A seller's market

If you go to the "single family" search page on the Houston Association of Realtors website and type "Centerpointe" in the subdivision box, you'll see something remarkable: only 2 active listings out of 438 homes (HAR pegs us at 436 but I had written down 438 during a POA meeting so I'm not sure which is the exact figure). 

That's an availability rate of less than half a percent at the height of the summer selling season, and quite a reversal from about a year ago when spec sales in Section 9 were wrapping up.  A few listings that had been on the market for quite some time have now either sold or gone under contract.  The situation seems to bode well for property values. 

From Wikipedia. 

Landscaping around utility boxes and lines

They are uglier than sin and often a major thorn in the side of any landscape plan.

Three car lateral garage with that kind of architectural detailing in Florida?  That might be a half-million-dollar house in the background, but I'd wager that this eyesore skims ten or twenty grand off its perceived market value.

Screengrabbed from this site. 

Not much better. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

There are a few creative (but usually expensive) commercial solutions on the market...

Some of these artificial rock covers such as this one from Brookstone appear to be high quality and are convincing to the eye - but unfortunately, they have high prices to match (generally $250 - $500 apiece!).   

Occasionally, some DIYer will hit a customized solution out of the park...

This is a screengrab from a post aptly titled "Genius Idea of the Week" by www.cloverandvine.com, but I can only access a cached image right now. 

...and similarly, there's always room for art:

Love it!!  But it's beyond the reach of most ordinary mortal homeowners. 
Screengrabbed from this site, which also will only load cached images today. 

In the series of photos below, I'll show you how we landscaped around our utility boxes.  We didn't just disguise them - we made the area very productive, to the point where it's paying us back for our investment.

Here are the ugly little buggers prior to the construction of our house...

...and here is the same area while construction was in progress.  Note two things here:  (1) My next-door neighbor didn't fare much better, as he ended up with a pad-mounted transformer in his portion of the easement.  And (2) the microscopic quality of our Centerpointe back yards becomes obvious here, as you can see just how far that house in the background extends toward the back fenceline, which is barely visible at photo right.  Their back yard at that point is probably less than 20 feet deep.  Probably smaller than their living room, in other words. 

Because of that microscopic quality of this back yard, I was not content to simply throw up a few bushes around these boxes and call it a done day.  I couldn't afford to lose the productivity of this space.

Ours is a particularly gruesome easement, because it wasn't encumbered by just one utility line - it has three (gas in yellow, electric in red, and fiber optic cable in orange).  And furthermore, those lines extended well beyond the trench established for the boxes, which thankfully were pushed up close to the back fence. 

The yellow arrows point to the same two boxes, which are partially obscured by the nursery containers. 

This is a very important thing to remember when you're dealing with landscaping in utility easements: Those utility boxes you see in your yard are just the barest tip of the iceberg.  There's all kinds of additional inconvenient crap going on beneath your lawn.  That photo above was from this post in which I talked about the importance of using utility locator services (Texas 811 in our case) before working around these things. 

You might look at all that nasty spray paint above and conclude that there isn't much hope for landscaping in this particular area of our yard.  But this is what that same painted corner looks like today:

Anything you plant in a utility easement is subject to being ripped out by the utility company if they ever have to work on their underground lines.  Partially for that reason, most of my landscaping assets in this area are "floating" rather than rooted.  I did add four POH Yaupon bushes directly in front of the boxes to hide them.  But I took the whole scheme much further than a simple vegetation screen.  I added two oblong stock tanks for vegetable gardening.  You can only see one of them here, because the POH hedge hides the other (I love those livestock tanks but at the same time, I didn't want the back yard to look like a metal factory).  The one visible stock tank floats directly over the buried electrical cable that runs to the right-of-way to power a street light. 

I had multiple reasons for using livestock tanks for vegetable gardening.  In this post, I talked about the importance of keeping our food-growing enterprises elevated, because our dog has to go potty in this microscopic back yard.  I also want to grow organically, and isolating the garden soil helps to control both chemistry and insect access. 

But in this particular corner of the yard, it was also essential that I have the ability to pick up the gardens and move them if the utility company needs to do any digging.  POH's are tougher than nails and can easily recover if they ever needed to be replanted, so basically there's nothing here that would get destroyed by a utility dig. I'd just have to move it all out of the way temporarily.  Given that I have no problem with soil back-loading, this wouldn't be a problem.

