, saving mature live oaks in the process. That allowed for more open spaces such as a 2.25-acre dog park, a portion of which could accommodate more units when the market improves.
“You would have to go back to the go-go ’60s and ’70s to see this much land for apartment development,” said Bruce McClenny of Apartment Data Services.
When Fein broke ground in late 2012, oil was trading around $86 a barrel, more than double today’s price. As demand slows along with job growth, the project joins 29 new communities with nearly 8,100 units in the Inner Loop/Galleria areas, according to Apartment Data Services.
Martin Fein, who has developed more than 12,000 apartment units, spoke with the Chronicle after marking the official opening recently. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: How does this compare with your other projects? A: It’s by far the largest project we’ve done. We’ve basically done three
buildings at one time. On the land was 171 units of rental townhomes built about 45 years ago that had for all intents and purposes reached the end of their useful life. We ended up with 10.2 acres of land in a terrific location, close to Highland Village, the Galleria, River Oaks. We want to take great care to do justice to this great location and also be sensitive to the surrounding neighborhood.
Q: The 1-acre park occupies some of the most expensive land in town. Tell me about it.
A: It’s a multimilliondollar investment to improve the park. If you look around the landscape, most of the recent apartment buildings — high-rises or midrises — are built on relatively small parcels of land on major thoroughfares with traffic and what have you. We, on the other hand, are kind of tucked into a neighborhood. We wanted to use that as one of our strengths in a competitive environment.
Q: It’s not the best time to introduce a multifamily project. How
do you feel about the timing?
A: There’s an almost historic volume of Class A apartments opening at the same time. I’ve been in this business in Houston for over 40 years. I’ve seen these cycles. The apartment market in Houston has always healed itself.
Q: What are the prices? A: We have units ranging anywhere from $1,300 a month to $5,000 a month.
Q: What was the thought behind having three different products?
A: We have different architectural styles so that it emulated a neighborhood where you might have different architecture styles of the single-family homes. Then we further wanted
to segment the market in our apartments. One has smaller units. Another has larger units. The townhomes are the largest of all.
Q: What other projects do you have going on in Houston?
A: We have a project complete and almost leased up by Exxon Mobil in Springwoods Village. We have another project that is just under construction in the same marketplace. We have another project in Cinco Ranch that is nearing completion.
Q: How has the downturn affected your projects?
A: The market is very competitive. There is free rent in the market. This will be with us for the next year or two until all the new units are absorbed.
Q: How are projects different today?
A: With the evolution of building codes and competitive nature of our market and rent going up as Houston has grown to be a more cosmopolitan city, the product today doesn’t bear any resemblance to what we built in the ’70s and ’80s. The common areas have become much more elaborate. Big fitness rooms, dog parks and dog washing stations. In Willowick, we have some spas there as well. We were building two- and threestory apartments. Now you’re seeing only midrise and high-rises being built inside the Loop, Galleria and downtown.
Q: Is now a good time to buy land?
A: I would say there are not any real bargains there. There have been a couple of recent purchases in the city, not by our company, that really set records for land prices. It also underscores a movement to build more and more high-rises, more than ever before in the city’s history.