| | | | | | | |
|
|
|
|
McAllen’s Green Movement Threatened by Uncertain Real Estate Market
98 Views ::
0 Comments ::  :: LOCAL |
In an article by James Osborne, The Monitor, he explains the plans spread out on the meeting room table takes a small, four-decade-old park honoring the city's firefighters and turns it into an outdoorsman's paradise in the middle of the city.
Rip out the overgrown brush and make campsites; fill the dried resaca with water and then stock it with game fish like perch and bass - all in a location tucked away near the intersection of Second Street and Business 83.
"It's hard to find places to camp here, where you're not driving all the way out to a state park," said McAllen Parks Director Larry Pressler. "We're hoping someone will buy the old water treatment plant and turn it into a restaurant. It would have a great view over the lake." The $1 million project is still awaiting grant approval from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, but it's emblematic of a push in McAllen City Hall to both increase green space and create new sorts of parks - outdoor oasis that offer more than the standard playground and barbecue pits.
But there are questions reverberating around the parks department about how the city will pay for it all. Under the city's development code, residential developers must provide 1 acre of park space for every 62 housing units, or pay a parks fee of $700 for every home on the property.
But the estimated cost to the city parks system for each new residence, based on a complex formula factoring in land values and park usage, is about $1,800, Pressler said. "But if new subdivisions keep coming in, and we're going to provide them with parks, fees need to go up."
As the McAllen area continues on a more than decade-long period of unprecedented growth, a race is under way to build enough parks for all the new residents of the city.
But passing the burden on to developers, either through land handovers or fees in keeping with parks costs, has met with general resistance from City Hall. The City Commission voted to increase fees from $300 to $700 per residence a couple of years ago, based on the recommendations of a committee comprised of both developers and park space advocates. But those recommendations, while an improvement, were tempered by political realities, said Danny Gurwitz, a lawyer and chairman of the McAllen Parks and Recreation Board.
"We couldn't go from what it was to the number we needed. It was too much," he said. "To go from $300 to $3,500, you may just get the door slammed in your face and not get anything."
In comparison to the rest of the state, McAllen's parks fees are relatively high, said John Crompton, a parks and recreation professor at Texas A&M University.
But McAllen's draw over other Rio Grande Valley cities is based in many ways on amenities like neighborhood parks - or better yet, a sought-after spot along the Second Street hike-and-bike trail, said real estate developer Tony Domit.
"Everyone wants to live there," he said. "McAllen is more expensive, but there's a reason people buy here." That may be true, that everyone wants to live in McAllen, however at what cost? I would suggest that the one acre or $700 per unit costs to the developers was never intended to solely fund an endeavor of this size. Expecting developers to pay for a restaurant may be a little over the top.
That doesn’t mean that the planned park is not an excellent idea, it merely means that partial funding for the same may have to come from taxpayers, user fees and business interests. To even consider asking or demanding developers to pay $3500.00 per unit for the park is a prescription for disaster in a market where lower priced products are leading the sales.
Why should a new homebuyer be required to make a $3500.00 donation to the park? Make no mistake about it the developers will have no choice but to pass the cost along to the homebuyers and any outlandish onetime assessment may in fact be “biting the hand that feeds you.” Developers develop for a profit and homebuyers are your new neighbors who will provide a much needed resource for the expansion of jobs in the McAllen area: workers.
 While single family real estate sales in McAllen based on the number of units sold are only slightly off from last year the dollar amounts in gross sales are down.
What that means in plain English is that lower priced housing is outpacing the higher end products.
What affect this will have on revenues for the park system remains to be seen.
In any event, it is generally considered to be a near term problem because all the experts agree that Texas is poised to have a real estate boom once the US economy and financial markets straighten out.
Couple that with the fact that McAllen real estate sales and growth are outperforming the nation and most of Texas and then the picture doesn’t look so bleak.
Read Full Story |
|
|
|
|
| Comments | Currently, there are no comments. Be the first to post one!
Click here to post a comment |
|
| | | | | | | |
|
|