The second stock tank is sitting against the boxes, but not pushing on them.  The boxes are now sandwiched between the stock tank and the POH. 

I left good clearance around the electrical access in case the linemen ever needed to get at it.



Something else to keep in mind:  If you work around these things in your yard, be very careful about the potential for exposed lines.  Lines and cables are not supposed to be left above ground, but they sometimes are, as installers (who usually get paid by the job, not the hour) cut corners on installation.  See what the yellow arrow is pointing to?  I know from experience (insert long story here) that this is my next-door neighbor's cable TV line which the installation subcontractor did not bother to bury in a trench.  So I have to remain aware not to accidentally cut that thing (again) as I'm working in this area.  If one of us raised a stink with Comcast, we could probably force them to bury it as they should have originally.  But I don't want contractors messing with my area here, so I just watch out for it myself.

Those two little stock tanks have been my most productive gardens when evaluated on a per-square-foot basis:

Over two thousand cherry tomatoes last year.  Chart from this post. 

My costs for landscaping that utility-encumbered corner of the yard were approximately as follows:

• Two Behlen Country oblong stock tanks -  $250.
• Four POH Yaupons on clearance at Lowes - $120
• Pavers to support stock tanks - about $60
• Stock tank soil and amendments - about $50
• Mulch - about $30
• Edging stone (multi-blend four-inch) - about $100 (stone is obscenely expensive in greater Houston because of the transportation costs - it has to be trucked in from hundreds of miles away). 
• One small sage bush - about $10
• TOTAL:  Approximately $620 (all labor was DIY)
• Offset value of food harvested to date from these tanks: At least $150
• NET TOTAL: About $470, and continuing to drop as more vegetables are harvested.

Look again at what is achieved for that investment.  Do you think this raises my property value by at least $500?  I suspect the answer is yes. 

I've planted tomatoes again this spring.  You can see them coming up in both tanks.  Last summer it was okra. 

 Because I cook and freeze food in large volumes, I can really leverage the value of harvested food.  Last year's two thousand tomatoes formed a wicked-good base for a lot of spaghetti sauce, chili, and other dishes.  I put the off-set costs above just in case that kind of thing is important to some readers.  I garden as a hobby and I'm less concerned with pay-back, but when I start working the pay-back numbers, I'm always surprised at how high they are. 


The organic versions of these cute little hot-house packages are extremely expensive - about four dollars apiece.  Imagine how many of these could be filled by a harvest of two thousand tomatoes. 

Screengrabbed from this site.

What he said.  Or in my case, I get tomatoes.  Lots and lots of tomatoes. 

Meme source unknown and uncreditable, but here's Ron Finley's site.

So there are some of my ideas for maximizing the beauty and productivity of space around utility boxes and above buried utility lines.  Happy landscaping. 

And oh - if you've got the time for it, here is Ron's latest TED talk.  While not aimed at a typical affluent suburban scenario such as we have here, his gardening and food management ideas are universal.  Dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks, indeed. 

Whole-house ceramic tile

You may have spotted an unusual consistency across a half-dozen or so of my recent home design posts:

From a post on choosing a modern pendant lamp. 

From a post on making over an art niche.

From a post on developing an artistic coat rack solution.

From a post about finishing a room that must serve at least four different functions.

From a post about using area rugs as wall art. 

From a post about keeping expensive area rugs clean and free of dog smell. 

Yup.  We have ceramic tile throughout our entire house.  When we placed this order, our builder (Meritage Houston) announced to us that we were the first customer ever to order a house with tile in every single area - every closet, every bedroom, every square inch.

Not only that (and this is critical from a design perspective), it's the same tile throughout.  There are no seams or breaks across the entire expanse of the house.  That kind of visual continuity is really being emphasized in modern home design because it's clean and it visually expands and unifies all spaces, especially in an open concept or greatroom design. 

There's plenty of debate about the use of ceramic tile on the internet (such as this thread), with most commenters apparently coming down on the "no" side of opinion.  Let me explain the rationale for our "yes" decision:

• Ceramic was not my first choice.  I wanted polished concrete, but our builder did not offer that option, and we had ordered so many other changes to our architectural plan that I couldn't see tying the builder in knots by bringing in a third-party contractor for the floors. 

