Park 8Ninety is a 127-acre business park in Missouri City, Texas, just southwest of Houston.

Ultimately, 1.8 million square feet of warehouse and flex space is planned, beginning with a
speculatively built first phase of 439,704 square feet in three buildings with high ceilings and
wide column spacing. Existing tenants include distributors and manufacturers, many serving
nearby hospitals or the building trades.

The infill site has excellent highway access but had been overlooked because it was entangled
by multiple utility easements that made drainage difficult. The municipality of Missouri City
worked with developer Trammell Crow to implement an off-site stormwater detention strategy
that raised the site’s elevation and created a new recreational lake at an adjacent city park.

| Performance, Management, and Marketing | Observations and Lessons Learned | Project

Information ]

Introduction
Getting stuck at the office over the weekend took on an entirely different meaning for employees
of Rexel Inc. during Hurricane Harvey. They were scheduled to open a new regional office and
warehouse at Park 8Ninety in Missouri City in September 2017. On Saturday, August 26, the
rains came—and did not let up for four days.

Park 8Ninety is a business park in Missouri City,

Texas. (Powers Brown Architecture)
First, the sunken highway interchange out front filled with water; elsewhere in town, two
tornadoes struck offices and homes. Then, water began backing up in some of the roads—but
then stopped, well short of the front doors or even the cars in the small parking lot. Nobody
could leave because even the elevated highways were only reachable via flooded roads, but at
least the staff, the new furnishings, and the valuable inventory were safe inside. By the time the
sun came out August 30, roads were clear, the detention basin’s channel was dry, and the new
offices could open on time.
The $4 million drainage system installed at Park 8Ninety “still worked with 50 inches of rain,”
says Dan Muniza, vice president at developer Trammell Crow. “Our tenants were high and dry—
including the ones trapped in the property during move-in.” A partnership between the developer
and the city ensured that the rain was safely diverted 1,000 feet away—to a newly dug lake at
the popular Buffalo Run Park. The park’s lakes kept more than just the business parks dry: an
adjacent high school also became a refuge during the storm, taking in more than 600
residents displaced from their flooded homes.

The site’s subdivision plan shows the utility

easements that crisscross the site. (Powers Brown Architecture)
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The Site and the Idea

Park 8Ninety fills 127 acres in the southern quadrant of the intersection between Beltway 8
(Sam Houston Parkway and Tollway) and U.S. 90 Alternate (U.S. 90A), a limited-access
continuation of Houston’s South Main Street. The site is 13 miles from downtown and ten miles
from the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical complex, with over 100,000
employees.

The beltway’s opening in 1997 gave the area much-improved, stoplight-free access around
southern Houston to the Port of Houston east of the city, the nation’s largest port by tonnage, as
well as to the two international airports and the Energy Corridor business center on the city’s
west side (see ULI Case Study: CityCentre Houston). The additional connectivity sparked
growth among industrial facilities in the southwest part of the region, an area that had mostly
been bedroom communities.
In 2007, Trammell Crow purchased the defunct Willowisp Country Club just south of Park
8Ninety and redeveloped it as Lakeview Business Park, building off the success of nearby
industrial development. A residential developer had been interested in that site, given the boom
underway at the time, but Trammell Crow convinced the city that industrial development
presented greater opportunities to expand its tax base and create local jobs.

“We predicted the industrial market moving in that direction,” says Jeremy Garner, principal at
Trammell Crow. “We saw demand expanding south of the beltway.” Today, Lakeview has over 1
million square feet of industrial space, including facilities for Niagara Bottling, Southwest
Electronic Energy, and Bimbo Bakeries USA.

Trammell Crow, which began operations in 1948 with a speculative industrial park in Dallas,
today is the largest commercial real estate developer in the United States, with almost $8 billion
in projects in development. (ULI published a biography of founder Crow in 2005.) Today, it is the
development services arm of CBRE, a Fortune 250 commercial real estate services and
investment firm.

