Fighting gentrification is a losing battle, but some try to get ahead of it
The Rev. Leslie Smith II does not try to slow gentrification; he knows that is a futile fight, so he tries to get ahead of it.
Smith has watched his neighborhood, and those surrounding it, change for almost 40 years. He lives in the Third Ward, a residential area set aside for African Americans during segregation, southwest of downtown and south of a former warehouse district.
The neighborhood deteriorated after middle-class African Americans moved out, and drug dealers moved in. As a new pastor, Smith dedicated himself to shutting down crack houses and discovered that purchasing them was the most certain way.
“The first thing I’d do when I buy a crack house, I’d put a sign there that says, ‘God’s property: A drug-free zone,’” Smith told me. “We renovated them, we did the change (and) not only have we changed lives, we’ve transformed the neighborhood.”
Smith’s ministry has moved beyond pastoring. He has built a nonprofit community development corporation called Change Happens! Over decades, the organization has assembled entire city blocks and filled them with singlefamily bungalows that he rents to Third Ward residents at affordable prices.
“These last 30 years, I’ve tried to put my hands on as many as I could,” Smith said. But it’s becoming harder as prices rise, and absentee landlords who once rented to drug dealers are selling to land speculators.
The Third Ward was initially intended to house poor African Americans who worked downtown or in the warehouse district or the homes of wealthy white people. But the warehouses are turning into condominiums, the Midtown commercial district is becoming hip and the two universities that skirt the Third Ward, Texas Southern University and the University of Houston, are expanding.
Lot prices in the Third Ward have skyrocketed from the $10,000 that Smith used to pay to $200,000. Developers are tearing down bungalows to build townhouses and student housing. Families that have lived in the Third Ward for generations are having a hard time finding cheap rental homes.
There are still drug dealers Smith would still like to buy out,
but he has a new, more urgent mission. He wants to provide his neighbors with affordable housing that will last.
“People want to live in their neighborhood,” he said, “but the people want a good quality, safe place.”
Change Happens! wants to move the bungalows to lower-priced lots elsewhere in the city and team up with the NHP Foundation, a Washington nonprofit that develops and protects affordable housing, to construct 70 units of senior citizen housing. The foundation is teaming up with another community development corporation to build 160 units for Third Ward families, said Neal Drobenare, a senior vice president at the NHP Foundation.
“We divide the world into really well-established neighborhoods, really bad neighborhoods and the folks in the middle, who are the folks that are gentrifying, that are not particularly good now, but it’s going to be good,” he said. “We think that’s really the place that you should be focusing on because land isn’t quite that expensive, opposition isn’t that bad yet and you’ll probably get more things done.”
The Third Ward is home to 1,400 families that earn less than 80 percent of average median income and do not receive housing subsidies, Drobenare told me.
“All of those folks are basically going to be flossed and crossed out of a neighborhood where they and their families have lived for generations,” he said. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to really build some bastions of affordability in what’s going to become an upper-income neighborhood and, in essence, create a mixed-income community.”
Smith and Drobenare know they cannot stop the gentrification. No one can build a wall around the Third Ward and dictate who can buy and sell a property within it. Neither should anyone want to make what would become a de facto reservation for impoverished African Americans, which would be a throwback to segregation.
A little financial and social jujitsu, though, can mitigate the worst of the gentrification. The only way to hold on to land is to own it, a lesson Smith learned 40 years ago and has put to good use. Drobenare and NHP Foundation know the wisdom of anticipating the market and striking a good deal to protect residents.
Change is a tyrant that cannot be stopped, no matter how much we want to preserve what is good about the past and present. The best we can do is soften its blow by applying business principles for good.