Quote:
Originally Posted by Dariusb
Wow! These are exciting times! Especially with all of these skylines merging together. Future panorama will be massive. Do you think TMC will be merging with the other skylines you mentioned or is it too far away?
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TMC and the Museum District are already growing together. From Downtown to TMC there are two neighborhoods in between them, Midtown and the Museum District. The Museum District has always had highrises and a skyline of its own and is doing its thing.
Midtown is the one that's been holding that area back but that's now starting to change too. Before the only highrises in Midtown were the ones fronting the freeway just across from Downtown. Technically these were in Midtown but to most people they were more associated with downtown. So excluding the highrises in midtown along the Pierce Elevated freeway ramp, the only other highrise building that Midtown had was that HCC building. Then Caydon bought some land near the HCC building and planned 5 highrises. The first one named Drewery Place is already done with construction and the second one will be over 500 feet tall and will have the Kimpton Hotel is now in site prep about to start construction. There will be 3 more, with a few of them also being very tall, one of them if I remember correct will be around 640 feet. The biggest benefit to this mega-development (called Laneways) will be at street level. It will implement the arcade and laneway system that Melbourne has, which will be the first of its kind in the US and a little piece of Melbourne will be brought to life in Houston. Near there PMG is also building a 30 story highrise which should be almost finished with construction.
So if you count the HCC building, Drewery Place, and that 30 story PMG building then Midtown has 3 highrises now. Laneways will build another 4 more, some of them will be very tall. AMCAL also has a 30 story highrise proposed and there's a 21 story one on Elgin also proposed. When and if all of these are finished then Midtown will have 9 highrises, up from just the 1 it had only a few years ago. Land is also becoming scarce now in Midtown, especially with Rice planning the Ion and Innovation District on 13 blocks in south Midtown, so more highrise proposals will become the norm. Along with more midrises too.
To connect Downtown to the TMC with a very thick 4 mile long vertical wall, Midtown will need 30-40 highrises. That's about 20-30 more years of infill and growth. But the good news is that Downtown, TMC, and Museum District are all doing their part quickly, so the wait is only on Midtown to get it going faster. It'll happen. Midtown is Houston's premier entertainment neighborhood and its hottest living space. It's too in demand and its grown like crazy.
Btw, to change gears a little bit I missed one more mega-development on Allen Parkway. Buffalo Heights District. That'll have 3-4 highrises and several midrises of its own. That would bring Allen Parkways expected number up to 27 if they all get built (Allen Parkway currently only has 9 highrises).
Every major highrise cluster from Uptown to Downtown and Downtown to TMC has at least one major mega-development anchoring it.
TMC:
1. TMC3 (2 highrises and several midrises, like a sea of them)
2. Innovation Tower (the other 2 Medistar towers are already completed, leaving only Innovation tower left to do)
3. A&M campus expansion
4. UT Health campus expansion
(several other highrises and midrises planned by other medical systems expanding like MD Anderson, TX women's health, etc)
Museum District:
1. Museo Plaza (3 highrises, the tallest one is over 600 feet)
2. the Parklane Towers (3 highrises, the tallest one will be 500 feet)
(several other highrises like X Houston, Chelsea, Boone Manor, and a couple more also planned)
Midtown:
1. Laneways (5 towers total, 1 of them already done)
(two other highrises also on the drawing board that AMCAL one and that Elgin one)
Allen Parkway:
1. the Allen
2. Regent Square
3. Buffalo Heights District
4. Hanover Buffalo Bayou
(several individual highrises also planned, the news story yesterday hinted at "multiple" towers near the Driscoll and that highrise Urbannizer pointed out a few posts ago too)
Upper Kirby:
1. the mega-development at Kirby and 59 (4 highrises)
(a couple of other individual highrises like the one on top of the HEB and the Westmore one)
Greenway Plaza:
1. the RO (7-8 highrises)
(the second phase hotel near Levy Park and the Paramount)
Uptown:
1. McNair Campus (3 towers, tallest one could become the second tallest building in uptown after Williams Tower since its 51 stories)
2. the Perennial (3 towers, one was completed a few years ago for BBVA, one is supposed to be a Loews Hotel and the other one an office)
(several individual highrises, too many to list)
Downtown actually seems like the only core cluster that doesn't have a mega-development of its own but that's excusable because they're building Texas Tower, the Preston, and that Block 387 with Block 98, Theater Square, and maybe 6HC still in the pipeline. Though 6HC appears to be a longshot. Downtown has built 609 Main and BG Group Place which are over 700 feet and 600 feet in recent years and dozens of other highrises near Market Square and Discovery Green Park. Downtown is trying to quadruple its population in the next 20 years, so we can expect to see several more highrises and midrises proposed there in the future.
Even the Energy Corridor has a mega-development in the pipeline with Republic Square. That has 7 highrises but that's a longterm project due to the slippage of oil prices a few years ago and the state of vacancies in the Energy Corridor.
There are several other highrises in Montrose or the Heights that I've prolly missed mentioning. The Greystar phase 2 under construction in the Heights comes to mind but I covered a decent bit of what is to come.
From downtown to TMC, the holdover right now is Midtown. From Uptown to Downtown the holdovers are that gap between Upper Kirby and Allen Parkway and the gap between Greenway Plaza to Uptown, though there's another way around that one. Greenway Plaza just needs to grow out towards Westheimer and then use Westheimer to grow towards the River Oaks District shopping area. Thanks to the RO and highrises like the Paramount that is already happening. So that wont be a problem as long as HOU gets more highrise developments to bulk that area up some more.
All HOU needs is these projects and a good deal more infill from some currently unannounced future stuff to beef up that wall of highrises from uptown to downtown and its done.
Even more distant in the future will be Uptown going west and connecting with Memorial City, City Centre, Westchase, and Energy Corridor. Memorial City, City Center, and Energy Corridor are already merging with each other, they just need to beef up their size some more. They’re already a straight line of development along I-10, flowing from one to the next and then to the next one after that. They just need more bulk to fill in some of the small gaps between them. Westchase just needs more towers going north to I-10 and it will merge with those City Center and Energy Corridor. Chinatown just south of Westchase also has 6 highrises planned. There's 2 twin 33 story towers and 4 highrises from that KP Plaza thing, so Westchase's skyline is also bulking up. But Memorial City/City Center/Westchase/Energy Corridor merging with Uptown is very far down the line because between Uptown and Memorial City there are 5-7 miles of only lowrises and midrises with barely any highrises currently in between them. It will take a very long time to fill in a gap that large. Probably 40 years or longer. So this one is a very distant possibility. Either at the end of our lifetimes or after we’re all gone. But when this starts happening then all of HOU's main business districts and skyline clusters will become one, except for Greenspoint.
Greenspoint wont ever integrate into the larger skyline because there's 15-20 miles of single family homes between downtown and Greenspoint. That's a gap that will never get filled with highrises in our lifetime, that's just too much area to fill in and you're basically starting from scratch.
In the short term and medium term what's going to happen is that there's Uptown to Downtown and Downtown to TMC with all of the highrise clusters in between them like Greenway Plaza, Upper Kirby, Montrose, Allen Parkway, Midtown, Museum District will all blend into each other.
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