Sign campaign will brand neighborhoods
Northwest Chamber effort aims to build identity of Cypress Creek communities
The north Houston area will soon be more united and its neighborhoods officially identified.
A capital campaign is underway to raise funds to purchase signs to be installed throughout the community.
The signs will say “Cypress Creek Community” and will then include an identifier such as Gleannloch Farms, Champions or Klein.
It is part of the Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce’s Grow Northwest capital campaign launched a year ago with the goal of raising $3.2 million to address community issues such as community branding, safety and security and economic development.
“It will give us some identity,” said Clara Lewis, vice president and director of the Cypress Creek Cultural District. “The Cypress Creek Community signs will help people realize they are in a vibrant neighborhood.”
The signs will help bring the community together.
“It will help unify us,” Lewis said. “We’re very fragmented right now — subdivision this and that. We’re a very unique whole. We need to claim that with an identity that the signage will help us to establish.”
The Cypress Creek Cultural District is one of the areas that will receive specific signage, identifying the district.
The Cypress Creek Cultural District includes the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Art, the Centrum, Barbara Bush Library, Cypress Creek Community Center and the Harris County Precinct 4 Courthouse.
“That’s the gem of this community — the Barbara Bush Library and hike and bike trails and The Pearl,” Lewis said. “It’s the downtown pulse of the entire northwest community.”
The Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce received a grant a year ago from the Houston-Galveston Area Council to conduct a study on revitalizing the region, said Barbara Thomason, president of the Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce. One of the ideas out of the study was to install the unifying signs.
The Cypress Creek Livable Centers study focused on the area of Cypress Creek Parkway, also known as FM 1960 West, and the intersections of Kuykendahl Road and Ella Boulevard.
The plan calls for creating an effective use of space that includes transforming abandoned shopping centers, and underused parking lots into green space, and thriving and aesthetically pleasing economic centers; adding trees and sidewalks along the corridor for walkability and helping to create future building and design standards for the corridor.
The stakeholders group, which consists of the Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce, the Ponderosa Forest Utility District and the Cypress Creek Parkway Property and Business Owner’s Association, was awarded a $125,000 grant from the HGAC to conduct the livable centers study.
The study encompassed a 1,600-acre area that is buffeted by Cypress Creek Parkway, Kuykendahl Road and Ella Boulevard and includes areas of single-family homes for around 6,100 residents, Thomason said.
For more information about Grow Northwest Houston, visit http://growhoustonnw.com/
Tamra Santana is a freelance writer.