Six months of lease negotiation and the landlord’s lawyer found a problem only now, after we had signed the lease. Convenient, perhaps? Now we are stuck with the impossible task of obtaining a convoluted permit or rewriting language in the lease that we had worked all Summer to achieve. Saner women may have given up at this point; resigned themselves to the great strip mall in the ‘burbs; but I persisted. I refused to consider an alternate location, not only because we had invested so much into the space already and announced it to our clients, but because I am plagued by a innate stubbornness that has been making my life difficult (and wonderful) since the moment I emerged from the womb.
The item in contention was our front door. Our landlord had agreed to build a new entrance to our space and since they refused to allow a recessed door, the entryway would have to extend onto the sidewalk. I was initially in favor of the sidewalk entrance. In my Sim-Houston sidewalk cafés and street vendors line the streets. Unfortunately, in the real Houston, downtown sidewalks are of a sacred nature. The irony of this fact, given that sidewalks are either neglected in or non-existant in most parts of the City, has not yet occurred to them. The proposed door would require an “Encroachment Agreement” to allow our intrusion onto the sacred sidewalk. The process entails a few checks to the City, a lot of waiting and then eventually hiring a Civil Engineer to show the City what lays under its own sidewalks. Yes, it is disconcerting to me as well. The City should probably know what is under its own sidewalks. Alas, then who would pay the Civil Engineers?
To further complicate matters, our financiers also require a fully-executed copy of the lease prior to approving our application. They continue to put pressure on our organization to either close on our loan or get out of the application pool.
Mr. Bad-news-from-Dallas Lawyer insisted that no lease would be executed until we received the Encroachment permit. We waited, impatiently, only to continue tripping over the permit details of our slippery sidewalk. As the year draws to a close we realize that we must amend the lease and proceed with construction in whatever way we can. A temporary door was proposed.

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