Park 8Ninety includes both single-loaded flex

space and cross-dock warehouses. (Trammell Crow)
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Planning and Design

Ultimately, Park 8Ninety will contain a total of 1.8 million square feet of space in up to 13
buildings. The site is bisected by a Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) drainage
channel, which conveys water from U.S. 90A along the site’s northwest boundary to the
Cangelosi Ditch, the site’s southeast boundary.
Buildings. The first phase consists of 440,000 square feet of space in three single-story
buildings at the front of the park, closest to the intersection of Beltway 8 and U.S. 90A. Two
buildings (Buildings 1 and 2) are 160 feet deep and bracket a rear truck court; the larger
Building 3/7 is 200 feet deep and 1,620 feet wide, with a front truck court. Four additional 160-
foot-wide buildings are planned for the park’s front half. All of these structures are appropriate
for either warehouses or flex space: multiple frontages allow for windowed offices in front of or
beside warehouses; storage racks easily fit under high-cube ceilings with 28 or 32 feet of
clearance and bays up to 52 feet wide.

The park’s back half, west of the TxDOT channel, is planned to include five substantially larger
warehouses. Three are planned as cross-dock warehouses (with loading docks on both sides),
and two are flex buildings with parking in front and a truck court at the rear.

A job-site camera captured the minor impact

Hurricane Harvey had on the site. This photo is from before the storm, August 24, 2017.
(OxBlue for Trammell Crow)
Despite its choice location, the Park 8Ninety site remained underused for decades; much of it
was woods or fields, but part was developed as a golf range in the 1990s. To the west are a few
streets of houses built in the 1970s and one site with a colorful history: a racetrack, then a failed
Chinese-themed retail center, then a never-built Islamic religious center. This particular site had
been eyed for development, but appeared to be impossible to drain—especially since about 40
percent of the site sat below base flood elevation. As Missouri City Mayor Allen Owen explains,
“Development [in east Texas] is geared around two things: getting water onto the site and
getting water off of the site.” The latter took some ingenuity.

Drainage. Even though the site is traversed by TxDOT’s drainage channel and borders the
Cangelosi Ditch, these were both only a few feet deep—too shallow to adequately drain the
volume of water coming off the site. Sites in the Houston area must be engineered to convey a
storm that drops 13 inches of rain within an hour—a requirement that is being raised in the wake
of Hurricane Harvey.

Neither constructing conventional storm sewers just below grade nor deepening the TxDOT
channel was physically possible: Park 8Ninety is traversed from east to west (parallel to the
ditch) by multiple utility easements—notably two 16-inch-diameter high-pressure petroleum
pipelines five feet below grade and high-tension electrical wires above. Trying to detain all
stormwater on site would have left much of the site as wetlands, with only unusably small
remnants for development.

The site at the height of Hurricane Harvey,

August 29. (OxBlue for Trammell Crow)
The solution, hammered out by assistant city manager Scott Elmer and project engineer Mark
Sappington, looked beyond the site’s boundaries for a solution involving a nearby park that
needed improvements. As Joe Esch, economic development director for Missouri City,
says, “We needed a hole, and they needed dirt.”

Most of Missouri City drains southward, toward the Brazos River, but this corner drains to the
northeast, into Sims Bayou via the Cangelosi Ditch. In the late 1990s, Missouri City
commissioned a watershed-wide master drainage plan from local engineering firm Walter P.
Moore that identified a defunct sand mine just south of Park 8Ninety as an ideal regional
detention site.

The mine site was purchased in 2000 by Fort Bend County, which built Thurgood Marshall High
School on part of it and sold 95 acres to Missouri City for Buffalo Run Park. The two big sand
pits were flooded to create three interconnected lakes with a boat ramp, surrounded by almost
two miles of trails, three picnic pavilions, an observation tower, a volleyball court, and a
playground. When combined with the high school’s adjacent playing fields, the park can
accommodate crowds as large as the city’s Independence Day festivities. In addition to
absorbing stormwater from adjacent parcels, including Lakeview Business Park to the south, the
lakes provide backup irrigation for the school’s fields.

The site one day after Harvey, August 30.

(OxBlue for Trammell Crow)
A fourth lake had long been proposed within the park but required additional funding. The
developer could dig that lake down to a depth that would accommodate Park 8Ninety’s drainage
needs (25 feet) and use the dirt to raise the Park 8Ninety site’s elevation. In addition, a half-
mile-long pipe could connect the site to the new lake, underneath the Cangelosi ditch.

