Community and elected leaders railed Tuesday against a potential plan to turn a rundown corner of Southmore and Live Oak into a gas station and convenience store.<\/p>\n
“This will be the fifth convenience store, gas station in less than a 200 meter radius,” said State Rep. Jolanda Jones. \u00a0“That’s unacceptable.”<\/p>\n
Jones and others organized their fight just within the last few days after seeing a public notice about a proposed re-platting which may be difficult to stop given Houston’s lack of zoning laws.<\/p>\n
And it’s unclear if deed restrictions apply to this particular property.<\/p>\n
“Let me be clear, we are not opposed to development,” said adjacent homeowner Julia Saunders. \u00a0“But a gas station and convenience store is the wrong development for a residential area already struggling with serious crime.”<\/p>\n
Saunders is among those also worried about the impact on property values.<\/p>\n
“We’re not asking for special treatment, we’re asking for common sense.”<\/p>\n
“The inexcusable lack of caring about what comes to our community is very concerning to me,” said \u00a0neighborhood president Tomaro Bell, who is also a longtime Riverside Terrace resident. \u00a0“We just had an amazing State of the City, we are a part of the city.” \u00a0“Let us relish in some of the wonderfulness that is happening in the city, don’t take it from us, we don’t deserve that.”<\/p>\n
Right now, the city’s planning commission is set to take up the matter next month.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, residents have already organized a special town hall meeting for Friday night in order to mobilize against the store even more.<\/p>\n
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it on this corner,” said Sharon Evans Brooks with the Riverside Civic Association.<\/p>\n
We did reach out to a representative for the fuel company whose name was on the notice of public hearing but have not heard back.<\/p>\n
Friday’s meeting is from 6 to 8 p.m. at Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Community and elected leaders railed Tuesday against a potential plan to turn a rundown corner of Southmore and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1871,4627,56,58,57,68501,10440,68500,68502],"class_list":{"0":"post-169127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-convenience-store","9":"tag-gas-station","10":"tag-houston","11":"tag-houston-headlines","12":"tag-houston-news","13":"tag-jason-miles","14":"tag-jolanda-jones","15":"tag-potential-development","16":"tag-riverside-terrace"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}