Montrose Boulevard businesses concerned about planned road reconstruction
HOUSTON - A long-awaited plan to rebuild and redevelop Montrose Boulevard is on hold, as city hall reviews it, and several infrastructure projects. The project is about 1.8 miles between the Southwest Freeway and Allen Parkway.
If you've seen the reconstruction of North Shepherd, remember putting light rail on Main Street, or completely rebuilding the Katy Freeway, it will be a mess. When work begins, some of the businesses along the busy road are concerned about surviving until it's finished.
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The corner of Montrose and Clay is where Phase-1 of the project will end, right in front of Dave Skorka's The Auto Doc garage, where he's worked on cars and trucks since 2001. He's not against the idea of improving the road, but has some worries about what's to come.
"It's going to be ugly, and it's going to be lengthy, and it's going to impact my bottom line, my employees," he says. "Everyone else up and down this road is going to suffer."
Construction is designed to vastly-improve drainage and mobility for traffic and pedestrians through the 120-year-old neighborhood that has grown dramatically. Critics complain that lane-redesigns, along with replacing old and damaged sidewalks with 10-foot wide pedestrian walks, will prompt a wide collection of old growth trees to be cut down or endangered by the work.
A little further down Montrose, the 43-year-old La Mexicana restaurant, is in the path of the project's Phase-2. Owners know the work is coming, and say they'd like to see an open-discussion about their future balanced with the needs of rebuilding, before digging begins.
"You'd directly affect the route that people use to get here, and if you change that one aspect, they're going to notice," says Dante Trevino. "They might not be too happy and decide to go somewhere else, and that's the last thing you want."
Back at The Auto Doc, a little dissatisfaction remains along with some resignation that the pain may be unavoidable.
"It's like dental work," says Skorka. "It sucks going through it. But at the end of the day, it looks beautiful, right?"
The Montrose Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, or TIRZ, is overseeing the project and says decisions have come through community input. A start date has not been established, while Mayor John Whitmire's administration completes its review.