Here in the southern U.S., most suburban homes are built slab-on-grade and so, by default, we end up with gorgeous concrete floors - which we then proceed to cover up with horribly cheap finishes such as nylon wall-to-wall pile carpet!!!  This option shown above is right under your feet and right at your fingertips, supposing you could find a contractor to do the finishing for you.
Screengrabbed from Texas Concrete which is doing business in (where else) Austin, Texas.

OK, polished concrete being off the table, I evaluated my remaining options thusly.

• Natural stone would have been preferable and potentially more timeless, but just about all of the stone that is "financially attainable" for residential flooring is some grade of travertine.  Travertine has the following limitations:  It's soft, it's porous (it will stain unless you have a sealant, which means maintenance), and worst of all, it's almost always got a natural pastel yellowish cast to it. 

I have a good friend who has probably 2,000 square feet of travertine on the ground floor of his large house, and it looks much like this one shown above.  That floor is beautiful in its own way, but it throws yellow tones throughout the entire house.  Yellow would have been utterly incompatible with every color scheme I had planned for our home.  This kind of soft yellow backdrop is pretty much going to constrain you to using neutral and pastel color schemes, and I'm more of a primary-color person myself.  Unbreakable design rule: DON'T mix pastels and primaries. 

Travertine also looks very traditional and I was instead shooting for modern / contemporary / transitional style.

Screengrab above from this site. 

Wood flooring would have posed multiple design problems and burdens: 

• It would have been cost-prohibitive to have wood run through every space in the house.  The c-tile we chose added only $10,000 to the base price which, when you're building a house, is manageable and a tiny percentage of the total mortgage.  A good quality wood flooring could easily have been two to four times that price (I would not have considered laminate or cheap grades of engineered product).  That would not have been a wise investment at our suburban price point. 
• Wood also presents an undesirable color constraint.  I wouldn't have wanted a dark wood on such a massive scale, which meant I'd have to get a light wood, which would also have presented a yellow tone problem similar to travertine. 
• I haven't shown most of this in any of my posts to date, but several of our rooms are dominated by natural wood furniture.  To have wood flooring beneath a bunch of wood furniture would have represented death-by-wood.  Wood overload.  No design contrast or balance could have been achieved. 

Look again at this photo:  How would this room have looked with a wood floor??  Not good.  I already have two wood tones in the four visible pieces of solid wood office furniture.  Without question, I needed a stone-looking floor to counterbalance all that wood.

Also, look very carefully at this overall color scheme.  This wood furniture is throwing all kinds of yellow tone.  What would have this looked like if the floor (supposing it had been travertine) had also been throwing yellow tones?  The result would have been death-by-yellow.  This is one of the most common design mistakes that I see suburban homeowners making - allowing too much yellow into their designs without corresponding tonal counterpoints.  This floor had to be an utterly neutral canvas if the result were to have any kind of sophistication to it. 

The neutral floor has the effect of legitimizing the blonde furniture in particular.  The blonde furniture "pops" against the neutral floor and looks "intentionally blonde" as a result.  If the floor itself had also been yellowish, the blonde furniture would have instead looked out-of-date (it's 20 years old, from back when "natural" oak was popular). 

• We have a fairly large dog and I garden extensively.  Both of us dash through the house with muddy feet.  Wood floors would not have been able to withstand our collective abuse.  One of my previous houses had white oak through most of its first floor, including the kitchen (installed by the previous owner, not me).  Even though it was a commercial grade of white oak, it was an absolute nightmare to maintain that stuff in a wet environment like a kitchen.  We literally had to move out for a week to get it refinished, and the kitchen floor was still visibly wearing out much, much faster than the rest of the house, so where would that have left me in the long run if I had kept that house?  Doing wildly-expensive custom repairs at some point to re-match new sections of kitchen wood to the rest of the first floor.  This is way too much overhead.  Not practical. 

So our final choice basically came down to process of elimination.  In order to achieve the desired durability, color control (again, notice that there are no yellow floor overtones in any of my pics above), cost control, and design impact, ceramic tile was the only sensible option.  We chose as generic a concrete-looking tile as possible, and we chose it in the newer 18-inch size so it would look more in-style over the long term. 

