Trapped in substandard housing
WITH NO RUNNING WATER OR DECENT ROADS, THOUSANDS OF LATINOS PAYING A BIG PRICE TO LIVE IN SO-CALLED AFFORDABLE ‘NEW COLONIAS’
NEW CANEY — The neighborhood is called Kings Colony, but the name just seems wrong. Reyna Sanchez and her husband live here in a three-room house, built from the frame of a utility shed with plywood, tar paper, concrete blocks and whatever discarded materials they can find.
Their home is beyond the reach of a municipal water system, and the couple cannot afford a well or septic tank. So they use two 250-gallon plastic totes to capture and hold rainwater for drinking, bathing and washing dishes. An outhouse stands beneath a shade tree in the yard.
Around their half-acre lot in east Montgomery County, there are no sewers, sidewalks, streetlights, parks or fully paved roads. The streets have so many potholes that those driving school buses, delivery trucks and even ambulances won’t go down them.
“We’ll need an airplane to get out of here if the roads get any worse,” Sanchez said through a translator.
More than anything, Kings Colony resembles the infamous colonias along the border with Mexico — places that typically aren’t associated with the suburban edges of Texas’ largest metropolitan areas. But that’s changing quickly as housing prices push Latino laborers to new colonias outside Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. An estimated 500,000 people live in these bare-bones real estate developments across the state.
No one knows exactly how many people live in Kings Colony, but there are 1,868 addresses listed in the latest directory of the property owners association. Nearby, in Liberty County, developers have carved thousands of lots from the piney woods, selling
them to Spanish-speaking workers with promises of legal plats, drinkable water, drainage, electricity and internet hookups.
The rise of the so-called “new colonias” has placed a strain on schools, roads and law enforcement in surrounding areas. Some local leaders acknowledge that they weren’t prepared for them and have limited power to improve them.
Backers say the communities offer an opportunity for people with little money and bad credit to have a house of their own. But the decision is fraught, experts say. That’s because developers don’t always keep their promises, and the gaps in infrastructure can prevent landowners from building equity and using it to move to a place that’s better, cleaner and safer.
“This is being marketed as affordable housing, but they’re going to pay a big price,” said John Henneberger, an expert in low-income housing issues at Texas Housers, an Austin-based nonprofit that tracks the state’s colonias. Too good to be true
Kings Colony sounded like a good deal to Sanchez and her husband, Jose Santos Perez, when they bought their lot five years ago.
The neighborhood was hidden among the tall pines off U.S. 59, some 35 miles northeast of downtown Houston and even farther from the foul air of their previous home near the Houston Ship Channel. An advertisement on Telemundo told them that they could buy a half-acre lot with no restrictions and for not too much money.
Perez and Sanchez purchased land from Colony Ridge Land, a New Caney-based development and real-estate investment firm, and built a home, room by room. Gardeners, seamstresses, roofers and other low-wage workers, almost all of them Hispanic, moved to the subdivision, too. The mostly forgotten place became a mishmash of jerry-built hovels, tin-can trailers and sagging, chicken-wire stables. The pride of ownership was the primary attraction.
But many of them, including Perez and Sanchez, said they haven’t seen any improvements in the neighborhood despite promises made when they bought their land.
The roads, in particular, are so shoddy that Perez, 64, doubts paramedics could reach their house if there is a problem with Sanchez, 57, who has cervical cancer. When the 4-year-old nephew of a neighbor was badly burned six months ago, he had to be driven by a family member to the nearest paved road before an ambulance could take him to a hospital.
The conditions also mean that some children must walk for a half-hour or more to the closest bus stop, which is located along Galaxy Boulevard, the only paved road that bisects the neighborhood.
Residents, meanwhile, have tried to fill potholes with broken pieces of concrete from nearby construction sites.
“It’s trash for you, but it’s riches for me because it fills the holes,” said Lizet Quevedo, who has lived in the neighborhood for eight years.
What really bothers Quevedo is the annual $180 fee per lot that she and others pay to the subdivision’s property owners association for the maintenance of streets, gutters, curbs, parks or others recreational facilities that don’t exist. The association is proposing to increase the fee to $280 per lot at its August meeting, she said.
“They’re taking away money from our groceries,” said Quevedo, who owns four lots with her husband, Evodio Gonzalez. The couple has five children. Neighbors file suit
Frustrated, Gonzalez and some neighbors recently filed a lawsuit against the property owners association, which is controlled by John Harris, owner of Colony Ridge Land, because his company owns the most lots in the subdivision. The suit alleges fraud, claiming Harris doubled the fees in 2012 and “simply pocketed” the revenues because there is nothing to maintain.
Harris denied wrongdoing and blamed the lack of paved streets and other infrastructure on others before him. Kings Colony was created in 1980 by a developer who gave the streets names like Essex, Huntingshire and Yorkshire but was unable to attract buyers and didn’t finish the roads.
