Montrose Libraries and Acres Homes Moving Forward After All

After all, two previously halted library projects will actually start moving forward, Houston Public Library Executive Director Cynthia Wilson said Thursday.

The city’s plan to open a new library space inside the Montrose Collective on Westheimer Road, which was derailed by a surprise announcement from Mayor John Whitmire that he would not go ahead with the planned move, is actually getting back on track, with plans to open this fall.

At the same time, Wilson said the recently announced “pause” for the new Northern Regional Library at Acres Homes had been canceled; the library is now looking to open this 20,000 square foot space as soon as possible – likely a year later than originally planned due to delays.

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by Maggie Gordon / Editor

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The Montrose and Acres Homes locations have been swinging like pendulums for weeks, with the city’s library system and mayor’s administration repeatedly changing course without notice, surprising city council members, private developers , community leaders and residents in general. This recent news is likely to create new waves of shock among stakeholders. As of Thursday morning, Wilson noted, she had not yet had a chance to brief city council members on those plans.

A NEW PLAN FOR MONTROSE

“The Montrose collective is back on the table. This happened two days ago,” Wilson said Thursday morning in an interview with the Houston Landing.

“The Houston Public Library will retain both” the historic Freed-Montrose Library branch as well as the new Montrose Collective space, which had previously been planned to accommodate a modern 12,000 library square-foot library in the mixed-use, high-rent Montrose collective development near the corner of Montrose Boulevard and Westheimer.

The announcement comes just six weeks after Whitmire announced at a news conference that he was concerned about plans to spend $11 million to move the Freed-Montrose Library from its current location to a location that would put it “very close to adult entertainment, on the third floor of a commercial building, behind the hamburger building. When I saw it, I said, ‘Not on my watch.'”

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While initial plans called for the Freed branch to close, this new path will keep two libraries operational in Montrose – a move that could save the city from losing the land where the current historic library sits. According to the original deed for the 14,600 square foot land on which the Freed branch sits, reviewed by the Landing, if the property goes 30 days without being used as a library before 2051, it will trigger a reverter, i.e. say the original donor. could take it back. That donor has since disappeared and the reverter rights have been transferred to the University of St. Thomas, the Catholic school that adjoins the building.

By keeping both libraries open, the city will be able to avoid possible confiscation of these assets. And while there will certainly be some overlap in services, Wilson said Thursday that the Montrose Collective location will offer more future-focused services, ushering in an era of new libraries for the city.

“We will have more conferences with authors,” she said. “We want to put our books on rolling carts to move them around so we can use the space for more different activities and events. This refers to this concept of “third space”. So this will be sort of our test case for this. »

There will be a café and a green room – places where community members can record podcasts.

“Also, Half Price Books closed in Montrose, and people really miss that, so we’re trying to figure out if this is an opportunity for us to sell — as we go through our collections — the books that we have, and create sort of a half-price book concept there. We’ll have a cafe,” Wilson continued. “It’ll be more — I don’t want to say ‘adult’ in nature, because libraries are still open to everyone. But it’ll be more technology-driven.”

FUNDING

The unexpected decision to maintain two libraries in a community that already has one, during a tight budget year, has raised some questions about funding. But Wilson said she and the mayor are confident they will be able to find money to build the new library — which she said should open by this fall — and address improvement needs capital expenditure of approximately $11.5 million to $14.5 million at the Freed Montrose. branch without having to turn to taxpayers.

“We passed the library bond several years ago, so we have some funding and we just have to look at it very carefully. And we have, quite honestly, said that one of the (tax increase areas) came to him and said they would be willing to help him pay for the costs, so we’re still looking at that.

The plan to have TIRZ 27, which operates in Montrose, pay more than $10 million to rehabilitate the current library building sparked its own controversy earlier this month when Whitmire removed four of TIRZ’s seven members from the neighborhood council — just days after the Houston Landing published a story about the mayor asking the council to fund $11.5 million in renovations to a Montrose library outside TIRZ boundaries.

Wilson said she now plans to discuss possible funding not only with Montrose’s TIRZ, which has not yet been fully reconstituted, but also with neighboring Midtown’s TIRZ 2, the area in which currently finds the Freed library.

“We’ll come back to the table with them,” Wilson said Thursday, while acknowledging that she has not yet formally met with either TIRZ to discuss the updated approach.

Wilson said she would not seek funding through a budget break for the new Northern Regional Library at Acres Homes, which she had identified earlier this month as a possible source of $10 million to help close the rehabilitation gap at the Freed branch, which is in desperate need of a new elevator and other improvements needed to bring it up to code after several decades without significant renovations or repairs.

ACRE HOUSES

When Wilson told The Landing earlier this month that the Houston Public Library planned to “pause” construction of the new North Regional Library in Acres Homes, community leaders expressed shock and outrage that the largely black community would once again be “neglected and underserved.”

“The Northern Regional Library was not in the plans, but it has been recommissioned,” Wilson said Thursday. “But its timeline is probably going to be pushed back by maybe a year. They were going to start designing in 2024, which we weren’t even close to.”

Before the pause, the design portion of the project was scheduled to begin last month and be completed in 2025. Construction would begin in March 2026, and the 20,000-square-foot library was scheduled to be substantially complete by August 2027. That completion is more likely to happen in 2028 now, according to Wison.

The new location would add significant resources to the Acres Homes community, which — like Montrose — currently has a smaller, older branch that is struggling to meet the needs of a growing community. According to the city’s 2023-2027 Capital Improvement Plan, in which the new location was proposed: “Currently, there is no full-service library in this northern area of ​​Houston.” The current Shepard-Acres Homes Library’s attendance and circulation figures, obtained by the Landing, are among the lowest in the city’s library system.

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