Commercial Real Estate Embraces Five-Year Freeway Project

The commercial real estate community showed up en masse for Thursday's discussion on the redesign of the South Loop by the state transportation department. The Uptown Houston District is acting as liaison between TxDOT and the business community, which has embraced the project at large. The target area has 23 million sf of office space, five million sf of retail and 26 hotels with 6,200 rooms.

More freeway exits and improved frontage roads and feeder roads are on the drawing boards to alleviate traffic congestion. "This area has really fallen behind in terms of accessibility," Stan Creech, owner of Stan Creech Properties, tells GlobeSt.com. He has worked the Uptown Galleria area for three decades. It's been his experience, and most real estate professionals would agree, that heavy traffic and accessibility are the submarket's biggest big drawbacks. The project's impact has yet to be fully determined, but he predicts that the short-term nuisance from the construction work won't stop tenants from signing leases for the area.

John Breeding, president of the Uptown District, said an informal study showed Houstonians travel into Uptown at least once a week. The study also found a high percentage of respondents indicated a preference to work in the submarket. "People know this area," Breeding says. "They may not know where city hall is, but they know this area."

The project will deliver in three phases. The US Highway and Loop 610 interchange near the Galleria will be expanded from 16 lanes to 24 lanes. The work started in August 2001 and will be completed in September. The second phase kicks off this summer and drives 3 1/2 years of construction as the project area heads north to Post Oak Boulevard. The final stage calls for taking 15 lanes to 20 at the intersection of Loop 610 and Interstate 10. Contracts will be awarded in summer 2003, with completion not due until nearly 2007.

Stewart Morris Jr. of Houston-based Stewart Information Services opened the session in the ballroom of the Post Oak Doubletree by calling for more relocations to the Galleria submarket. His firm's decision to do so, he said, was "without question the right thing to do." In support of his case, Morris said his firm has renewed a 235,000-sf lease at Crescent Real Estate Equities Co.'s Two Post Oak Central, a class A property at 1980 Post Oak Blvd. The vision for improved accessibility to the high-demand submarket, says Morris, will solidify it as "the crossroads for business."