Starting in the Bottom, wave of change hitting Fifth Ward
Longtime residents hope tight-knit historic Black community can survive
Kelvin “Rock” Washington shook his head at his feet as he walked to Greater Mount Olive Missionary Baptist, one of Fifth Ward’s historic Black churches.
“People are moving out. I heard a church is moving out.” Talk of a nearby church, one of the oldest in Houston, discussing selling its property and moving outside the Loop was circulating throughout his congregation.
A block away, Christopher Christie’s phone rang. His family has lived on the same plot of land for more than a century. When Christie, 64, picked up, the voice on the other end wanted to know if he’d sell.
“Sell it and go do what?” Christie asked. “Buy another one? We already own this one. Why leave?”
Washington and Christie remembered when the southernmost stretch of Fifth Ward, which they grew up calling the Bottom, was filled with singlefamily homes built in the early 1900s. In their tellings, the Bottom was bursting with children and churches; neighbors knew their neighbors. They themselves go back to those days; when they were kids, they’d sometimes go down to Buffalo Bayou together and use dogs to rustle game from the grasses. They’d sell their catches to their neighbors: 25 cents a pi
geon, 50 cents a bullfrog, $2 a rabbit.
Things have changed since then. The Bottom of Fifth Ward, from Interstate 10 down to Buffalo Bayou, has seen the most visible signs of change many believe is coming for the rest of the historically Black neighborhood. Now, viewed from above, much of the Bottom resembles a parking lot, but with homes instead of cars. The tightly packed rooftops of uniform townhomes have replaced the aging rental houses, and the families who rented those homes for decades have largely dispersed.
The change, which is taking place in historic Black and Hispanic communities throughout the city, has reshaped both the informal support networks that many had relied on and the institutions that provided residents resources. Increasingly, fewer and fewer of the people who grew up calling the area the Bottom still live there. The median home sales price in the neighborhood has risen to $335,000 in 2020 from $145,000 in 2010, according to Houston Association of Realtors data; the median household income is roughly $30,000, according to census estimates.
Washington, dressed in a mustard-colored suit with a gold tie, opened the doors to his church, stepping out of the hot Houston morning into the cool relief of an air-conditioned space. It felt in many ways like stepping into a time capsule: He was greeted by dozens of people who not only knew the Bottom but who also have known him since he was a child. When he slipped into the sanctuary of the brick-and-stone building after the devotion, the pastor, who has been at Greater Mount Olive for 38 years, nodded in recognition.
Nonetheless, change could be detected within the church’s wood-paneled walls as well. While once the congregation verged on overflowing its two dozen pews, that morning only a few dozen people dotted the room. Many who remained were getting on in years. Several had moved from the neighborhood when the homes they were renting were sold to developers.
And encroaching development was not far from the congregation’s minds. At the end of the service, the Rev. Byrd Lacey Jr. mentioned a section of townhomes that was under construction adjacent to the church’s property — heavy equipment had driven across the church’s empty lot, tearing up the grass, and he worried that temporary fencing had been set up on their side of the property line.
“If you give people an inch …” he began.
“They’ll take a mile,” the congregation responded.
Lacey nodded. “You can sing, you can preach all you want to. But sometimes, you’ve got to stop and talk business.”
Dispersal of people
After the call about selling his home, Christie stood inside his living room, gazing at a pair of old photographs. One was a picture of the house. Directly below was a portrait of his grandparents, who bought it. Lorenza and Hillary Sullivan moved to Houston in 1918 from Bonnie Mae, a Louisiana town so small, Christie said, that “it still ain’t on the map.”
When the Sullivans purchased the home from a white developer Hillary met doing odd jobs, they were the first Black family on the block, Christie said. Many others soon joined; eventually the population of Fifth Ward, which was half Black and half white five years after the Civil War, became predominantly Black, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
At the time, many white families across the region were moving to new subdivisions where neighborhood agreements known as deed restrictions banned minorities and industry. Fifth Ward, which did not have such restrictions, allowed minorities but also allowed factories to open up shop next door to homes — Christie grew up across the street from a mattress factory and a block and a half from a Superfund site.
Now, trends from those times have begun to reverse. These days, the family’s yellow bungalow faces a gated community of townhomes instead of a lowslung factory. Fifth Ward, like many historic Black and Latino neighborhoods, also has seen drops in its minority population.
The shift, some say, was inevitable. Harvey Clemons Jr. is both a member of an informal group of pastors known as the Fifth Ward Coalition of Churches and one of the founders of Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, a nonprofit that encourages development and investment in the area.
