Men return to ‘hood within a hood’ to give what, when they can
Ex-residents helping new generation facing same poverty, crime
On a summer Saturday night, rapper J-Dawg sits on a set of stairs in front of a gray brick apartment building in the Acres Homes neighborhood of northwest Houston. He lights a cigarette and talks with five men, most in their early 20s, about Tiger Woods, civil rights and what it means to be black in 2019.
A car pulls up in a parking lot at Garden City Apartments playing J-Dawg loudly with the windows down. One of the young men starts rapping the lyrics:
Livin’ in the projects, broke with no lights on
Windows wide open so I can see when I write songs
“Everybody in Garden City knows J-Dawg,” said Travon Dow.
Dow, also known as Trigga, has a childhood memory of JDawg, fresh out of jail, walking around Garden City Apartments with a backpack full of CDs. Dow, 30, and J-Dawg, 38, no longer live in Garden City. They go about their daily lives outside the complex, also known as “the bricks,” 252 units of subsidized housing in 29 low-rise buildings erected in 1970.
Former residents call the bricks a “hood within a hood.” Dow remembers hearing gunshots at age 7, during his first night in his mother’s apartment. Other former residents tell stories about the crack epidemic of the ’80s and early ’90s, when mothers sold their food stamps to pay for the drugs some of their children eventually learned to sell.
Garden City is central to Acres Homes, one of the 10 neighborhoods in Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Complete Communities Initiative, a program meant to revitalize Houston’s poor and neglected communities.
Acres Homes residents helped establish goals for the program:
expanded access to jobs, job training, after-school programs for children and solutions to food insecurity, for example. And some results have been achieved, including new workforce and construction training centers and educational camps for kids.
But even when such initiatives are successful, it takes a long time for their effects to trickle down to places like the bricks. Several former residents who hang out at Garden City, and who remain deeply engaged with the neighborhood, said they had never heard of the Complete Communities program.
They grew up in the complex but eventually left, one way or another. Some got pushed into prison cells. Some made it out, but not far, only across the street to Paradise North Cemetery.
Some moved on to regular jobs, like barber or delivery driver or construction worker. Yet the place kept tugging them back. Some return every day to hang out with friends; some come just once or twice a year for fundraisers, birthdays or funerals.
While the mayor’s office continues its broad plans to improve Acres Homes and other distressed neighborhoods, these natives of Garden City feel an obligation to do their part in more personal ways, by giving back to the young men hustling for survival in the apartment complex, the bricks that raised them.
No school shoes
Garden City bumps up next to a strip mall with a self-serve car wash, gas station and cellphone store. On a Friday night, that’s where you can find guys washing their cars after a long week of work. In one hand, Dow holds a rag and inspects the shine of one of his wheels, a whitewall tire wrapped around spokes from a 1984 Cadillac. In the other hand, he has a cup of ice and tequila. As his car dries, other cars pull up, windows roll down, and the night begins.
Dow said life in the bricks led to an angry childhood. When Garden City kids went to parties, they fought. It was like a tradition. But the older men who still hung around the complex kept him in line.
Dow and his closest friends visit a couple of times a week. Dow, whose hip-hop handle is Trigga713, gets up at 4:30 in the morning to work a construction job, mows lawns on the side and spends late nights in the recording studio rapping bars from memory over syrupy-slow bass. In the video for “Ridin’ Dirty,” he raps leaning against his blue Cadillac in front of the apartments that raised him.
Last summer before the school year started, Dow and his friends bought shoes for some of the kids. He sees his younger self in them.
“I didn’t get school shoes one year,” he said. “I started selling bootleg CDs at the corner store to make money to buy myself school clothes.”
At back-to-school fundraisers, former residents help those who remind them of their past. Darrin Turner, 50, remembers himself as an embarrassed 6-year-old when the list of school supplies was sent home and his family didn’t have enough money to buy what he needed. It’s why he braves the heat every year and hosts a fish fry to raise money to buy school supplies.
