17-acre walkable district in Houston’s East End

Now, the scale of the project — estimated at $350 million — has grown to 17 acres, and developers plan to incorporate up to 1,000 mixed-income apartments with 250,000 square feet of retail and office space over the next decade. Working with global architecture firm Gensler on a master plan, Concept Neighborhood is expanding its vision for the district after purchasing additional land from Union Pacific Railway and a handful of other property owners over the past few months.  

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

While some neighbors are nervous about gentrification, the developers, if successful, could achieve what urban planners say could be the first project of its kind in the city: a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of adaptive reuse buildings where low- and middle-income residents can live affordably, and where owning a car would be optional.

•  Phase One: Some adaptive reuse projects converting multiple warehouse buildings into boutique retail and office space are already complete: the 20,000 square-foot retail/office complex called The Plant; another 36,000 square-foot coworking outlet creative office space called The Headquarters; along with some of the former W-K-M campus are already converted. By mid 2023, Concept Neighborhood will break ground on an additional 52,000 square feet of  retail/office/restaurant space within existing warehouses.
• Phase Two: Breaking ground in mid-2024, this phase includes 500 mixed-income apartments scattered across new buildings at 3301 Canal Street, 3402 Canal Street and 212 Sampson Street. This could include a mix of micro-units (400 square feet in size), traditionally-sized units and potentially coliving (shared housing). Also in phase two, plans call for incorporating 100,000 square feet of retail space scattered throughout multiple adaptive reuse projects in former warehouse buildings.  
• Bayou Trail Rails-to-Trail Conversion:  In conjunction with the Phase Two apartments and retail/office space, Concept Neighborhood is proposing to convert about 0.33 miles of of former railway running from Commerce  Street to Navigation Boulevard into hike and bike pathway called the Bayou Trail. The trail would feed into the rest of The Plant/Second Ward district to the south of Navigation Boulevard. 
• Phase Three (additional apartments): Breaking ground in 2025, this phase would include tearing down some of the former abandoned Tyson food manufacturing building at 3100 Canal Street (at the corner of Canal Street and Palmer Street), but salvaging an older section of it for retail space. In the place of the former warehouse building, Concept Neighborhood is proposing an additional 500 residential units and 25,000 square feet of retail space in a project called “Trail  Village.” It’s not clear yet how much of this housing would be market-rate or mixed-use housing.
• Project team: Concept Neighborhood’s firm includes co-principals Jeff Kaplan, co-founder of Axelrad and HTX Made and former retail real estate broker;  Dave Seeburger, a former private equity professional; David Kelley, a co-housing developer, founder of a community bank and former executive at MetroNational;  Monte Large, another Axelrad co-founder and urban designer; Jeremy Roberts, a former real estate attorney; and Zachary Samet, real estate broker. Real estate broker and East End resident Andrea Daniela is also involved. In addition to Gensler, Concept Neighborhood has hired design/build firm Stovall Interests to design the adaptive reuse buildings in the first phase as well as Schaum/Shieh to design the multifamily in the second phase.

See MoreCollapse

“Houston does not have a neighborhood for people that want to rely on micro mobility, biking and transit,” said Jeff Kaplan, principal with Concept Neighborhood who lives in the district he’s helping to redevelop. “People can choose to have a car if they want to, and if they want to live car-free, they can.”

In the project called The Plant/Second Ward, developers are stitching several parcels together to create a nearly mile-long corridor of streets lined with small businesses, restaurants and housing across a mix of about 21 old and new buildings — starting from Harrisburg Boulevard in the south and extending north to Navigation Boulevard, a critical thoroughfare in the East End a few blocks south of Buffalo Bayou. Concept Neighborhood also plans to convert a section of a former Union Pacific railway into a hike-and-bike trail running one-third of a mile through the development from  Commerce Street to Navigation.

A vision of walkability

Today, the parcels in The Plant/Second Ward corridor feel separated by cracking streets and the old railway partially covered with overgrown vegetation. The streets splice through patches of grass and bland warehouses shrouded in metal siding surrounded by cement. Cars zoom past pedestrians in the area still dominated by vehicles.

But the proposed new district, located near a MetroRail stop, falls within the city’s designated Transit Oriented Development program that allows developments near public transit stops to offer fewer parking spaces in exchange for wider sidewalks and a better pedestrian experience.

The designation allows Concept Neighborhood to relinquish pavement for patios, parklets and pedestrian paths. Instead of a dedicated parking garage for apartment buildings, car owners would share a central garage with office and retail users.

Building entrances will be designed with pedestrians, not cars, in mind. Roberts Street could turn into a row of storefronts along wide, tree-lined sidewalks.

EARLIER: Axelrad co-founders to turn East End site into walkable, socially-conscious district

The proposed rails-to-trails pathway could eventually feed into an area along Velasco Street, which the nonprofit Buffalo Bayou Partnership is considering for a greenspace project. The Plant/Second Ward path also abuts Navigation Boulevard, just east of the linear park known as Navigation Esplanade, which  is getting extended eastward by 3.5 blocks starting next year, noted Veronica Chapa Gorczynski, president of the East End District.

Houston has a handful of walkable urban districts — including Downtown, Midtown and near Rice Village — but Concept Neighborhood is taking a different approach to development, said Bill Fulton, former director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University who is not involved with the project.

“What we haven’t seen in Houston is a 15-minute neighborhood in a gentrifying area where the strategy has been to try to retain as many residents and businesses as possible,” Fulton said. “There are some people in the neighborhood who think any change or gentrification is adverse, but I think what (Concept Neighborhood) is trying harder than most developers to create something that benefits the people who already live in the neighborhood, as well people who might want to move in. It’s a very tough trick.” 

Affordability challenges

At least a few tenants leasing space in some of the buildings that Concept Neighborhood acquired are anxious about affordability amid rising rents. Alan Rivera, an artist leasing a 5,000-square-foot welding and 3D printing studio in one of the former W-K-M buildings, said Concept Neighborhood proposed raising his rent by $700 a month.

Concept Neighborhood said they are working on strategies to try to keep Rivera in place, as well as hiring him to build signs throughout the project and offering to pay for him to add a retail storefront to generate another revenue stream.

“It seems like they’re wanting to keep artisans around,” Rivera said, but he’s nervous about the potential rent increase pushing him out of the neighborhood.

Concept Neighborhood acknowledged rents will increase for many tenants in its buildings to cover the costs of rising property taxes and inflation. But the firm is trying to devise strategies for assisting small business tenants.

At 3401 Harrisburg, where Concept Neighborhood already completed a warehouse-to-office/retail conversion, the firm has struck sliding-scale lease agreements with some tenants in which rental rates increase as the businesses prosper. In other cases, the firm has paid the costs of building out some tenants spaces. All of this is meant to lower the barrier of entry for low-income, minority and local small businesses owners who want to locate in the project. (So far about 83 percent of tenants at 3401 Harrisburg are minorities, women or residents who live in the neighborhood.)

“We’re trying to come up with ideas that will help these tenants evolve with us,” noted Dave Seeburger, principal at Concept Neighborhood. “We can achieve financially sustainable investments and market-rate returns by incorporating (artisans) into the plan, not getting rid of them.”  

Micro-unit living

East End’s apartment market is dominated by moderately-priced, older units renting below $1,000 monthly, but that is changing as more developers add high-end apartments in the area. Although some private and public entities are adding affordable housing, some neighbors worry it isn’t enough.