Residents work to bring green space to Gulfton
Groups seek to put more nature in the neighborhood, keep park clean
A group of friends played soccer and a father pushed his daughter on a swing Saturday in BurnettBayland Park while a group of moms meandered along the grass searching for litter. The women volunteer monthly to keep what they say was a once-neglected park clean.
“It was terrible,” said Olga Flores, 43, a mom of two daughters. “The park that you see today is not the park it was in the past. It’s absolutely different.”
The space matters because Burnett-Bayland Park is the only sizable park in Gulfton, a densely developed community just outside the west side of Loop 610 and known as Houston’s Ellis Island. Many are from other countries and live in apartments with only parking lots for kids to play in.
Residents, including those volunteering that morning, know the problems that come with a lack of green space. There’s not enough places to gather, meet people and de-stress. And walks to school are
hot. A heat mapping project in 2020 found that Gulfton residents live with higher temperatures than others in the region; they lack trees and vegetation to cool the air.
For the past year, a steering committee of community leaders and consultants started to tackle the problem. They drafted a plan called “Greener Gulfton,” a road map for bringing more nature to the neighborhood and one that organizers hope will be useful for other urban places.
The plan suggests ideas such as building placitas, or small plazas, with plants and art, and it puts redevelopment of Burnett-Bayland Park at its center. Moms in the cleanup group, Madres del Parque, do what they do to make sure the space can be a community resource. They helped envision more.
“We started this program just as a concern and a worry for our families because it was so neglected,” said Maria Hernandez of Madres del Parque, who also worked on the Greener Gulfton plan. “I believe because it’s in under-served communities in Gulfton and the money was not there for this part of town.”
An urban challenge
Once a wild coastal prairie, Gulfton was developed to provide affordable housing for single energy workers during the economic boom in the 1960s and ‘70s, according to the Greener Gulfton plan. That meant large apartment complexes built next to each other. After the bust, workers left and immigrants and others seeking lower-income housing moved in.
Sandra Rodríguez spent almost 40 years in what she called the “concrete jungle” of Gulfton. Many there live in apartment buildings that don’t have green spaces, she explained. “Our playgrounds were the parking lots and running around the property,” said Rodríguez, now the super neighborhood president.
When Rodríguez started to raise her own family in the area, she sometimes drove them to Hermann Park. She lamented that Burnett-Bayland didn’t have more amenities. Parks and green space could help residents who might be coping with trauma after fleeing war-torn countries, she thought.
A need for improved street safety also concerned Anne Whitlock, founding director of Connect Community, an organization that focuses its work in Gulfton and Sharpstown. Many kids live within 2 miles of school, so the bus doesn’t pick them up.
“It’s a little horrifying when you realize that not only are the ... crossings really unsafe but the routes to school are all concrete, no tree cover, really no biodiversity at all to speak of,” Whitlock said. “So it’s not only just a flood mitigation problem, but it’s quality of life, it’s that sun beating down on a little kid’s head all day.”
Developing solutions
Heranandez, Rodríguez and Whitlock joined the plan’s steering committee and had important questions to answer: How do you bring green space to areas this dense? And how do you bring diverse nature to a diverse community?
For all the threats that climate change and social inequity bring, the group saw solutions. They gathered data and they brainstormed with residents. Among their ideas: They could build vertical green trellises to help with cooling where there wasn’t room for trees and build green roofs to reduce stormwater runoff.
A primary goal became finding ways to provide experiences in nature, just as people had in the countries or other places where they came from, said Jaime González, the Houston Healthy Cities director for the Nature Conservancy, who helped lead and consult on the project.
“They had many rich experiences with nature,” González explained, “and they wanted that for their families, and they wanted it for themselves as well. So it’s just that basic human right to nature really rose to the top.”
Improving biodiversity also became an important factor, said Carolyn White, an urban planner with Harris County Public Health. Animals should be able to pass through urban environments. A lack of habitat can lead to an outbreak of disease.
As the group moves next to enact portions of the plan, a key will be seeing through redevelopment of Burnett-Bayland Park. The dedication of Madres del Parque made clear it was important to families to have a safe environment for their children. When the group formed in 2016, they visited the park weekly.
On Saturday, a handful of woman arrived around 9 a.m. in spite of the wind and cold. Nineyear-old Natalia Perez came along to help her mom, Luz, 43.
“It really means a lot to me because when I was little, like 6 or 7 years old, I came to this park and played on the playground to make new friends,” she said.
“It looked like so much trash, but now it’s not really that much. It changed a lot.”
“The park that you see today is not the park it was in the past. It’s absolutely different.”
Olga Flores, speaking about Burnett-Bayland Park