Allied Orion Group broke ground on The Beacon at Buffalo Pointe, a 281-unit multifamily community near the Med Center. Development was slowed because of a wastewater capacity problem, SVP Charles Crane (who’s spearheading the project) tells us. The master developer, Harris County Improvement District #12, and the City of Houston have reached an agreement to resolve it. Meanwhile, oil prices took their dive, but Charles says that isn’t a problem because the community isn’t targeting energy employment. (He says most Houston multifamily developers aren’t too nervous about oil prices because in the past a drop in prices has caused energy jobs to be moved into Houston. Plus, Mexico is opening up its existing older oil fields for the first time in history, which should benefit the oil field talent that resides here.) Pictured, a rendering by Steinberg Design Collaborative Architects.

Allied Orion faced one other challenge—the site was an old oilfield and had some groundwater contamination from a well on adjacent land, but that was resolved prior to closing. Now that The Beacon at Buffalo Pointe is underway, it’s slated to open in Q1 ’16. Allied Orion has a number of other projects in its pipeline—it’s under construction on Harper’s Retreat, a 216-unit community a half-mile from the new Methodist Hospital in The Woodlands. (The firm is loving healthcare-driven locations.) It’s wrapping up construction at Riverstone in Sugar Land, and is just beginning work Downtown—it demolished an existing property on Block 384 but hasn’t started vertical construction on the yet-unnamed 242-unit community there. Above, mulching is underway at the Buffalo Pointe site.