Amid all the noise, all the construction, all of a sudden, midrises are popping up all over Montrose.

"I have never seen this kind of development," said Houston City Councilmember Sue Lovell. "I mean, 10 midrises going up, pretty much within a half-a-mile area."

Just check out the holes in the ground and the construction cranes in the sky on the sites of future apartment and condo buildings going up in and around Montrose.

If you think these construction sites are busy now, just wait until the jobs are finished. Just wait until midrises stand on these properties and all of the traffic starts flowing into the nearby streets. City officials are now talking about how they're going to deal with all those traffic problems.

Among the possibilities, more one-way streets, more traffic signals and better planning of driveways feeding traffic onto city streets.

"Well, a good example of what we've done is having the contraflow lane that's on, that currently you can experience on Alabama," said Mayor Bill White. "And we've got to take a look at other places where we could have full utilization of lanes."

Many of these new midrises will rise right next to old neighborhoods with narrow streets.

"The city has to get ahead of this problem, not wait until there's a traffic problem," said Lovell.

And still to come in Montrose a so-called urban village on the site of the Allen House apartments.

Progress has its price. And in Houston, part of that price is traffic.