Good morning, Houston. Sure, the national economy may be going to hell in a handbasket, but look on the bright side: Houston's housing market is remaining pretty strong, so at least you homeowners have something of value! According to a new report, the median home value in Houston fell just $500 between the end of the third quarter 2007 and the end of the year, to $119,300 from $119,800 — still a gain of......

::Houston Dynamo MLS Championship Rally at City Hall:: Help welcome our team home today as they return from DC after defeating the New England Revolution for the second year in a row. Yikes, Reis, let another one slip past ya?! By defeating the Revs, the Dynamo become only the second team in the history of Major League Soccer to conquer back-to-back championships. Glenn Davis will serve as the event's Master of Ceremonies. Other speakers include......

Artist creates "faces" of famous Houstonians Ever wonder what Carolyn Farb would look like on oil and canvas? Ok, we've never either but now you're intrigued, right? Tonight, at Winter Street Studios [2101 Winter Street], artist John Palmer will debut a new series of “faces” of Houstonians. The exhibition will be held in the main gallery at Winter Street Studios, and includes faces of notable Houstonians, local art enthusiasts, collectors and faces from Palmer's imagination.......

Good morning, Houston. Sure, we've had a lot of rain, but there haven't been any hurricane scares yet — so it's pretty easy to overlook the fact that we're headed into the peak of the 2007 hurricane season. Not that easy, though: The Chronicle's Eric Berger reminds us that there's still some storm activity in the Atlantic, including a system 650 miles east about 650 miles east of the southern Windward Islands that could......

Good morning, Houston. Are you feeling particularly crunk today? Maybe you should be: Crunk is among the words added to Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary this year. Also among the 100 new words are DVR, IED, gray literature and smackdown. But we think we'll get the most use out of crunk, which M-W defines as a style of Southern rap music but which has a variety of definitions in the Urban Dictionary. Which brings us to......

Despite initially vowing to keep writing tickets for drivers with obscured license plates until a revised state law takes effect in September, HPD Chief Harold Hurtt announced Tuesday that his department would stop writing such tickets after all — apparently feeling the heat from Mayor Bill White, who called obscured plate tickets a "gotcha system" earlier this week. As you'll recall, the state gave police the authority to write tickets for obscured license plates with......

The final report from HPD crime lab independent investigator Michael Bromwich recommends new, taxpayer-funded DNA tests for prisoners in more than 400 cases in which incomplete or below-standard work was originally performed by the lab. That recommendation is based on a review of 135 of the cases which found "major problems" with 43 of them, including those of four death row inmates. But that doesn't mean there aren't other cases that have resulted in wrongful......

Good morning, Houston. As faithful Houstonist readers, you know we have trouble resisting a good crime report, so we were nearly beside ourselves when we read about the family that might have set a grocery store potato chip display on fire in February. Seriously. It happened at a Sellers Brothers on Telephone Road on Feb. 10, and surveillance video — which you can see if you follow the link — shows a young man......

More on the story of the 21 guns that turned up missing from HPD's property room: The Chronicle reports today that independent police department investigator Michael Bromwich had warned city officials two years ago that conditions in the property room could lead to lost evidence. "The property room currently uses a number of forms to track chain of custody," Bromwich wrote in a June 2005 report. "The forms are cumbersome and archaic and increase the......

Remember the city's proposal last year to set a 10 p.m. curfew for kids under age 17? It never really went anywhere, and now City Council is trying again: Yesterday, councilmembers began discussing a proposal to set Houston's juvenile curfew at 11 p.m. HPD Assistant Executive Chief Mike Thaler told councilmembers that the earlier curfew — it's now set at midnight on weekdays — would not only help curb juvenile crime, but would also give......

Looks like the city's crusade against the Carter's Grove apartments could be just the beginning of widespread action against run-down and dangerous apartment complexes throughout Houston. According to KHOU, a team of 30 police, fire and code officials hit the Flamingo Terrace Apartments, a northeast Houston complex with problems of its own. Channel 11 first reported on Flamingo Terrace Sunday, describing several abandoned buildings in the complex littered with broken glass and barely secured by......

Soon, you won’t have to go all the way to Clear Lake or Lake Conroe to see a boathouse. Buffalo Bayou is about to get its first boathouse ever – but don’t start packing up your apartment to move there – this boathouse is for dragon boats. The Houston Endowment has donated $75,000 to assist the Texas Dragon Boat Association to build a boathouse at 501 N. York Street. The facility will house the......

Today, KHOU takes a cursory look at the number of people arrested for drunk driving in Houston and finds that it has dropped significantly over the last couple of years — from 6,120 in 2004 to 4,737 last year to 3,709 so far in 2006. A drop of nearly 40 percent is good, right? Well, maybe not. Houston City Councilman Adrian Garcia says one of the reasons for the decline is there are fewer officers......

The recent driveby at Westbury High School and the stabbing of one Lamar student by another in Ervan Chew park in June aren't just isolated incidents, it seems. It's looking more and more like they're a trend, and a troubling one at that: both the numbers of teenage homicide victims and the numbers of felony-level violent crimes commited by teens are up significantly over last year. Thirty three juveniles have been victims of homicide through......

A man was arrested today after a six-hour standoff at a southwest Houston convenience store The average price of a gallon of gas in Houston dropped to $2.02 this week, marking the 11th straight week of price drops Ronald Williams, a 19-year-old cadet at A&M, claims he's been the victim of racial harassment from fellow cadets Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California called on the Justice Department to appeal the decision to overturn ex-Enron Chairman Ken......

Is it just us, or has the city's proposed graffiti crackdown been going on for a while? We first talked about it in late June, and then it came up again earlier this week. And after City Council discussed the would-be ordinance yesterday, councilmembers delayed a vote on the matter. Stamping out graffiti must be harder than it looks! Councilmember Adrian Garcia has reportedly been working on the tougher graffiti ordinance for about a year;......

As expected, City Council delayed a vote on expanding the city's smoking ban at its meeting yesterday — and with councilmembers divided between a variety of proposals, it's anyone's guess how the vote will go when it's actually taken. Mayor Bill White, who supports a smoking ban at all enclosed workplaces with exceptions for cigar shops, certain meeting rooms, private functions and a handful of other situations, said things are close: "I think the majority......

HPD Chief Harold Hurtt avoided a crash yesterday, and a group of his supporters are trying to help him avoid another one — the one that could be headed his way when the results of a police union survey come down. The survey, you'll remember, found that 75 percent of respondents said they had little or no confidence in Hurtt's ability to lead HPD. About 2,300 officers responded to the Houston Police Officers' Union survey,......

A proposal to tighten the city's midnight curfew for juveniles is a step closer to becoming law: Yesterday, the City Council's Public Safety Committee approved the proposed ordinance, meaning it will likely be up for a full council vote next month — with Mayor Bill White's support. The proposal would institute a 10 p.m. weekday and 11 p.m. weekend curfew for kids younger than 17; those 17 and older wouldn't be subject to the law.......

The death of 23-month-old Stephanie Garcia during a carjacking Tuesday night has gotten a lot of media attention, and it's getting the attention of city authorities, too: The Chronicle reports today that police are questioning three people in connection with the incident and have assigned up to 20 people in the homicide department to the investigation. Garcia was killed when two gunmen tried to rob her dad, Luis Adrian Garcia, as he used a pay......

...