I can't tell you how happy I am that we chose ceramic tile.  Here is my personal myth-buster opinion list in response to the most common ceramic tile criticisms:

1. It's a safety / slip hazard:  In three years, not one of us has slipped and fallen down (except the dog as she's careening madly around corners).  This argument simply doesn't parse in most foreseeable scenarios.  Almost all tract-home suburbanites already have ceramic tile kitchen and bathroom floors by builder-grade default, as well as ceramic tiled entryways.  How often have you fallen down on those?  Not often, eh?  So why would you think it would be a problem in the dry areas your house when it's not an existing problem in your wet areas?  If you're very sloppy in your house, if you let small children drag food around your house and smear it on the floor, yes indeed, you might have a problem with slip hazards.  But I would not foresee a significantly elevated risk under normal circumstances of cleanliness. 
2. It's hard on the leg joints:  We haven't noticed any issues.  Again, most of the leg-work people do in their houses is in the kitchens, which already have c-tile floors.  I tend to wear Tevas or tennis shoes during my marathon cooking sessions, for arch support.  I would do this regardless of how the floor was finished, because I'm old. 
3. It's cold on the feet:  We live on the subtropical upper Texas coast.  A cool floor is a godsend for us.  I believe it helps to keep our home cool during the summer months.  The ground beneath the slab is cooler than the prevailing outdoor air.  Having a carpet on the floor would insulate against that subterranean coolness from penetrating through to the house. 
4. It imparts a cold and sterile atmosphere to your house:  This is only true if you fail to complete your house with area rugs, furniture, drapery, and accessories.  Look at the pics of my house above.  Look at the living room with its 8' x 10' wool area rug.  Does it look cold, sterile, and impersonal? 
5. Your house will be an echo-chamber if all the floors are ceramic:  This is only true if you fail to complete your house with area rugs, furniture, drapery, and accessories.  When you walk into an empty fully-tiled house that has no furniture, yes, it's an echo chamber.  But that's not how it's intended to be lived in. 
6. It would be bad for resale value.  My realtor tried to argue this.  He said, "You know you're never going to sell that house with c-tile in the bedrooms."  My reply was, "You know I've never sold a house without a bidding war on it.  We are just a bit ahead of our time with this one.  By the time we need to sell this place X years from now, solid flooring will be de rigueur, and we will already be in line with the market's expectations."  I've been with my realtor for 20 years and he's handled six of our eight residential transactions in that time.  All four of our historical sales were by bidding war.  Even if solid flooring does not become de rigueur, there is already a sufficiently large buyer pool with asthma and other health conditions that would refuse to buy a house with wall-to-wall carpeting.  They would jump at the chance to buy a "done from top to bottom" place like our Centerpointe house. 
7. Ceramic tile cracks if you drop anything on it.  More accurately, it will chip, but you have to really screw up to have this occur.  For instance, my husband dropped a heavy steel claw hammer from a height of eight feet and it carved a quarter-inch divet in one tile.   It's not something that people notice, although we may eventually get a tiler to replace that tile.  If you have a problem with ceramic tile cracking, then there may have been a problem with your initial installation.   

Anyway, there's lots more I could say in favor of ceramic tile, like how incredibly easy it is to keep clean (massive money and time savings on the cleaning aspect alone), but this post is getting long, so I will close for now. 

The best use of Centerpointe volunteer time

In this recent post, I asserted my viewpoint that, if anyone in Centerpointe feels the urge to devote time to enhancing the neighborhood, that time should not be squandered developing new ways to put the run on pickers. 

Of course, my opinion begs the following question:  What would be a more productive use of a volunteer's time, if they had some extra time to give to devote to subdivision issues?

Those of you who read this blog already know my answer:  Develop a neighborhood outreach initiative that encourages residents to establish some friggin' landscaping in their back yards!!

Recall this frightful scene:

View looking between two rows of houses that are several years old now.  In other words, none of these residents planted anything significant in those intervening years.

I can guarantee you that views like this will not help neighborhood property values.
You never hear a prospective buyer say, "Oooooh look, honey!  Absolutely no privacy!  How wonderful!"

And recall my subsequent comparison of the overall "feel" of this to rows of prison cells overlooking a common corridor.  The suburban analog to Alcatraz, in other words. 

