As a result, the Fourth Ward has a number of preachers who now fancy themselves real estate developers, and they have come to expect a share of the city's grant money for the privilege. But not one has opened his collection box to help residents with moving expenses or utility reconnections or to assist them in finding new housing.
Likewise, the residents of the Fourth Ward have not been particularly well-served by City Councilmen Jew Don Boney and John Castillo, whose districts include portions of the Fourth Ward. Boney lent bureaucratic authority and considerable indignation to the ministers' demand for grant money. Castillo didn't get involved in the redevelopment project until September, when he and Boney were put in charge of a City Council relocation committee.
For some inexplicable reason, Boney and Castillo didn't convene the relocation committee until mid-January. That gave Bob Lanier enough time to hand over the city's business to Brown, but by then it was too late to deal with a problem that escalates closer to a crisis with each passing day.
With no plan or mechanism in place, Brown turned the matter over to the city's Citizens Assistance Office. Two weeks ago, the mayor said the CAO was helping more than 40 families, but it's difficult to determine how much help the office has been. Housing officials have sent out hundreds of notices, urging residents to call the city for help. A few elderly folks were given a tour of Pleasant Hill Village, a senior's complex in the Fifth Ward. But rents there run between $490 and $590 -- almost triple what most of the residents now pay.
At a mid-December Council meeting, a testy Lanier tried to defend his administration's failure to help residents destined to be displaced by gentrification. He insisted that the city has no obligation to help anyone who lives on the south side of West Gray because Houston Renaissance owns no land there.
That's not true, and Lanier probably knew it. Houston Renaissance starting buying land south of West Gray last September, and as of a month ago, owned about 150,000 square feet on that side of the Fourth Ward.
Moreover, about 300 yards from Willie Taylor's back door, Perry Homes is building a complex of townhouses, one of several development projects receiving property-tax breaks through the city-sanctioned Midtown Tax Increment Financing District.
Lanier may have been irritable at the prospect of leaving office in a few weeks. Or maybe, in his haste to dump the relocation problem on Lee Brown, he simply didn't want to consider the human cost of the urban-renewal juggernaut he unleashed.
Whichever, Lanier apparently decided he'd leave the city's "moral" obligation to someone more qualified.