On a Saturday in early August by 11 a.m., Turner and his friends were wiping their faces with hand towels while setting up tents on the corner of Montgomery Road and Wavell Street.
Turner lived in Garden City through the ’80s. He was incarcerated twice, for aggravated robbery and possession with intent to sell drugs, but for the past 11 years, he’s been a delivery driver for Target Hunger, a nonprofit that delivers meals to seniors.
“One of the most gratifying things in my life was letting my mom see the person I could be before she passed on,” he said.
Turner also organizes the Garden City Bash, a reunion of former residents at Sylvester Turner Park in Acres Homes. (Mayor Turner grew up in Acres Homes and still lives in the area.) This year’s event in March brought together about 200 people, said Darrin Turner, who is not related to the mayor.
By 1 p.m., Crock-Pots warming boudin rice, single servings of macaroni salad and slices of pound cake in multi-colored sandwich bags were set out, ready to be served.
“I don’t know if I’m doing enough, but I’m doing what I can,” Turner said
Garden City Drive, which cuts through the center of the apartment complex, takes you through building after building of gray bricks. To an outsider, they’re hard to tell apart. But someone who grew up in these apartments can tell you where they used to live, where their friends used to live, where their mother still lives and where their friend’s mother’s sister lives.
Moms’ dominant role
Harvey Hubbard’s mother still lives in Garden City, and he visits her often. But he doesn’t stick around because if something happens, he said, it’s hard to stay uninvolved.
“I love that place, but it will bring you down,” said Hubbard, 44.
Hubbard grew up in Garden City in the ’80s and ’90s. He remembers going to the woods across the street with his pellet gun to shoot anything that moved: squirrels, birds, rabbits, frogs. But he wasn’t doing it for sport; it was to survive.
Hubbard said his mother used to trade their food stamps for money at a liquor store down the street to buy crack. About halfway through the month, his diet would consist of syrup sandwiches or whatever his friends’ mothers could spare. His toys were burned spoons and dirty needles.
At 9, he saw a man shot dead in the entryway of the apartment next door. At 13, he started to sell crack. At 14, he started to rob houses and steal cars.
“I had a dream,” Hubbard said. “I wanted to play sports. But because there was no food, there was no clothes, there was no money, it totally derailed me from what I initially wanted out of life.”
Mothers play a dominant role in Garden City. Women push strollers down the street together and wave from porch to porch. They work hard to support their families. But the women of the bricks are navigating a history of systemic roadblocks, the same roadblocks that redirect the futures of brothers, husbands and sons.
“It’s real hard,” said Patricia Anderson, 48, who goes by Patty Pat in Garden City. Anderson grew up in the apartments with her mother and came back when she was 21 to raise her two sons as a single mother.
“If the young boys see the older boys selling drugs, they’re going to want to do it, too. If you see them going to school, getting a job, you’re gong to want to do it, too,” she said.
Older men, like Hubbard, are proof to the younger generation that they don’t have to face these problems alone.
Hubbard was sentenced to prison three times for dealing drugs and possession. Now he enjoys a comfortable life in Tomball with his three children. The young men who walk the bricks today, however, still know and sometimes look up to Hubbard and his criminal past.
In his Notes app on his iPhone, Hubbard keeps a list called “Ghetto Dreams” after the Fat Pat song. Every so often, he updates it with ideas he thinks will help Garden City: educational programs, business classes, counseling, mentorship.
“If you make it, if you do halfway good for yourself, you’re obligated to help someone from over there,” he said.
Former Garden City resident Corey Johnson has been helping Dow with his music. Johnson, 43, owns a barbershop near U.S. 290 and got his start cutting hair on the porch of his mom’s place in the bricks. He was one of the last to step off the porch, as he says, and start hustling.
“I got caught up in the ways of trying to make money when I saw my mom couldn’t afford to give me money,” he said.
Now when he visits, he packs his clippers, sets up on the same porches where he learned his craft years ago and gives the kids free haircuts.