Colony Ridge Land began buying and selling land in the subdivision in 2005 and gained control of the property owners group in 2008 after a legal fight with another landowner who later went to prison for theft, records show.
Harris said in a statement that the company is committed to improving the roads because “our customers will never pay for their properties if they can’t access them.” To that end, he said he gave $350,000 to Montgomery County in February to begin paving Cambridge Boulevard, which serves as the subdivision’s eastwest spine.
Typically, developers build the roads in a subdivision, then transfer them to the county for maintenance. Colony Ridge estimates that it would cost at least $20 million to pave every street in the neighborhood, company spokesman Kurt Johnson said.
“You can’t go in and pave everything at once,” he said. “There just isn’t enough money.”
Houston attorney Chris Bell, who is representing the residents, said it’s shameful that money was collected with no obvious benefit.
Residents “just want to see some signs that the developer is going to make improvements, and they haven’t seen them,” said Bell, a former congressman. A familiar story
The struggle to improve life in colonias is not a new story, of course, especially not in places like El Paso, Hidalgo and Cameron counties near the border with Mexico.
Many colonias emerged during the migrant labor boom of the 1950s, with landowners subdividing land and selling plots without basic necessities to the newcomers. They were seen as hopeless slums for decades before residents and religious and labor groups pushed state lawmakers to tighten development standards in the 1980s. Texas and federal dollars helped to provide water systems.
Since then, conditions have improved, analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas concluded last year, but poverty remains. The median income for a colonia household is less than $30,000 per year, compared with $51,000 for Texas as a whole. Nearly three-fourths of residents are U.S. citizens, but more than half of the working-age adults didn’t graduate from high school.
The Dallas Fed defines “new colonias” as subdivisions with substandard housing but with proper plats and access to drinking water, sewers and paved roads.
In some places, however, improved infrastructure doesn’t lead to higher-quality housing. That’s because residents have less to spend on construction after paying more for better lots.
Colony Ridge Land is selling half-acre lots for $25,000 in Montgomery and Liberty counties. The company offers financing for as little as $500 down, but interest runs as high as 12 percent — a rate that is more akin to credit cards than mortgages.
Johnson said Colony Ridge began to market to poor Latino workers because of the lack of affordable housing in the Houston area and their inability to get loans from banks. Through the company’s financing program, monthly payments are less expensive than rent at a trailer park, he said. ‘Not ready for it’
Liberty County Judge Jay Knight said he was struck by the poverty when he paid a visit last year to one of Colony Ridge’s new subdivisions near the tiny town of Plum Grove, just north of Harris County and east of Montgomery County. People were living in trailers, shacks and tents on recently cleared land.
“Development was going on,” he said, “if you want to call it that.”
Knight said Colony Ridge had followed the rules in subdividing the land, but the size and scale of the new neighborhoods was alarming. They could have as many as 40,000 residents once all of the lots are sold. Roughly 75,000 people now live in the sparsely populated county.
“Everything is legal, but it isn’t making anyone happy,” Knight said. “It’s bringing unprecedented growth to the county, and we’re not ready for it.”
In response, Liberty County established a committee to help guide development and hired additional staff to ensure compliance with permits. The county also increased the minimum lot size from a quarter-acre to one acre, so any developer who wants to sell smaller lots will be required to meet stricter standards for housing.
County governments generally are limited in what they can require in terms of housing in unincorporated areas. Those rules usually are set by property owners associations. Colonias’ ‘antidote’
Johnson, the company spokesman, said no one can move onto their lot in the Colony Ridge subdivisions until they are connected to water and sewer systems and their street is paved.
“This is the antidote to colonias,” he said.
But he acknowledged that Kings Colony is different. That’s because the subdivision already was in poor shape when Harris began buying lots.
“The streets aren’t his fault,” Johnson said of Harris. “That’s the way he found it, and he’s trying to fix it.”
Montgomery County Commissioner Jim Clark, whose precinct includes Kings Colony, agreed, saying the original developer didn’t build the streets to code. But the roads need to be addressed because they’re causing problems for emergency responders, he said. That’s why he agreed to provide labor and equipment to get paving started on Cambridge Boulevard.
“I’m not going to fix this one road and leave,” said Clark, who was elected in 2014. “If it takes 10 years (for the subdivision’s other streets), I’ll do the right thing.”
Many residents, meanwhile, feel trapped.
Naila Salazar and her husband, Elias Orozco, rented a house in north Houston before moving into a single-wide trailer to be closer to family already living in Kings Colony.
“I wanted to be with everybody,” she said.
Owning land was important, too. But the couple owes more than the property is worth, based on the Montgomery County Appraisal District’s records. She said they’re paying $500 a month for 20 years to Colony Ridge for a lot that has become more difficult to access since the recent heavy storms.
Now, less than three years after buying the lot, Salazar said they have thought about walking away, like others before them, but don’t want to do more damage to their already bad credit.
“It was important to be an owner of something,” she said. “But we’ve lived here 2½ years, and it’s gotten worse. We’re basically living in Mexico.”