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The Metropolitan Transit Authority board voted today on a Richmond-Wheeler route for its controversial University light rail line. But that was almost an anticlimax: It also voted to put light rail — not Bus Rapid Transit — on all five planned lines.

“We now feel we can pass federal muster (to obtain 50 percent funding) by going to light rail on all five lines at once,” board chairman David Wolff said. “We can’t help but believe that people will be thrilled by it.”

Today’s news is equally welcome and surprising. Mas, y mas.

The front page of the Chronicle (online) today is a story about developers in Midtown and how the rules of the TIRZ make it complicated to build in the area. This gives me an opportunity to repost something that has now expired from Google’s cache: A Houston Business Journal article from 1995 (one year before their online archives begin) describing some of these very early developers: Redevelopers launching first Midtown project, Houston Business Journal, June 2, 1995.

Further reading: houstonmidtown.com; Wikipedia: Midtown, Houston (whose map puts us just over the line into the 3rd Ward); HBJ articles about Midtown (since 1996); the cover story of Governing magazine earlier this year (via).

Some interesting stuff in the Houston Chronicle yesterday and today. First off, today’s frontpager, College parents find it hard to let go, featuring a number of cute Rice stories:

“I don’t want to find any of you hiding in the hedges tonight,” Leebron told a concert hall filled with parents Sunday.

But not everyone is ready to leave. Rekha Malhotra, of Fort Collins, Colo., cried as her youngest son, Parteek, unpacked his belongings.

“I have to call her every day,” Parteek said. “I thought she was joking at first.”

Move It!: Points to Ponder about Metro.

Culberson is fond of calling Metro’s post-election attraction to Richmond a bait and switch. Translation: Previous Metro leaders left Richmond off the ballot for tactical reasons, intending to resurrect it if the measure passed. Thus “Metro created this dilemma,” as he said recently.

The same kind of thinking — cynical or just reasonably suspicious? — might lead others to conclude that Culberson baited the trap by insisting that the routes be spelled out as a condition of his support, then kept quiet as Metro walked into it.

Let’s assume instead that both Culberson and Metro are acting in good faith.

Finally, on Sunday, an editorial calling for VVPATs (voter-verifiable paper audit trails; the ed refers to them simply as VVPBs—”… ballots”) in Texas voting machines, and an op-ed rebuttal by County Clerk Beverly Kaufman.

Chronicle: Culberson wants rail along Southwest Freeway. “The Houston Republican wants Metro to align the rail route with the Southwest Freeway from Main to near Kirby, where the sunken road, in essence, runs through a long concrete box.”

What Culberson, the Afton Oaks residents, and other rail opponents miss (through honest or willful misunderstanding) is that the Universities line is not intended to be primarily a commuter rail. It is instead a part of the ongoing long-term process of revitalizing and integrating Houston’s central neighborhoods; it will connect residents and students to existing workplaces and retail inside the loop. If you build the Universities rail line where there are no residents and no businesses, nobody will ride it. Now that’s a waste of tax dollars.

This isn’t urban planning; this is rail sabotage, and election-year constituency pandering that will have a detrimental impact on Houston revitalization for decades. To read more about resident-focused and business-friendly urban planning that can be brought to bear on the problem, poke around Christof Spieler’s Intermodality blog (look here for hard facts about rail on Richmond).

(Update, 12AM: When, by the way, will the ridiculous argument that “this line was voted on Westpark” die? Anti-Richmond-railers argue that the ballot explicitly places the east-west Universities line along the Westpark corridor, because that line’s bullets are under the heading “WESTPARK”. Does this mean we should also expect a rail line along a road called “SOUTHEAST”? METRO hadn’t yet conducted feasibility studies for the Universities line, and so the “WESTPARK” section is consequently quite vague, especially when compared with the other sections which identify specific roads and rights-of-way that will be involved in those other lines. Besides, even the Westpark corridor doesn’t extend all the way to Wheeler Station; Richmond must be involved somewhere, and as you can see it’s a part of every proposal METRO has put on the table.)

Update 8/14: Charles Kuffner follows up the Chron article with a clear statement of the anti-rail endgame:

The plan is simple: If Richmond is off the table, Metro is forced to put forth a lesser plan, such as this elevate-it-over-the-freeway scheme. The required feasibility studies then show that ridership will be insufficient and the expense will be excessive. Naturally, the Federal Transportation Administration refuses to provide funding, leaving Metro with the choice of finding its own money or giving up. And thus the anti-rail forces win.

NYT: Out of College, but Now Living in Urban Dorms.

This month, Ms. Cook is moving in. The woman on the phone, Karen Falcon (not a mass murderer), calls the building “a dorm for adults.” It is a community of the overeducated and underpaid.

There is nothing new about having roommates in New York City. What Ms. Falcon has invented is a full-service dorm, full of strangers she has brought together to share big apartments as a way to keep housing costs down. Her approach is a homegrown response to the soaring rents bedeviling desirable cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

How is this different from a 19th-century London boarding house?