“It’s like being a father to these kids,” he said. “If we had fathers, a lot of us wouldn’t do the things we did.”
Johnson doesn’t go back to the bricks as often as some of the younger men like Dow. For Johnson, while Garden City represents his childhood, it also is a place that can turn into trouble in an instant.
This summer, three of Dow’s friends from Acres Homes have been shot and killed.
Crime in Acres Homes has dropped since 2013, according to data from the Houston Police Department. More than a third of crimes recorded by HPD in Acres Homes are some type of assault, compared to about a quarter of crimes for all of Houston.
But Garden City is not a lawless place. There’s a Houston Police Department station steps from the apartment complex. The bricks, however, have their own set of rules. “Loyalty” and “loyalty before betrayal” are common tattoos on necks, torsos or arms.
One-acre lots
Acres Homes is a historically black neighborhood built after World War I. Properties were sold by the acre, which attracted people who wanted a bit of country near the city. Homes had enough space for gardens and horses, still seen in yards today.
The community faces barriers not unlike other urban communities of color. Elementary school test scores drag down rankings. The median household income is lower than average. And the community faces higher risks of asthma and heart disease.
The Acres Homes neighborhood was hit hard by the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s, residents say.
By 1990, new economic policies, mass incarceration and addiction had disrupted the social health of the black community, said David Ponton III, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida who researches racial segregation and African American criminalization. In 1990, marriage rates had fallen dramatically in Acres Homes, with two-parent households ranging among census tracts from 56.9 percent to 31.6 percent. The average unemployment rate jumped from 6 percent in 1980 to 14 percent in 1990.
Some of the men who return to Garden City feel an obligation that runs deeper than back-toschool haircuts and supplies. Men like Dezmond Jackson, Dow’s friend, visit daily, not only to make sure children are fed and go to school but also to hustle. It’s a “do as I say, not as I do” approach.
Some of the kids in Garden City have food one day, but it’s gone the next, and Jackson believes fundraisers are too rare. On a Saturday evening as he walked to an apartment building in the back, he greeted everyone on their porch, everyone who drove by and every child who rode by him on a bike.
Jackson, who said he’s “three felonies in,” goes by his rap name Caesar when he’s in Garden City. To him, it’s important to be there for the kids to pay attention.
“If you pull up and don’t know their names, they’re not going to listen,” he said.
Food is a way to reach out to the kids. Former residents often say, “You’ll do anything when you’re hungry.” So it’s not uncommon for Jackson and his friends to pitch in $4 here, $15 there, to buy pizzas for the 15- and 16-year-olds who might otherwise find another way to get money for food.
“We make things happen out of nothing,” he said.
Jabriel Odom, aka Chunky, looks up to Jackson. The 19-yearold, who wants to be a preacher, was watching over the younger kids one evening in Crenshaw Boulevard, a field between two apartment buildings named after the infamous street in Los Angeles.
At 15, he was shot in the stomach. The bullet twisted through his abdomen, and at one point he was pronounced dead. He said he heard the bullet was meant for his twin brother, but Odom took the shooting personally.
“If it hit me, it was meant for me,” he said.
Odom says the bricks have gotten a lot better. He attributes the change in part to older men coming back and helping the community.
“Most kids in these apartments have no fathers. But to see those that made mistakes grow up and help those who have no father, I give them the most respect. Why? Because I don’t know if they had a father,” Odom said.
The young men who live at Garden City and patrol between buildings today fill the spaces that J-Dawg, Dow, Hubbard, Johnson and Turner left open when they moved on. These men, by returning, are redefining what family looks like and what fatherhood means.
Fatherhood means buying shoes and giving haircuts. Turner can sell fish plates to raise money for school supplies. Jackson can make sure no one goes hungry. And J-Dawg, using his talent for words, can inspire young men, even for five minutes on a hot and humid summer night while sitting on the stairs.
They all come back and give what they can, when they can, to the young men who stand under the oak trees and on the porches of the bricks.