Major stories and events

Cities such as Clear Lake, Pasadena fight for independence with varying success

In 1913, an angry mass of what were then Houston suburbanites gathered in the July heat in the community of Brunner — now just another clump of townhomes along Washington Avenue — to declare war against an annexation pushed by Houston City Hall.

The state Legislature had granted Houston and other cities new annexation powers, and Houston had been eyeing Brunner and the community of Sunset Heights. The residents wanted none of it.

“You will be sought for the taxation of your property,” A.T. Maxwell, president of the Sunset Heights Civic Club, told the crowd, as reported in the Houston Post. “It will not be for the want of your pleasant company, but strictly your money as taxes.”

The faces changed, but, for the next eight decades, the same angry residents in the same crowded meeting halls made precisely the same denunciations of Houston’s aggressive annexation plans, from Bellaire in 1949 to Mykawa in 1956 to Clear Lake in 1977 to Kingwood in 1996.

Aided by ambition and liberal annexation laws that gave residents no say in the matter, the swampy backwater gobbled up territory, becoming the largest city in the South and, then, the fourth-largest in the nation.

For the last 15 years, nearly all of Houston’s annexations have been limited in scope and at the request of the property owners. Typically, these are outlying utility districts in which the city takes in commercial land, levies a sales tax and splits that new revenue with the district. Property to be fully annexed, in which new residents would pay all taxes and assume all duties of citizenship, must be identified three years ahead of time. In part because Houston’s past actions led to more restrictive annexation rules, the city today plans no such general annexations.

It was not always so, for Houston or for its peers across the country. As America urbanized, the challenge of serving a growing region typically was solved by cities annexing new neighborhoods on their edges.

Around the turn of the 20th century, attitudes shifted, and states restricted annexation even as cities boomed, as detailed in a 1965 U.S. Department of Agriculture report on Harris County’s postwar growth. As Americans used their new automobiles to flee cities, these restrictions became entrenched. Suburbs incorporated into their own cities, creating landlocked metro areas.

One exception was Texas, and Houston in particular.

Founded in 1836 on roughly a square quarter-mile at the confluence of Buffalo and White Oak bayous, Houston did not boom overnight. By 1900, the city had expanded to only about nine square miles around downtown. In 1913, with a population of 77,000, the city added a bit of land beyond that — including Brunner — and also annexed land along the newly deepened Houston Ship Channel.

The formerly independent city of Houston Heights, the state’s first planned community, was annexed in 1918. By the end of the 1920s, Houston covered much of what is now the Inner Loop, including the former cities of Magnolia and Harrisburg, and the state’s first black-founded city, Independence Heights. Unlike unincorporated areas, cities had to consent to become part of Houston.

It was the postwar period, however, that gave Houston largely the shape it has today. Afraid of being boxed in by neighboring cities with which it was in open competition, Houston completed more than two dozen annexations between 1940 and 1960.

A landmark 1949 annexation added 79 square miles and 110,000 people. The original plan had been even larger, but industries to be annexed along the ship channel forced a referendum and defeated the plan. In a surprise 1948 New Year’s Eve vote, City Council restarted the process without the plants. Pasadena mayor Sam Hoover called it a “land grab.”

Houston Mayor Oscar Holcombe ultimately dropped some claims near Pasadena and Deer Park, but that did not stop angry residents from petitioning for another referendum. This time, however, voters approved, and the city’s footprint doubled.

Holcombe, then mayor of a city of more than 600,000, argued Houston had to prevent suburban communities from benefiting from Houston’s economy without ensuring its long-term vitality by contributing to the city’s tax base.

Houston again doubled in size in 1956, taking in another 188 square miles and 140,000 residents. A handful of southside opponents protested, saying city services would not justify their new tax burden. “There are only a few cows out there,” one resident said. “Why take me in?”

But the plan went through, adding Lake Houston and swathes to the south and west, reaching what is now Beltway 8.

Pasadena and other eastside cities fought Houston’s expansions, triggering a decade of lawsuits, recalled Jerry Wood, who worked on annexation issues at City Hall for 21 years. Houston moved to lock in a claim to all unincorporated areas of Harris County in 1960; in protest, Wood said, Deer Park annexed part of the surface of the moon.

These wars spurred dozens of bills in the Legislature. One, in 1963, blocked the sorts of enormous annexations Houston had pursued, limiting annexations to a 5-mile band around the city limits and capping them at 10 percent of a city’s existing territory.

The bill also cooled the city’s interest in Clear Lake City, the growing community around NASA’s new manned spaceflight facility. Ultimately, it just delayed the fight.

City Hall moved to annex the area in 1977, after a bill passed the Legislature that could have allowed Clear Lake to form its own city. T-shirts and bumper stickers proclaimed “Free the Clear Lake 25,000.” After the vote, billboards cried, “De-Annex Clear Lake.” Wounds from the battle didn’t fully heal. Many residents kept using Clear Lake City, not Houston, in their mailing addresses.

“In all the time we’ve been here there has never been adequate staffing in either the fire or the police department at all, and of course we’ve been taxed quite well,” said longtime Clear Lake resident Sherrie Matula, who said the 40-year-old topic still comes up regularly.

In the 1990s, Mayor Bob Lanier made clear his intention to again grow the city by annexing a large, populated area, Wood said, and Kingwood made the most sense from a planning perspective.

The issue dominated 1996, as Houston officials started the year being heckled at a January meeting in Kingwood and ended it that December with a split vote to take in the area’s 55,000 residents and 32 square miles.

Again, bitterness lingers. The Kingwood Service Association ousted its president after he cooperated with city officials in the wake of the vote. Area residents and their councilman still argue they do not receive adequate services for the taxes they pay.

The Kingwood fight spurred 70 bills at the Legislature in 1997, ultimately producing a 1999 compromise that all but ended cities’ ability to conduct similar forced annexations in the future.