Rethinking connections up and across
What connects us can be as intimate as the space between shoppers at the grocery store or as impersonal as ribbons of highway that take workers to and from their offices.
In this issue of Texas Inc. we look at those dynamics and how they are changing — or need to change.
Reporter Paul Takahashi takes us inside the expanding world of mixed-use real estate projects that marry where we shop for food with where we live.
This new generation of multilevel urban grocery stores becoming part of mid- and highrise residential developments is a matter of both convenience and practicality, propelled, he points out, “by inner-city population growth, rising land prices and changing consumer preferences.”
“The suburban business model doesn’t work anymore,” Scott Ziegler, principal of Houston-based architecture firm Ziegler Cooper, which designed two of the new grocery/apartment projects tells us. “People are tired of getting into cars to get their groceries.”
Developers, Takahashi points out, like pairing residences with groceries because they are both an amenity and a destination — and they often allow premiums on apartment rents of as much as 20 percent over those with no retail component.
“People are willing to pay for that direct connection and convenience,” said Jim Zemski, a commercial architect with Zieger Cooper.
Contributor Ilene Bassler was in a conversation recently with Steve McGough, newly named chairman of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, a lobbying group in Washington, D.C. McGough, president of HCSS, a Sugar Land-based software company that serves the heavy civil construction industry, is raising the alarm about the need to get the funding bill for the Highway Trust Fund through congress.
“In years past, we had bipartisan support for infrastructure. In the last 10 years, the climate on Capitol Hill has become so caustic that it’s hard to get things done,” he says, despite nationwide, bipartisan support for addressing an aging road, highway and bridge infrastructure.
ARTBA, he says, is “trying to keep the pressure on Congresspeople, advocating for the passage of a new transportation infrastructure package, and sharing our blueprint with people on Capitol Hill.”
That gridlock has fed a wide distrust of congress; it’s not alone.
Columnist Chris Tomlinson this week points out that many — too many — chief executives have lost that trust among the public as well.
“The challenge for CEOs,” he writes, “is regaining trust, which will be difficult in an era where denigrating others is considered the height of wit and cynicism is all the rage. A starting point, though, maybe to remind the public of what corporations get right.”
Among those things, he observes, are basic needs such as food, clothing, fuel or a paycheck.
“Corporations make Americans angriest when they stand up for their self-interest. But for every factory that fights a new pollution regulation, or every energy executive that denies human-made climate change, other companies are fighting the good fight.”
Welcome to Texas Inc.