page_title: Southside Place, Texas
section_title: Economy
hierarchical_section_title: Southside Place, Texas / Economy
caption_attribution_description: English: Royal Dutch Shell Bellaire Technology Center
context_page_description: Southside Place is a city in west central Harris County, Texas, United States. The population was 1,715 at the 2010 census.
  As of the 2000 census, Southside Place was the 13th wealthiest location in Texas by per capita income. It has since dropped to the 14th wealthiest location.
  Southside Place functions as a bedroom community for upper-middle- and upper-class families. Many businesses are located in Southside Place; all are along Bellaire Boulevard.
  The United States Postal Service uses "Houston" for all Southside Place addresses; "Southside Place, TX" is not an acceptable postal city name for mail addressed to locations in the city.
context_section_description: The Braes Heights Shopping Center, a two-story mid-century modern shopping center, is located in Southside Place. In 2012 the Houston Press ranked the center the "Best Strip Mall - 2012" due to its abundance of small businesses that made the editors feel nostalgic. The editors said "In many ways, Braes Heights seems more like Rice Village than Rice Village" because many iconic small businesses had left Rice Village by 2012.
  Shell Oil Company's Bellaire Technology Center had been located in Southside Place. The 310,000-square-foot (29,000 m²) facility opened as a geophysical processing center in 1936. For decades many scientists and engineers discovered and studied facts related to oil and natural gas. In 2008 Shell announced that it would close the Bellaire facility and expand the Westhollow Technology Center in Houston to accommodate the most of the staff employed by the Bellaire center, while some staff would go to the Woodcreek Technology Campus in western Houston. Shell said that it closed the Bellaire facility partly because two thirds of the land was leased, and the lease was set to expire in 2010. The move decreased tax revenue into the City of Southside Place; the city rezoned the parcel for various land uses.
  The Palace Bowling Lanes bowling alley, a two-story, 80,000-square-foot (7,400 m²) structure that was built in 1955, was on a 2.8-acre (1.1 ha) plot of land in Southside Place. In October 2016 the owners sold the alley, which had been renamed Bowl on Bellaire but still had signage reading "Palace Bowling Lanes", to Sparkle Frame, and that group closed the business later that month. In September 2018 the real estate firm Triple Crown Investments stated that it would remodel the building into the Southside Commons complex, and Arch-Con Construction will be the construction company. A bowling alley, restaurants, 10,000 square feet (930 m²) of retail space, and other entertainment facilities will be on the first floor; the restaurant and entertainment businesses would take up a total of  30,000 square feet (2,800 m²) of space. Offices, including medical and non-medical purposes, occupying 40,000 square feet (3,700 m²) are to go on the second floor. The building is scheduled to re-open around Summer 2020.
caption: Shell Oil Company Bellaire Technology Center
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