Third Ward is getting ready for its close-up
Antoine Bryant leads the Bryant Design Group, an architecture, urban planning and community engagement firm. He studied urban planning at Cornell University, architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, and has been rebuilding and reinvigorating Hou
Last month, the city rededicated the Third Ward’s Emancipation Park following a $33.6 million renovation, making one of Houston’s most economically challenged districts ripe for redevelopment. Bryant, who serves on the Houston Planning Commission and the Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone that includes the park, says managing what comes next will be a challenge.
Q: Why did community engagement become an important part of your practice? A:
Often there is an assumption that because a community has a certain education attainment gap, or a certain income gap, that they don’t know what’s good for them. And I’ve found that to be not true whatsoever. Oftentimes communities are pretty clear about what they need.
I realized that there is an opportunity, not only from a design standpoint but also from a community engagement standpoint, to give people a voice where they don’t typically have one. So the Bryant Design Group acts as both a design entity and in the capacity of giving a voice, and an ability to get your points across, to community residents.
Q: Emancipation Park, which has been a centerpiece of Houston’s African-American community for over a century, introduces an amazing new amenity just as the Third Ward is undergoing tremendous change. Should long-term residents be worried?
A:
Many of the African-American residents feel threatened, and they feel that any new improvements are not necessarily for the residents who have been there for the last five decades, but are for those who have been there the last five years. But Emancipation Park was done emphatically for the neighborhood. I hope people know that this park is for the people who live there. It’s not for somebody else. If you came to the park before the renovation, we want you back.
There are real fears about gentrification, though, and the Third Ward has gone through a shift; a demographic shift and an economic shift. When I moved to Houston, there was a lot of vacant land, there was a lot of dilapidated housing, but the neighborhood was definitely turning. Those vacant parcels were available for $1 a square foot, so I was telling anyone in the neighborhood who would listen to buy a house, buy some dirt. As has happened in other cities, speculators came in and bought the land, and prices went up. We’ve seen this movie before.
This is the gift and the curse of doing development in challenging neighborhoods. One solution the neighborhood has been looking at is developing more affordable housing, both owner-occupied and quality, affordable rental housing that can replace the slumlords. If we want to bring the working class and the middle class back into the urban core, we need to give them somewhere to live.
Emancipation Park is also part and parcel of a larger, longer-term plan to develop a commercial corridor along Emancipation Avenue. The bones of a commercial corridor are there. A lot of the community groups have been soliciting commercial entities, as well as developing a cohort of local businesses, to open along Emancipation Avenue from Alabama Street north.
Everybody would love to see a whole row of neighborhood retail. For the commercial and economic viability of that neighborhood, it behooves us to develop and promote local entrepreneurship.
Q: What would you advise an outsider who is considering investing in the Third Ward? A:
You can make money and be responsible at the same time. I know that’s crazy talk, but it’s true. I think the community is primed for quality investment. There are very active entities in the neighborhood, such as the Emancipation Economic Development Council, so just go to a meeting. That’s how you’ll get the pulse of what is happening, and if you are looking for a place to make an investment, you’ll get your answer within a couple of meetings. Affordability is a big issue, and cultural integrity is important. The neighborhood has been 95 percent African-American for the last 50 years, maybe longer. The El Dorado Ballroom was where Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie went after they did a gig downtown. The neighborhood has this very rich history that some residents are nervous about losing. They don’t object to people moving into the neighborhood, they just them to respect what the neighborhood is about. For example, if you move into a neighborhood where little old ladies sit on the corner and talk, gossip and do what they do, then two months in, you can’t get mad that the little old ladies are sitting outside, talking, gossiping and doing what they do.