Growth ops

In the "hard to miss" category, there is that new construction on the southwest corner of Walker Street and W. League City Parkway, just south of Centerpointe.

Construction fencing has gone up across from the new "Gas Dude".  Pic taken yesterday evening.

A Centerpointe resident emailed me asking if I knew what this was, but then followed up by sending me an August 15, 2012 GCDN blog entry by Laura Elder which suggested that it's going to be a Stripes convenience store. 

We don't have one of these anywhere in our area yet.  This is what their brand looks like, as screengrabbed from their homepage.  Note the intimate association with the taco company. 

Laura has yet to confirm this report, however, and thus far I haven't been able to do it myself either.  I may have been the one to initially break the Gas Dude story (see the blog post from last January titled "Construction mystery solved"), but I've been out of the country for several weeks which is my excuse for falling down on the job here.
:-)

Galveston CAD hasn't helped my initial inquiries.  I'm not sure how much lag time affects their records updates, but as of yesterday, it still showed that tract as belonging to the Credit Union across the street.

Here's a screengrab from the County plat map, centered on the W. Walker / W. League City Parkway intersection. 
The tract in question is on record as being 15-2-0 (shorthand cross reference) at 2.081 acres in size.

And here's a screengrab of the associated ownership record.
Note that it says "W. League City Pkwy" without reference to a precise street address, however.

Part of the hurdle in tracking this down is that I can't find where it has yet been assigned an actual street address.  An actual number is the key to picking the informational lock on any given property, at least from a passive armchair (read: lazy) blogging perspective. 

This will not be the only new construction to potentially affect us here in Centerpointe in the coming months.  After a few years of commercial developmental doldrums, we should expect to see accelerated dirt sales in our general area in the near future.   There tends to be a "domino effect" with development, where a few large projects touch off a cascade of additional projects as investors try to ride a hoped-for profit wave.  I suspect that we've recently reached a developmental tipping point with the announcement of the following initiatives:

• There's the massive $70 million Tanger project underway just down the freeway from us near Dickinson. 
• The Victory Lakes Park 'n' Ride recently opened.
• Last week, a large movie theatre project was announced.  This will fundamentally change the character of the commercial area to the south of us and will likely prompt coat-tail projects just by itself.
• UTMB recently opened its Victory Lakes cancer center.

All of these things and others contribute to developmental momentum.  I'll have additional blog posts in the future as we learn more about what's in store for our area.