The rain had just started. Just little flecks. The morning chill hung thick in the air, as the temperature fought to rise from the low 50s through the morning. Inside the Houston Public Library’s Montrose branch, the cold wouldn’t budge.
With just two minutes left until the building was set to open for the day on Monday, Jan. 22, employee LaTasha Houston fired off an urgent email to her bosses:
The Houston Public Library did not answer the Landing’s questions about whether it’s a coincidence that this estimate represents the same amount offered by St. Thomas later in 2023.
A Houston real estate expert said a $1.25 million offer for 14,600 square feet of land on Montrose Boulevard is well below the market rate.
“That tract would be worth between $120 or greater per square foot — not less than $100 per square foot,” says Bill Baldwin, a prominent real estate agent in the Montrose area, and a member of the Houston Association of Realtors’ board.
And that’s just for the land, knowing that the building itself is no longer in its best state. Still, he says, “I haven’t seen any prime Montrose land” go for such a low-ball rate. Recently, he says, he sold the land where Chris Shepherd’s original Georgia James restaurant location once stood “for what is three times that.”
A market-rate offer at $120 per square foot for the Library property would ring in at $1.75 million — 40 percent higher than the university’s November pitch.
That would likely make sense for a listing price, were the property for sale. It isn’t. Baldwin, consistently one of Houston’s top real estate agents, says he was unable to locate a listing.
The Houston Public Library did not respond to the Houston Landing’s questions on the proposed transaction, nor did the Library provide insight into the reasons behind the delays keeping the Montrose Library from moving to its new home.
And the city’s legal department has blocked the Landing’s attempts to obtain more details about the possible property transaction.
Earlier this month, the city filed a letter with the Texas attorney general’s office, asking to withhold records, citing an exemption in the Texas Public Information Act for information relating to “appraisals or purchase price of real or personal property for a public purpose prior to the formal award of contracts for the property.”
The Landing has filed a complaint with the attorney general’s open records division, arguing for the records’ release because it appears the city missed its deadline to try withholding the records.
While the university would not comment on the transaction, Bolt did note that St. Thomas expects to use the property to serve students, and that its exterior “would continue to look like the beautiful building it is.”
In the meantime, the status quo continues at the Freed Library. Some days, the upper level — that sacred space once vaunted as a novelty among city libraries — is roped off from users. Circulation dwindles. And library patrons, confronted with hurdles to access, are giving up trying.
“It’s unfortunate that the city is not seeing the state of literacy, and the state of libraries happening all across the country, and not wanting to push library usage even more, or make it more accessible,” says Hernandez, the Montrose resident who’s found it increasingly difficult to access her neighborhood library. “Instead, it kind of seems like libraries are an afterthought.”
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