“We bypassed the ditch and put a 10-by-10-foot box underneath the Cangelosi Ditch,” says
Sappington. The pipe “drains into the lake, the lake rises, and spills into a channel, back into the
ditch.” The overall approach “provided a depth of outfall that you could not achieve elsewhere”
in a very flat area, he says.

The site’s elevations had been determined from a 20-year-old survey of the ditch’s drainage
area, conducted before GPS and lasers allowed more precise measurements. A new survey of
the detention basin—at a cost of $50,000, borne by Trammell Crow—found that the ditch’s
standing water level was lower than previously reported. This reduced the amount of fill needed
to raise the base site elevation above the floodplain, from three feet to two.

Careful attention during grading of the entire site offered another buffer against floods. Wing
walls, 30-foot-wide landscape buffers, and ramped parking lots imperceptibly modulate an
elevation rise between the roads and buildings—and between the front parking lots and rear
truck courts. This subtle rise keeps the buildings dry even when flash floods exceed the
conveyance system and spill into streets and truck courts.
 Stormwater from the site drains into the lakes at
Missouri City’s Buffalo Run Park, which features trails, a boat ramp, an observation tower for
bird watching, and picnic areas. (Payton Chung)
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Approvals, Finance, and Construction

Approvals for work at the site were complicated by its location astride numerous jurisdictional
boundaries: a sliver at the northern corner sits within the city of Houston and Harris County, but
most of the site is in Missouri City and Fort Bend County. The site includes “every possible
combination” of city and county, says Sappington.

The Houston City Council deferred to Missouri City regarding the site; as Owen told Houston
officials, “The project’s 90 percent in Missouri City, so you don’t need to come out here.” For the
seven acres along Beltway 8 inside Houston, an interlocal agreement allows Missouri City to
provide all municipal services, ranging from engineering and permitting to water and sewer via
Fort Bend County Water Control & Improvement District 2 (WC & ID 2).

Missouri City was keen on seeing the development through because it offered a prime
opportunity to broaden the city tax base. The city was incorporated in 1956 and saw its
population boom from the 1970s through the 1990s, even drawing celebrities including Beyoncé
Knowles and her family. Today, it has the most racially diverse population among the region’s
municipalities, along with median incomes well above the metro norm.

Yet, like many suburban areas, it has sought to outgrow a reputation as a bedroom community
and reduce its budget’s reliance on residential property taxes. Trammell Crow’s industrial
development is “putting Missouri City on the map as a business-friendly community,” as the
Houston Chronicle put it, substantially increasing Missouri City’s commercial property tax and
inventory tax revenue—without the volatility that has beset the retail sector in recent years.
 A view of Park 8Ninety from across the new
drainage lake. (Payton Chung)
Zoning on the site was a mishmash of agriculture, residential, industrial, and retail uses, so the
developer opted for a planned development zone. Muniza recalls that the effort was
straightforward—“getting the planned development approval required one planning
[commission] and two [city] council meetings. One neighbor testified, in support.”

Muniza praised Missouri City’s cooperative spirit. “I can’t say enough good things about the way
Missouri City did this. . . . At all levels, they want you to succeed.” Elmer cites the city fire
department as an example. “The driveway connection into the public road exceeded the
standard formula of grade difference,” he notes. “[The fire marshal] drove the fire truck around it,
signed off on it, and let it go.”

A few immediate neighbors did have to be brought on board, though. Negotiating the drain
pipe’s access across the electric company’s transmission corridor took a few rounds of
negotiation. The pipeline companies were even less flexible. “Interaction with pipeline
companies is one-way,” says Muniza. Their engineering standards do exist for good reason,
says Elmer: “Those are old pipes, so that means no vertical displacement at all.”