Most residents of Centerpointe are not the slightest bit dumb.  They know that a barren-earth back yard will not help their resale values.  However, many of those residents:

1. Are not from this part of the country.  They moved here because of career transfers.  They simply don't know what plants would grow well here as a result of having no experience in this climate.
2. Have limited time because they're working hard to pay for their lifestyles.  They can only devote a small amount of time to their yards.
3. Have limited interest in landscaping.  Everyone without exception is interested in higher property values, but landscaping in itself is very boring for many folks.

Earlier this year, I started trying to help supply some tools that might lead to at least partial resolution of this issue by creating a database of blog posts in which I showcase a bunch of plants that: 

1. Are immediately available at retailers within two miles of Centerpointe.
2. Grow well in our climate, including having resistance to both drought and freeze episodes.
3. Are extremely cost-effective - almost shockingly low-priced. 
4. Require virtually no maintenance. 
5. Work well in the tiny back yards that most of us have.  They are scale-appropriate and don't overwhelm our restricted spaces. 

It's about time that I resumed the building of that blog database, for the following reasons:

1. Fall is a great time to plant many things.  The cooler weather allows landscaping to get its roots established for a few months before having to face the onslaught of summer heat.
2. YIPPEE!!!  The Houston Garden Center annual 70% off sale is now back on!!

If you just want a plant-it-and-leave-it backyard landscape, there is not much that you would need that is not on this list.
Screengrabbed from http://houstongardencenters.com/ad.php

The answer is no, they don't give me any kickbacks for blogging them.  I refer to them because they have great sales and because they are located about one mile from the Centerpointe front entrance.  It doesn't get any easier than this. 

Just to drive home my point about neighborhood improvement priorities, let's do the following thought experiment. 

Let's compare potential bang for the volunteer buck.

Let's say that someone puts forth a concerted effort and we eliminate pickers and then I'm proven wrong about theft causality, and petty thefts magically cease. 

Well, let's look at what the likely result of that scenario would be.  In the last six months, Centerpointe residents have collectively lost the following due to petty theft or attempted burglary (as tabulated on the Crime Reports website, exclusive of an alleged wire fraud that was not physically connected to the neighborhood):

1. One Apple Macbook from an unlocked vehicle.
2. Items of unstated monetary value from an unlocked vehicle.
3. One residential pre-hung back door (busted but not entered).

So what are we talking about here??  Perhaps three thousand dollars total collective losses?

OK - in our thought experiment, let's compare that to the estimated property value forfeiture that is occurring because a high percentage of residents have landscaping that is arguably substandard for our price-point.

Let's say that perhaps, on average, we each forfeit 1% of our property value because we either have no landscaping, and/or we're flanked by stark and less-appealing McMansions that have no landscaping and no privacy as a result.

HAR says that Centerpointe's median appraised value is $221,600 and that there are 405 homes here.

Do the math.  Assuming that very reasonable 1% loss, it works out to be a little less than one million dollars that Centerpointers are leaving on their collective property value table. 

Personally I suspect that lack of landscaping causes a much bigger hit to a property value than 1%, but you get the picture.  This is a crude conservative estimate I'm doing simply for illustrative purposes here.  Some accounts say that property values could be increased 10% to 20% by good lanscaping.  Do THAT math and then resume reading this after you've picked yourself up off the floor.

SO, the question then becomes:  If you have time to spare, do you want to devote that time to resolving the conditions that collectively might continue to cost us a few thousand bucks a year, or do you want to resolve the conditions that are effectively costing us a million bucks or more?

To me, this is a total no-brainer.  Stay tuned for additional Centerpointe-centric blog posts about how to improve your landscaping for almost no money. 

Sidewalk surprise

In case you haven't noticed, there are new sidewalk segments currently being installed around our part of League City.

SH 96 WB at Hwy 3, yesterday evening.

My teenaged daughter looked at these things rather quizzically and asked, "But how are people going to use them?  They don't seem to go anywhere."

My response was, "At this point, I don't know, and I don't care - all I know is that we have to start somewhere if we are every going to improve the cohesion and connectivity of this city.  Almost anything they do in this regard is better than nothing.  We've got nowhere to go but up."

