HOUSTON – (By Michelle Leigh Smith for Realty News Report) – The Meyerland community lost more than homes when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston last year. It lost its H-E-B grocery.
The H-E-B void will be filled in late 2019 when a new, elevated store is completed at Meyerland Plaza, at the corner of Loop 610 and Beechnut in southwest Houston.
“We can’t build it fast enough,” Scott McClelland, President of H-E-B Houston told a large crowd of Meyerlanders Thursday.
His enthusiasm was met with universal applause from a crowd composed of many homeowners who lost their homes in the Meyerland neighborhood where 1,900 of the 2,300 houses suffered heavily at Harvey’s watery hand. Some of them were rescued by boats off of second-story rooftops.
UPDATE: H-E-B Opens Jan. 29, 2020 in Meyerland Plaza
H-E-B’s $35 million, 96,000-SF Meyerland Plaza store will have ground-floor parking and on the first floor and a grocery store on the second floor with a skybridge connecting to the second floor of the adjacent JC Penney.
“The store will be as good as we know how to build it,” McClelland surmised, in front of the standing-room-only crowd Thursday night at Lovett Elementary in Meyerland. “It will have a modern feel – the escalators, which take 26 seconds to ascend to the top, will be timed so that your cart will go up next to you.”
The 950,000-SF Meyerland Plaza center is owned by a partnership of Bellaire-based Fidelis Realty Partners, led by Alan Hassenflu, and BlackRock Realty Advisors of New York.
McClelland and Alan Hassenflu, head of Fidelis Realty Partners, shared their plans for a new H-E-B store in Meyerland Plaza.
“I came to Houston in 1988 and I’ve wanted to own Meyerland Plaza since 1989,” said Hassenflu. “Ed Wulfe (the former owner of Meyerland Plaza) did such a fabulous job, taking it from the old mall that it was to a great shopping center. We wanted to take it to the next level and for that, we needed a grocery store. When we bought it in 2013, we began figuring out how to get a grocery store in there – that element was missing.”
McClelland told the audience of 400+ Meyerlanders that he does not do cookie cutter stores. He showed several drawings of the proposed store, which features ambient natural light streaming in from the roof. “The sunlight warms the overall feel of the store,” he said.
H-E-Bs do best in the inner city, explained McClelland, who has been an executive with the San Antonio-based grocery chain for years. “We are not building a second Central Market in Houston. What we have done is borrow liberally from Central Market and begun to make stores look more like them.”
“In Houston, we tailor our H-E-Bs aggressively to clientele,” McClelland said.
The two-level Meyerland Plaza grocery will have a pharmacy and curbside pickup at street level, with a kosher bakery, a coffee shop, New York style bagels and cheese and meat section upstairs. “There will be a full service seafood section, along with sushi, a large produce section with organics and more than 1,600 wine labels. He and his team met with the Chabad House and Levi Donin on Wednesday to review requirements for Kosher offerings, both in the kosher bakery and throughout the store.
McClelland insisted, “Meyerland’s been good to us since 1993, (when they opened the HEB Pantry store on S. Braeswood at Chimney Rock that has flooded several times) and if anything, we’ve underserved Meyerland. In recent years, you had to swim to it to get to it.”
