New grocery store for League City

It's not the announcement that many of us have been hoping for, but perhaps it will stimulate a higher degree of healthy free-market competition:  GCDN's Laura Elder reports that a new HEB grocery store will be built at the corner of League City Parkway and South Shore Blvd.

As reported, it'll go in that vacant tract you see roughly in the center of this screengrab from Googlemaps.  That light-colored building you see near the top of the photo is the existing Kroger Signature store, which is why I say "healthy competition" - they will aim to take customers from each other, so perhaps they'll accomplish some of that edging-out-the-other stuff by actually offering edible fresh vegetables for sale. 

At the very least, this is potentially good news for every suffering Leaguer who lives on the east side of the freeway!!  We Centerpointers have an easy jaunt to get to the existing west-side HEB - we just zip down the IH-45 feeder.  But there's only one way to get back home from it, and that involves taking one's life in one's hands by dealing with a forty-year-old obsolete freeway cloverleaf (and God knows when TxDOT is ever going to fix that mess), plus navigating the interminable construction on FM 646.  In sum, it's a short but acutely miserable transit experience to which I will gladly say good riddance. 

Even by Houston's perpetually-under-construction standards, this has been the definition of suck.  They waited wa-ay too long to improve the cow path that had remained FM 646 even as development along it increased by orders of magnitude.

Screengrabbed from TxDOT's project page. 

But this is not the Whole Foods that we have been hoping for, nor does it sound like it's going to be the Central Market that we were hoping for as a consolation prize. 

Oh well.  Each new day brings us closer to a chance at a happier announcement.