The Energy Corridor’s hurting, but there’s one bright spot for commercial development

 

By Roxanna Asgarian

With oil prices staying low, the Energy Corridor’s office market has been hardest hit, with about 3 million square feet of sublease space available and new speculative construction, like Trammell Crow’s Energy Center 5, gearing up to add even more space to the market.

But there’s one area of development that’s moving forward. Several of the big-name hospitals are planting or expanding their flag in the Energy Corridor, adding services to a rapidly growing area of Houston.

Texas Children’s Hospital plans to invest $50 million into several projects at its west Houston campus, which is located at 1-10 and and Barker Cypress Road in the Energy Corridor. The first phase of the project, which includes adding beds to a floor that includes a specialized isolation unit for highly contagious infectious diseases, is expected to be complete Oct. 1. The rest of the projects are expected to be complete in the next couple of years.

Next door to Texas Children’s west campus, Houston Methodist is adding a new six-story building that will include more hospital beds, operating rooms, more space for imaging and an expanded emergency department, as well as a new parking garage. There will also be a floor dedicated to labor and delivery, hospital CEO Wayne Voss told the Houston Business Journal. That project is expected to break ground by the end of the year and be completed in the first quarter of 2018.

And M.D. Anderson is getting ready to break ground on a planned campus on nearly 35 acres it purchased for $34.1 million in 2012. The first phase of the project, a 175,000-square-foot outpatient diagnostic and treatment center, is slated to open in 2018.

David Hightower, chief development officer of Wolff Companies, which sold M.D. Anderson the land for their new building, said the addition of new space to the Energy Corridor bodes well for the future of the area.

“Every population growth forecast shows that this area will be one of the predominant growth areas of the city,” Hightower said. “With all the high-quality master-planned communities in the area, as well as the construction of the Grand Parkway, the growth of these health care systems is greatly needed and will be welcomed.”

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