Development finance. Trammell Crow’s equity partner on Park 8Ninety is Artis, a Winnipeg-

based real estate investment trust (REIT) with over C$5 billion (US$3.8 billion) in office, retail,
and industrial properties primarily in central and western Canada, but also in Ontario and the
United States. Artis has a 95 percent share of the joint venture, as well as another park that
Trammell Crow is developing in Arizona. Its portfolio focuses on properties that offer stable and
reliable yields. As such, it has been shifting capital out of Alberta office properties and
diversifying into the U.S. industrial market.

The roads and storm drains were built by Trammell Crow and then conveyed to the city. Many
new developments in Texas use municipal utility districts to reimburse the costs of constructing
public infrastructure, such as roads and drainage. In this instance, Missouri City executed a
similar “Chapter 380” agreement with Trammell Crow whereby a tax abatement will reimburse
the $6.65 million cost of the drainage and street improvements. Esch notes that “the city’s never
in the hole” with the agreement because rebates only flow after the site’s taxable value has
increased above $37.5 million—well above its pre-development value. Missouri City is allowed
to levy a drainage impact fee for development along the Cangelosi Ditch, but so far has pursued
other means to pay for infrastructure.

Construction. Grading for the lake and the site was “all done with excavators, at a [dry] time
with temporary dams . . . crossing the ditch,” says Muniza. “We ran 30-cubic-yard trucks
continuously for six months and filled in the site all spring.” The pipe was mostly excavated, but
the portion underneath the pipelines was tunneled to minimize disturbance. “While our
equipment operator was within the park, we helped the city out by filling in some low spots along
the roadways,” Muniza adds. Trammell Crow also paid for landscaping around the newly dug
lake.

On the west side of the site is South Cravens Road, which had been a 20-foot-wide gravel road
providing access to several houses. The developer was obligated to maintain 24-hour access to
those houses, while also paving and widening the road for access to the warehouses that will
eventually be built on that side of the site. That was done in part by first building Buffalo Lakes
Road through the site, before returning to pave Cravens.

High ceilings, wide column spacing, and flexible

layouts offer tenants maximum flexibility to pursue warehouse, manufacturing, or office uses.
(City of Missouri City)
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Performance, Management, and Marketing

Trammell Crow broke ground on Park 8Ninety’s first phase, with three speculative multitenant
buildings, in 2015 and completed the buildings about a year later. In early 2017, the first leases
were signed—including one for a space that spanned the existing Building 3 as well as a
planned but then-unbuilt extension, Building 7. Speculative construction on phase two will begin
soon, and larger tracts within the site are being marketed as further build-to-suit opportunities.

Tenants drawn to the site so far are mostly business-to-business suppliers with regional
distribution networks. Some combine warehouses with light manufacturing: Texas AirSystems
stores, services, and does on-site final assembly on heating, venting, and air-conditioning
systems. Others, like Rexel Inc., have operations that cross multiple uses: at Park 8Ninety, the
electrical supplier has one of its two area warehouses, its regional sales office, and a small retail
showroom facing U.S. 90A. Half the tenants so far, including anchor tenant VWR International,
supply the life sciences industry.

In addition to the prime location, Park 8Ninety offers tenants readily available space—whether
buildings or land—in flexible configurations. For industrial users, “most searches begin with
available space, not land,” Esch says. “[Trammell Crow was] out of land that could be delivered
at Lakeview, but this allowed them to start with spec buildings” that were move-in ready. “Speed
to market is the key to attracting tenants,” says Jeremy Garner, principal at Trammell Crow.
“Having a shovel-ready site means there’s less uncertainty and allows us to provide prospects
with a reliable timeline and costs.”

Missouri City’s flexibility and transparency in dealing with businesses’ varying needs has also
been a draw. VWR has 20,000 square feet of chemical storage space, says Muniza. “We got
letters from the fire marshal about what they would do” to train fire department staff on the
proposed systems at the park, giving the tenant additional certainty ahead of its major capital
investment.

The site’s proximity to Buffalo Run Park and extensive landscaping distinguish it from other area
offerings. Companies have picnics at the park and the site, and employees can go fishing or
jogging after work.

