Houston's Housing

In 1991, housing advocates led by state Senator Rodney Ellis lobbied to have $20 million from a $500 million bond referendum set aside for homeless and housing initiatives. Following the bond vote, City Council passed a resolution dedicating $10 million to be split between homeless programs and the repair of public-housing units. The other $10 million was to go toward increasing the stock of privately owned low-cost housing.

But it wasn't until last month, almost four years after the money was supposed to be available for use, that the bond funds bore any fruit. That happened when SEARCH opened up a new facility. And though several other homeless projects are now under way, as are repairs to the public-housing units, the issue of the $10 million reserved for low-cost housing initiatives is another matter. Despite voter approval in 1991, there has been no attempt by the city to allocate it or even to suggest ways to spend it. The city's Margie Bingham claims that her office is accepting proposals for use of the money from housing groups. If so, that's news to advocates such as Sally Shipman, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, who say they're discouraged by the city's lack of initiative.

"This was a major victory," Shipman says of the 1991 bond measure, "and we thought this means they'll get busy and issue the requests for proposal and we'll see our bond money spent. To the city's credit, they are moving along with the homeless projects. But what concerns us are the affordable housing bonds. Nothing has happened that we're aware of. That bond money is just sitting there."

The idea of $10 million "just sitting there" makes housing advocates edgy. They've seen unused funds disappear before. In 1986, in the midst of a severe economic downturn, city housing officials were ordered to return nearly $3 million in unspent Community Development Block Grant funds to the federal government. In 1990, it forfeited $1 million more, according to a study by the League of Women Voters.

While the city's record of making use of the federal funds available to it has improved in recent years, more and more of that federal allocation has gone not to build or rehabilitate housing, but rather to demolish substandard buildings, particularly apartment complexes. Block Grant funds have also been used in lieu of money from the city budget to make improvements in infrastructure, not housing, in certain areas.

The effect of this can be seen in the explosion of families who are seeking subsidized housing through the city's housing authority.

"Houston has been very unaggressive in getting low-income housing, and it gets worse every year," says Texas Low-Income Housing's John Henneberger. "If you look at the per capita number of public-housing units in Houston and compare it to other cities, [Houston is] way down there on the list. And it's true of the privately owned units as well.

"The gap between the number of units available and the number of people who need and qualify for them just increases at an exponential rate."

That trend will likely continue. Shipman says she appreciates the effort the city has made to increase shelter beds and services for the homeless. But that only begs the question of what is the city doing to keep people from becoming homeless?

"I'll tell you, I'm concerned and the [Coalition] board is concerned," says Shipman. "These are the folks who are going to be making minimum wage, and maybe, if we're lucky, in three years they'll be making $6 an hour. But they will not get into the housing market because there is nothing for them."

Until it was slammed by the oil and real-estate crash a decade ago, Houston hadn't much reason to consider the full range of economic perspectives. The city's growth and success was born of its marriage of politics and business. The poor don't vote. Nor do they do much business. So, despite the recent talk coming out of City Hall about diversity, it's still inherently easier to think of the poor in terms of cost rather than benefit.

"As one elected official told me," recalls Shipman, "'You have no constituency.' And he's right."

Such attitudes have led to some rabid reactions to the presence of the less fortunate. A case in point is the demolition of thousands of low-cost apartment units in Spring Branch, which, with the support of City Councilwoman Helen Huey, seems to be waging war against its large immigrant population. Similar uprisings have been staged by single-family homeowners in the Fondren Southwest area.

So it's not surprising that the city's first sorties over the land acquired in the RTC sale was at the behest of homeowners in those two areas of the city.

"The mayor's office is interested in converting this site to new home development ... if we could recover it from the RTC, hit it with deed restrictions and market it to a homebuilder," read a January 2, 1993, memo from Huey to her chief aide, Bob Thompson.