Simultaneously with this construction effort, Houston Tomorrow released this article stating the obvious:

Wish they wouldn't use that funky title font.  It's difficult to read.
Screengrabbed this morning from:
http://www.houstontomorrow.org/livability/story/walkable-neighborhoods-more-valuable/

Yes.  Among other observations, when you can move freely from Point A (your house) to Point B (a target venue), you tend to spend your money at Point B because it becomes an alternate path of least resistance.  If I have to go to the trouble to get in my car, I might as well keep on going right on out of League City to some other venue - they all become more-or-less equivalent at that point.  But if I could instead walk my dog to conduct the same activity, I'd rather kill two birds with one stone.  But for that, I need a safe place to actually set down my feet in the act of walking.  A sidewalk fits that elusive description perfectly. 

Anyway, I like the juxtaposition of the sign with this new amenity, and with that, I shall close.

ONE WAY to increase property values and foster economic activity is to add sidewalks such that people can then move freely around the area.

Tract home trauma, Part 1: Avoid kitchen cabinetry failure

In my last post, I described a Houston trend that drives me batty:  folks in otherwise-upscale subdivisions allowing their fences to look like crap. 

On the same theme, here's another local phenomenon I simply don't understand: folks failing to install hardware on their kitchen and bathroom cabinets, hardware otherwise known as cabinet pulls or knobs. 

These were about $4.00 apiece at a big-box hardware store.  I can't find a listing for this exact product right now and they may have been discontinued due to style changes, but these are somewhat similar.

It's usually up to home buyers to install this kind of hardware, especially if the home was a "spec" (built for speculative sale in the open market) rather than a "dirt sale" (contracted ahead of construction by a specific buyer).  Builders don't generally supply these things unless they are chosen by the buyer as an upgrade because they are so taste-specific, and once you've drilled a set of holes for them, you're married to that hardware for the duration of the cabinetry (which is one of the reasons why I chose knobs instead of handle pulls, because knobs only require a single hole per cabinet and can be easily changed out as styles evolve). 

These are not just for style or convenience - they are important for preserving both the structural integrity and the surface finish of your cabinetry.  Regardless of whether you have entry-level grade cabinets or upgraded cabinets, knobs perform two functions:

(1)  They minimize natural skin oils and food residues from coming into direct contact with the wood or paint finish of your cabinetry and degrading it.  When you open the cabinet, you should be touching knobs rather than the wood finish itself.  In just the course of a few years, oils can break down the cabinet stain around the touch points, making them look awful and shortening the life of the cabinet finish considerably.

(2) They help extend the life of the structure by minimizing lateral stresses on the joinery.  When knobs are not present, people tend to open drawers by grabbing the edges semi-randomly, often in an off-center manner such as this:

If you grab it like this, you're actually pulling sideways as well as straight out.  This has the potential to loosen the joinery over time, because if you pull sideways on a rectangular object, the forces serve to want to elongate that rectangle out-of-square.  If you've ever opened a cabinet drawer and notice that it's "wobbly", this is likely a contributing factor. 

The problem with this is that the structure was not designed to take that kind of sideways forcing.  If you look carefully at the way the drawers are constructed, you will see why:

The drawer facing (the pretty part that shows at the front) is typically connected to the body of the drawer using four heavy screws - two at each side.  HOWEVER...

...the body of the drawer itself is attached to the front portion using staples!  In this case, only three staples, and not very heavy ones at that. 

Let's take a closer look at this configuration:

Why kitchen cabinets are built like this, I do not know, but I've seen this type of construction in a wide variety of cabinets chosen by multiple builders in the greater Houston area.  Even "upgraded" cabinets may look like this.  "Upgraded" sometimes means that the manufacturer puts on a more fancy or elaborately-trimmed wooden cabinet face, but the structure of the cabinetry itself remains the same. 

I've been in Houston houses less than five years old where all the drawers in the kitchen are either loose, or the drawer fronts have totally fallen off.  Once those side staples start to loosen, it becomes difficult to restore the drawer through a repair process because those sides are usually made out of fiberboard, not wood.  Therefore, as the staples work their way loose, the fiberboard tends to crumble around them, making the whole thing very difficult to put back together again. 

If you install drawer knobs, you'll be pulling the drawer basically straight out every time you open it, rather than on a slight angle.  This can minimize the stresses on the side staples. 

Within about one week of moving into our Centerpointe house, I got busy installing knobs on everything in sight.  At the time, my husband questioned whether installing cabinet hardware was really a top priority, given that we had so much unpacking to complete.  Answer:  Yes.  I can't think of a faster way to reduce a home's value than to allow damage to occur to kitchen cabinets.  If you allow your drawers to weaken structurally, a future buyer is going to notice that and conclude that all that cabinetry is worn out and needs to be replaced, at a cost of many thousands of dollars.  Less than a hundred dollars worth of appropriate hardware can help extend the life of cabinets and minimize the chances of such a scenario arising.