Management. Missouri City owns the stormwater infrastructure, roads, ditch, and parkland. The
Missouri City Parks and Recreation Department performs light maintenance on Buffalo Run
Park; heavier maintenance is carried out by the city’s streets department. TxDOT is responsible
for its drainage channel across the site, but in practice Trammell Crow mows it along with the
rest of the site.
Flood performance. The drainage system’s first big test came on April 15, 2016, even before
the roofs were complete on the first phase of Park 8Ninety. Then-record-setting bands of rain
pummeled the west side of Houston in what became known as the Tax Day Flood. Six inches of
rain fell in 12 hours in Missouri City; other areas saw an inch of rain in just five minutes. The
detention lake at Buffalo Run Park, then newly complete and slowly filling, easily absorbed the
storm. During and after Harvey, both the Cangelosi Ditch and its receiving stream, Sims Bayou,
stayed within their banks. Indeed, Sims was the only bayou in Harris County that did not jump
its banks.

Gently sloping landscaping and wing walls

modulate grade changes across the site that keep building sites above the floodplain. (Payton
Chung)
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Observations and Lessons Learned

Planning for regional detention. Neither the Park 8Ninety site—surrounded by highways and
utility easements—nor the Lakeview site could have been developed had it not been for
Missouri City’s foresight in creating a master drainage plan, identifying a detention basin, and
following through on building Buffalo Run Park. Elmer, previously the city’s chief engineer, says
the strategy resulted in a net benefit for the city, with more tax value from the business parks,
particularly because the city “managed to partner with the parks department and surrounding
agencies to turn these facilities into major, award-winning parks.”

Thinking in three dimensions. Especially in a region as flat and wet as Houston, careful

elevation measurements can make a huge difference. A digital survey of the site recalculated
the amount of fill needed, reducing the grading bill by a third. Yet changing the topography by
raising the site’s base elevation only made sense as part of a wider strategy that included
raising some areas and lowering an adjacent area—which could not only detain stormwater, but
also provide inexpensive fill. The exceptional depth of the drainage infrastructure, including the
pipe and lake, both created the right volume of stormwater detention and allowed the pipes to
clear below-grade hazards like the petroleum pipelines and the ditch’s channel.

Working across boundaries. Park 8Ninety itself crosses boundaries—the parcel spans two
cities and two counties, and drains onto public land. It took a lot of cooperation, mutual
understanding, and a sustained effort by Missouri City to make sure those boundaries did not
get in the way. Esch, the economic development director, credits the city’s “competitive edge—
to be creative, reduce costs, and create an amenity [Buffalo Run’s fourth lake] that we can sell
elsewhere. We can spend that dollar once and see multiple benefits from it.” Digging the lake,
says, Elmer, was “something that benefits everybody.”

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Project Information
Project timeline

Groundbreaking

Phase 1 complete

Building Square feet Loading docks Cl

Building 1 55,221 Rear

Building 2 68,778 Rear

Building 3/7 315,715 Front

Building 4 73,600 Rear

Building 5 73,600 Rear

Building Square feet Loading docks Cl

Building 6 73,600 Rear

Building 8 42,900 Front

Building 9 155,600 Cross-dock

Building 10 199,898 Cross-dock

Building 11 115,440 Rear

Building 12 460,000 Cross-dock

Building 13 163,200 Rear

Total 1,797,552

Major tenants Square

VWR International 125

Rexel Inc. 96

Texas AirSystems 36

Infrastructure costs

Hard costs

Storm sewer lines

Paving
 Infrastructure costs

Subtotal

Soft costs

Storm sewer engineering

Paving engineering

Construction administration and staking

Subtotal

Total

Website
http://park8ninety.com/about

Address
521 U.S. 90-A
Missouri City, TX 77489

Developer
Trammell Crow Inc.

Equity partner
Artis Real Estate Investment Trust

Owner
TC Houston Industrial Development Inc.

Broker
Boyd Commercial

Architect
Powers Brown
Civil engineer
Sappington Engineering LLC

Interviewees
Scott Elmer, assistant city manager, Missouri City
Joe Esch, economic development director, Missouri City
Dan Muniza, vice president of development and management, Trammell Crow Company
Industrial Group
Allen Owen, mayor, Missouri City
J. Mark Sappington, president, Sappington Engineering LLC
Stacie Walker, director of communications, Missouri City