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Matching entries from Houston's Clear Thinkers
Amazingly bad decision-making
One fringe benefit of economic downturns is that local public officials generally defer their financial decisions, which tend to be uniformly bad even during good economic times. Except apparently in Houston. Over the past few days, Houstonians have been...
A couple of questions regarding the proposed soccer stadium
The always-entertaining Houston real estate blog, Swamplot, provided this post last week with typically pretty pictures from a KHOU-TV video of the long-proposed soccer stadium for the Houston Dynamo MLS soccer team. Have we really been talking about this...
Can Mayor White pull off another "win-win" deal?
Although the developers of the proposed Ashby high-rise condominium project didn't know it at the time, Houston Mayor Bill White did the developers a huge favor by putting up roadblocks to that project. Can you imagine trying to peddle...
Assessing priorities at TSU
This Jeannie Kever/Chronicle article follows up on new Texas Southern University President John Rudley's efforts to find a place for the institution within Houston's changing marketplace for university education (prior posts on TSU are here). Beyond academic programs that remain...
Continuing to suspend reality on financing the soccer stadium
This earlier post addressed the economic absurdity of having financially-strapped Texas Southern University make an investment in the long-proposed Houston Dynamo downtown soccer stadium. However, why is it that common sense seems to evaporate into thin air whenever either TSU...
The price of soccer keeps going up
Based on what's going on in Washington, D.C., my prediction on the eventual public subsidy of the proposed Dynamo soccer stadium in Houston may be a tad low. With D.C.'s proposed $150 million public subsidy for about 25,000 seats,...
The Chron's continuing soccer stadium drumbeat
In this post from last week on the proposed downtown soccer stadium, I observed that the Chronicle should simply declare that it supports the public financing of the stadium and quit attempting to rationalize that such financing makes economic...
Suspending reality on financing the soccer stadium
Look, I realize that the reasoning in support of public financing for the proposed Houston Dynamo soccer stadium has not been particularly rational. But this Chronicle article takes the cake in terms of suspending reality. Chron reporters Bernando Fallas...
Examining stadium subsidies
As if on cue for the soccer stadium financing issues currently being discussed on the local scene, Dennis Coates provides this excellent op-ed in The American on the dubious nature of municipal stadium subsidies: Clearly, stadiums built with public...
Mayor White's management
Help me out here. I'm really trying to understand the basis of the perception among a large number of Houstonians that Mayor Bill White is an effective manager. For example, this earlier post summarized Mayor White's dubious decision-making in...
The "leadership" of Bill White
Let me see if I've got this straight. On one hand, private businessmen invest millions in buying a run-down property and following the city's existing laws and regulations in preparing to build the Ashby high-rise, a large-scale residential redevelopment...
Re-evaluating boondoggles
Let me get this straight. Mayor White started out with a proposal several months ago to allow the local MLS soccer team to build a stadium at their own expense on downtown land that the City of Houston owned but...
Arena wasteland
Anne Linehan over at blogHouston.net has been having fun (as has Tory Gattis) watching Houston city officials try to rationalize how the city is not really going to have to cough up any money to subsidize a portion of the...
More on that little boondoggle
Charles Kuffner has an interesting post about the John Lopez column noted earlier here that suggested that the $80 million or so in public financing for the proposed downtown soccer stadium is a political payback to the minority groups that...
Rationalizing the latest boondoggle
Houstonians are currently enduring the rationalizations of a couple of boondoggles, a big one and a relatively small one. The Chronicle is always a good source for these rationalizations, such as this romantic interlude from Chron soccer writer Glenn Davis...
This boondoggle is getting personal
Well, at least the city's proposed financing for this boondoggle is less than this one ($80 million versus $150 million plus who knows how much?). But really. How many new and well-furnished high school football stadiums are located in the...
The Latest Coup
The New York Times has its faults, but it continues to be one of the best sources of international news reporting. Today, Times foreign correspondence Michael Wines writes this incredible story about the latest coup attempt in Equitorial Guinea, the...
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