To knob or not to knob...
there is no question.
These cabinets are now 2 years old and look as good as they did the day they were installed.

On the issue of subdivision gates

The following comment was included verbatim in the last neighborhood newsletter:

"I have asked several neighbors what their thoughts were about our neighborhood adding gated access for a one-time assessment fee.  I would feel much safer, and I think it would go a long way towards property value retention as well.   Is there a way to petition interest?  Those asked were all for it."

This is where I invite folks from the blogosphere to comment if they have specialized knowledge regarding this issue.  When I try to search for applicable regulations on the internet, what I get is too much legal detail and not enough 30,000-foot view (as some of the screengrabs below will illustrate), so the statements below might not be correct or complete. 

That being said, from the information I have been able to assemble, subdivision gates appear to be a non-starter for Centerpointe.  There's no use petitioning to see if there's support because even if 100% of residents express a preference for them, we lack the legal basis to install them even if by some miracle we could collectively afford the cost. 

Centerpointe's streets were originally platted (and remain) as public rights-of-way.   As such, it would seem that they cannot be impeded or restricted without major legal action which would probably involve vacating them AS public rights-of-way and getting them declared as private property instead.  After that point, our little POA (rather than the City of League City) would then be responsible for maintaining both the streets and the gates in perpetuity, with the streets being to a standard of quality equal to or better than similar public rights-of-way.  

(Not only that, if you start researching what it takes to administratively and functionally maintain gates, your hair might fall out from the enormity of it.) 

An anecdotal report seems to support the private property basis described above.  We have some friends in the well-known Sugar Creek subdivision in Sugar Land.   If you look at the entrance to Sugar Creek, you can see a curious thing:

What's wrong with this picture?!
Why would you have a shack in a location such as this?
So you can simply watch as cars zoom by?
Screengrab from the Googlemaps little highway man.

There's a rather fancy entrance shack upon which a lot of money was obviously spent, but no corresponding gates are present.  Rumor has it that gates WERE installed at one time, but were removed because someone sued the subdivision for barricading a public right-of-way.  It's not legal to do that, and so the gates had to be removed.

I haven't been able to verify for certain that this did, in fact, happen, but if I look at the anecdotal references on the internet, they unilaterally support this notion that only private streets can be gated. 

For instance, the City of Colleyville's municipal code discusses gating regulations at length, and while that content is strictly applicable only to that city, is is undoubtedly consistent with state law precedents.

Note the immediate distinction between public and private streets.
URL here. 

Similarly, guidance for subdivisions platted in County-controlled areas also makes reference to the issue of private property.  For example:

Excerpted from Hunt County, Texas subdivision guidance.
URL here. 

Well, heck, that's all well and fine, but what does League City itself say?!

League City's Code of Ordinances is maintained on the Municode platform.  Again, it's a lot of detail and less of the 30,000-foot view, but these passages are instructive:

Again we see the public-private distinction,
and Centerpointe's streets are public.

There is a large passage detailing the technical standards that apply to gates, but again, the emphasis is on the streets being private, not public.
URL here. 

So there you have what appear to be the facts of this matter: legally we couldn't install gates even if we wanted to.  But if a sufficient number of residents express a desire to investigate this issue further, by all means, get together and approach City Council in order to feel them out on the likelihood of the City's approving a request to vacate our streets, and by all means, derive some supportable estimates of the corresponding costs, and I'll publish them here for initial contemplation. 

UPDATE 2:12 pm:
Here are a few comments from the property management company on the subject of gates:

• Initial costs of up to $50,000 to install gates can be expected (not sure if that's per-entrance or per the three entrances).
• From that point forward, homeowners must pay the subdivision's electrical bills (streetlights) and all repairs to lights and streets (resulting in a signficant increase in annual property assessments). 
• Telephone lines would also have to be added to each gate and paid for monthly.
• Monthly maintenance on gates is expected to be $500 - $8,000 (they are very subject to damage from motorists) - again, these costs would be added to everyone's assessments. 
• Would require insurance policy rate increase - another monthly expense.
• Remote control devices are $20 - $35 apiece, paid for by homeowners. 
• Police would no longer patrol the subdivision or respond to calls regarding offenses such as automobile speeding, because the streets would be private property.

