neighborhood improvements

(I'm borrowing a few images from sawyerbrownstone.com, our townhouse's website)
James and I have been living here for almost a year. I love our townhouse! Our neighborhood is special. Houston lacks zoning laws which makes our neighborhood interesting. Any of you have warehouses for neighbors? Not to mention we're in that residential area near downtown where they were building 80 years ago... if you've always lived in suburbia then you probably can't appreciate what our neighborhood is like, but we've come up with some great improvements lately. First off: here's a satellite image courtesy of google maps of our immediate neighborhood before they built our townhouses.

(there's a target one block to the west or left of the image and the freeway is just north of the warehouse at the top)

The abandoned houses were owned by the elementary school... I heard a rumor that Oprah had something to do with it. Notice that I used past tense? YEP DEMOLISHED. I am so happy about that. Anyway check out what they plan to do on that block:
This is the Crockett elementary expansion.

That is good for our property value :)
Another excellent development is the bike path. They're still in progress but we are going to be linked up to miles of excellent path that drops right into downtown and also has a loop through a nice park by our house. I think this image is hilarious. Notice the bike path at the top? It's from the website for our town houses. they are going to build phase II really soon, so it's not to late to be our neighbor :)


Also, all of the new commercial right by our house is filling up. We've got Target, staples, petsmart, restaurants, etc. just a block away. Plus we're only 2 min. from I-10 (freeway). We're right in the middle of the spider-web style freeways of Houston, making it really convenient to get just about everywhere. If our neighborhood continues to gentrify at the current rate, then hopefully we'll be in a good spot when we need to sell (2 bedrooms will only cut it for a few more years).