“We cannot be in the shadow of downtown in the fourth-largest city of the United States and think that (Fifth Ward) will not (change),” he said.
In the face of such development, he said, the only course is to look forward. He advised longtime residents to love their new neighbors and for legislators to think of ways to change the tax rules so that people who grew up there are not priced out.
“To romanticize antiquity is an error,” he said. “When segregation was in place, we were fighting for integration. Now that there is integration in place, it seems we are fighting for segregation.”
The change crept up from the south. Second Ward, just across the bayou, became a hotbed of townhomes, breweries and restaurants, then a 150-acre former manufacturing facility just within its southern border became the site of an ambitious $2.5 billion redevelopment project.
East River already has begun construction on a golf course and eventually will bring over a million square feet of apartments, offices, restaurants and retail. Its developer, Midway, has promised that 15 percent of its housing will be affordable. But some are worried that its definition of affordable won’t be enough to keep longtime Fifth Ward residents in the neighborhood. The most affordable of East River’s units will target households making 80 percent of the Houston region’s median income — that’s $63,050 for a family of four. That’s more than double Fifth Ward’s median household income of roughly $30,000.
Many of Christie’s family members and friends left the neighborhood even before prices began to rise; they moved to the suburbs as neighborhoods desegregated, opening up new housing options. But those like himself who plan to stay are finding themselves contending with skyrocketing home and land values. The Harris County Appraisal District has pegged the market value of the 10,000-square-foot lot on which Christie’s family home sits at over $400,000.
“Right now, they’re trying to tax us out of here,” Christie said.
Washington has thought a lot about the dispersal of the people he grew up with.
“It reminds me of the tribe of Israel,” he ruminated on one of his walks through Fifth Ward. That evening he was up north of the Bottom and strolling the sidewalks of Kelly Courts, public housing that may be torn down to make way for a wider Interstate 45. “If you move these people out of here, you destroy a close-knit community.”
He knew how important community can be for a person with little else. Growing up in the ’70s, he and his friends foraged for blueberries in the brush alongside railroad tracks and used a pole to knock plums from a neighbor’s tree to their side of the fence.
In 2016, after leaving prison for jewelry theft, he had even less. He found himself without work or a place to live. But when a childhood friend, Earl Malbeaux, heard about his situation, Malbeaux took Washington in as if he were family, offering a couch in Fifth Ward rent-free and sharing food until Washington was back on his feet.
“I had nowhere else to go,” said Washington, as he thought of why he has been drawn back to his childhood neighborhood and why he can’t imagine living elsewhere. “I feel more comfortable in Fifth Ward than I did anywhere else because everybody knows me.”
Now, in the Bottom, he feels known for more than his mistakes. People respect him, he says, for checking in on seniors and driving them to church.
So the news of a historic Fifth Ward church’s potential sale weighed on Washington. His own church has received calls asking if it would like to sell; Washington frequently visited the subject like a person who can’t help touching a sore.
“I would hate it to go down — it would be like death to me,” he said on one of his walks.
“At church I can see people look at me with respect, and I respect everyone in that church. It’d be hard for me to accept it. It’d be like being married to an individual, you’re with them so long, you wake up next to them every morning, and one day they’re gone. You don’t know if you’ll find that again,” he said.
As he thought of the possibility, he faltered. “It’s like the bigger people eat the pie, and the poor people get the crumbs.”
What’s next
Christie and Washington have spent a lot of time thinking about what’s next for the Bottom as the networks of friends, families and congregations they grew up with begin to wane. Christie likes many of his new neighbors — “I have white friends, Hispanic friends, Asian friends right here in the neighborhood now” — and sometimes wonders at how safe and diverse the Bottom has become. Nonetheless, he and Washington often wish that their old neighbors had been able to buy their homes and that families who owned homes had been able to hold on to them over the years, so that they could benefit from the neighborhood’s rise.
But they don’t let those feelings stop them from hoping for the future. When Christie retires from his carpentry work, he hopes to start a community day care and children’s program out of a local church. In his written plans for the project, he describes the programming as “good clean family fun” that would “bring the academic achievement levels of our area of service up.”
After all, Christie said, “it’s my home.”
And on Greater Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church’s 75th anniversary, Washington celebrated with his congregation. A group of children, the New Generation Choir, sang “I expect a miracle every day,” and when a little girl who had stood by shyly at the beginning of the song suddenly brightened and began dancing, Washington smiled and pointed her out to his daughter.
“Look at that little girl,” he said. “She’s going to be something. The spirit in this church is thick.”