Census: Historic areas lost residents

Federal data shows demographic shifts in Third Ward, East End

People of color led Houston’s growth over the last 10 years, but that trend wasn’t reflected across all the city’s historic Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Census data released earlier this month paints a changing map of Houston’s racial demographics. In some neighborhoods, such as the historically Black Third Ward, the changes are stark — a byproduct of ongoing gentrification. In other neighborhoods, such as Sunnyside and the Near Northside, the shifts are subtle but hint at the beginnings of a similar process.

The data confirms what residents have known for a long time: The changes are nothing new, and the stakes are high, experts say.

“This is a crisis of enormous proportions,” said Assata Richards, director of the Sankofa Research Institute. “It’s not just that people have lost their communities, communities have lost their people. Housing rates have increased, opportunities have decreased and the protections for naturally occurring affordable housing aren’t there.”

Black people now make up just 45 percent of Third Ward, a drop from 71 percent in 2010, according to the census bureau. Both numbers increase about 10 percent if you remove the census tract that houses the University of Houston.

Third Ward saw its Black population drop about 15 percent to 8,045 residents, though the neighborhood’s overall population grew about 35 percent, census data shows. The

white population rose about 170 percent, from 1,283 residents in 2010 to 3,465 in 2020. White people make up about 20 percent of the neighborhood’s 17,706 residents.

“It’s like a flood. A hurricane has hit the city, and the flood has washed away African Americans from historic neighborhoods,” said Richards, who lives in Third Ward. “I’ve seen the disappearance of Black people at the parks, at the post office, at the corner store. The places in our community are being reshaped and are beginning to become foreign to me. It has a very disorienting effect. These are my neighbors and family members and people I love.”

The gentrification occurring in Third Ward is happening in other racial and ethnic enclaves throughout the city. Second Ward saw its Latino population drop about 25 percent, from 10,802 residents to 8,111 over the last 10 years. The white population rose to 2,572 from 1,711 residents in 2010, an increase of about 50 percent.

Despite Houston adding nearly 94,000 Latinos over the last decade, almost none of that growth occurred in the East End, Near Northside or Northside, traditional Latino strongholds. Nearly every census tract in those areas lost at least some portion of its Latino residents, regardless of whether there was an increase in white residents.

That’s why experts say the issue is larger than just a matter of white people moving into a neighborhood historically occupied by a particular racial or ethnic group.

In fact, the white growth in Third Ward and other areas inside Loop 610, such as the East End and the Heights, is mostly an anomaly. The white population in Houston decreased by about 30 percent over the last decade, though Houston’s overall population rose by 10 percent. That growth was driven almost entirely by people of color and not limited to neighborhoods in the urban core.

“What happens when it becomes more profitable for a landowner to sell than it is to rent is that the people who were longterm renters end up displaced,” said Dr. Quianta Moore, of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Some look at gentrification as neighborhood revitalization and say that’s not a bad thing, but regardless of the definition you use, it’s always problematic when people are forcibly displaced from their neighborhood.”

“When you have economic factors that drive and uproot people out of a neighborhood … there’s a negative psychological harm and increased morbidity and risk of death,” Moore said, citing “Root Shock,” a 2004 book by Dr. Mindy Fullilove.

More displacement

Some historically Black neighborhoods that lost residents saw an increase in Latino people. Acres Homes, for example, saw its Black population fall 12 percent, despite an increase of nearly 5,000 residents. The Latino population increased by 65 percent to about 41 percent of the neighborhood, while Black people make up just over half of the neighborhood, compared with 66 percent in 2010.

Similar trends played out to varying degrees in Trinity Gardens and other northeast Houston neighborhoods.

“The principle concern about gentrification is displacement, and so it’s not always a function of racial change, though it frequently is. It’s a class phenomenon, but because race and class are so yoked, we observe it most as a racial phenomenon,” said housing organizer Zoe Middleton, the former codirector of Texas Housers.

The increase of Latinos in historically Black neighborhoods isn’t fueled simply by cyclical displacement, in which residents who were priced out of one community then displace the residents of another. Other factors — such as immigration, domestic migration and natural birth and death cycles — also play a role in population changes.

Still, the economic factors transcend racial and ethnic boundaries.

“The same economic forces that disenfranchise Black people disenfranchise Latinos,” Moore said.

Longtime residents say they don’t resent their new neighbors but hope that people who move to their neighborhoods respect the history and tradition.

“You hope new neighbors would try to blend in and not change it in a demonstrative way, but in an inclusive way,” said Tomaro Bell, chairman of the MacGregor Super Neighborhood group. MacGregor, which lies directly south of Third Ward, saw a similar loss of Black residents over the last decade.

‘We look out for each other’

Second Ward residents Juan Hernandez and Jose Manuel Diaz echoed the sentiment and wondered why white residents had to move to the neighborhood for it to be “revitalized.”

“The problem is when people come in and try to change everything to have it cater to them,” Diaz said. “You see people on (neighborhood social networking app) Nextdoor reporting ‘suspicious people,’ and it’s like, ‘No, those are our neighbors.’ ”

“When I was in high school, we had to hop over the trains to get to school because they never moved,” Hernandez said. “They knew it was at times when kids were going to school, and they didn’t care. Now they’re wanting to have meetings, and it just seems that all of a sudden that these changes are happening. Why wasn’t this happening 10 years ago or more?”

Despite the changes, residents are working to preserve the community they’ve built over the decades.

“We still are a neighborhood, we look out for each other,” Bell said. “When COVID happened we went to our seniors and made sure they had hand sanitizer. … We gave out food every month to the community.”

That sense of community is tangible in neighborhoods such as MacGregor and Greater Third Ward, where Moore, a child health expert, conducted research on how neighborhoods shape public health. Moore’s research found that the strong bonds formed among residents in low-income neighborhoods can help offset the negative health impacts of living in such areas.

Those bonds led to increased physical activity in Third Ward and lower rates of anxiety, Moore said.

“Pro-social behavior, or being deeply rooted in a community, is a protective factor,” Moore said. “It builds resilience and allows people, individuals and communities to weather storms.”

“This is a crisis of enormous proportions. It’s not just that people have lost their communities, communities have lost their people.”

Dr. Assata Richards, director of the Sankofa Research Institute