That last one kinda clinches it for me.  At this time I cannot foresee any net benefit to discontinuing police patrols in here.

Property values: Centerpointe first impressions

As one of the very first buyers to sign a contract for a house build in Section 9, it may surprise you to learn that my first reaction upon seeing Centerpointe was absolute horror.  We examined all Clear Lake neighborhoods prior to making a buying decision, and my first response to the possibility of buying here wasn't "No" - it was "HELL, NO!!"

Why?!?

Because THIS is the first thing I noticed about the neighborhood:

Not a single scrap of vegetation anywhere.
Most of the cheap apartments I've rented in my lifetime have offered greater privacy than what is seen here.

That commonly-repeated neighborhood scene reminded me overwhelmingly of THIS:

This is a screengrab of a corridor in a maximum security prison - I believe this may be Alcatraz.  Same general configuration - rows of windows facing a completely sterile intervening space through which sun shines down.

Now, some of you may be thinking, "Hey, wait a minute - this is a new neighborhood - there hasn't been time for vegetation to grow."

There are two rebuttals to that as follows:

(1) Centerpointe is actually not that young.  Some parts are a decade old.  The conditions depicted above are not restricted to its youngest sections.

(2) At this price point, it is appropriate to invest in the kind of landscaping that would be visible from common areas from Day One of installation.  So even if the houses are young, one would expect to see good landscaping conspicuously in progress.

What I concluded initially as a house-shopper was that Centerpointe is the kind of subdivision where people throw up tract homes and then fail to incrementally improve them.  And that is THE kiss of death from a property values standpoint.  

The same phenomenon is visible in aerial photograph throughout the neighborhood: two builder-grade trees in each front yard, a few one-gallon foundation shrubs, and virtually nothing in any back yard.

Homes in far-flung Houston subdivisions generally do not appreciate in value.  In recent years, there has been value contraction.  Additionally, those of us who contracted new houses to be built according to specific tastes paid a premium for that service, a premium that we will not necessarily realize upon resale.  The only way the average Houston suburban homeowner can hope to recoup anything close to their original purchase price is to make smart incremental investments in their properties, investments that cause the properties to stand out from the competition.

Screengrab from a real estate listing of many months ago.  Rest assured, no potential buyer  ever responded to a scene like this by declaring, "Oh, look, honey - absolutely no privacy - how wonderful!!"

Artist's rendition of the Meritage Aspen, as shown on Meritage's Centerpointe marketing page.
What makes the big impression here is not the house - it's the ambiance, the feeling of richness.  Without the landscaping, the house is just another generic tract house.

So what ultimately compelled us to buy in Centerpointe, if our first reaction was wholly negative?

It's a long, long story involving the types of necessities and compromises that characterize our unusual family life.  Suffice it to say that one of the compromises I made with myself is that I would offer to the neighborhood my knowledge on how this kind of incremental investment deficiency can be rectified - and for far less money than you might think.  In order to build in Centerpointe, my husband and I each sold our individual Clear Lake houses at a profit during the Great Recession when many local sellers were probably not able to break even - both of them, at a profit.  We know how to maximize return on investment where suburban tract homes are concerned.

And so in an upcoming series of blog posts, I'll offer some small-yard, privacy-maximizing landscape ideas, complete with budgets and sourcing.

Several families have already asked me to lend a hand in this regard, and our own investment efforts to date here in Centerpointe have elicited some humorous responses from other homeowners.  One resident confessed to sneaking into the upper floor of a house under construction so that he could get an elevated view across the neighborhood and into our back yard, because he wanted to see what is growing there.  Another resident referred to me in conversation as "the one with landscaping".  I was trying to explain to him where I lived, and I was saying, "...you turn right and then make a left and then make another left --" when he cut me off and said, "Oh yeah - I know who you are.  You're the one with landscaping."  Note the use of the phrase "the one".  THE one - the ONLY one with landscaping on this side of the neighborhood.  Maybe it should be my Native American name: instead of Dances With Wolves, Crazy Horse, or Maria Tallchief, I'm The One With Landscaping.
:-)

So stay tuned for those upcoming posts.  And happy Labor-Day-plus-first-cold-front-of-fall.