Mary Claire Neal, Anthropology, Class of ’21 with Jacob Tate, Economics + Social Policy Analysis, Class of ’22
Brief Summary: As the City of Houston and Rice University prepare to build their gleaming new innovation center, they often ignore the impact this construction will have on the Third Ward community. This paper presents the community group fighting against the gentrification and displacement in the Third Ward and ties them into the greater context of place in Houston.
Introduction
When the Houston Coalition for Equitable Development without Displacement held its first public gathering at Wesley AME Church in November 2019, those present beegan formulating a vision for Third Ward to become Houston’s center for literary arts. The coalition, abbreviated “HCEDD,” is made up of neighbors, community leaders, scholars, students like myself, and organizations from Third Ward and across Houston. Together, we are working to develop, secure, enforce, and sustain a Community Benefits Agreement, or CBA, with Rice Management Company (RMC), which stewards Rice University’s endowment and is developing the 16+ acre South Main Innovation District at the edge of the Third Ward neighborhood.
In a nutshell, here is why: A “CBA” is a project-specific, legally binding contract between a community coalition and a real estate developer. The Rice Management Company (RMC) plan is for the Innovation District to build a thriving, live-work-play complex serving as Houston’s “natural center of gravity for tech start-ups” while simultaneously generating investment returns to ensure that University’s endowment continues growing for generations to come (Miller). The project is slated to be built in the Third Ward, which Rice’s Kinder Institute identifies as the location of the two Census tracts in Houston most likely to gentrify (Kinder Institute). Local and national precedent teaches us that the influx of capital generated by the Innovation District will harmfully disrupt existing black, brown, and low-income communities whose dominant economic and political institutions have been structurally deprived of the so-called “benefits” of capitalism since the system’s origins. A CBA is necessary because it allows the community that a development project would otherwise adversely impact to shape the project according to the needs, concerns, and visions of the community by working directly with the developers to create an enforceable set of strategies.
It was the narratives surrounding the Innovation District that first drew my attention to how consequential the development would be. My coursework at Rice gave me an opportunity to explore how disability and race, and in particular blackness, was implicated in the discourses serving to promote, describe, reflect on, or contest the changes the Innovation District would create. My involvement with the Coalition for Equitable Development gradually emerged from the process of poring over media material and seeking out conversations happening in spaces on and off campus to learn more about the social origins, implications, and impacts of the Innovation District. I participated in the Houston Afrofuturism Book Club facilitated by Jaison Oliver and encountered the Black Quantum Futurism theory and practice of Rasheeda Phillips. These both greatly influenced my understanding that the construction of collective histories and the creation of collective futures relies on the power of narratives, stories, and language connected to place.
I believe that Houston needs the power of narratives, stories, and language that arise from a transformative love for the city’s black and brown people and places. The solidarities between Houston communities needed to nourish that love emerge from partially common needs, visions, memories, challenges, and desires which the Innovation District, HCEDD, and the Community Benefits Agreement strategy are all entangled with.
Part I: How did I get here?
The centerpiece of the Innovation District is an in-construction structure named The Ion, which lies at the corner of Main Street and Wheeler Avenue, the former home of a Sears department store that opened in 1939. This was also the year that Houston became the most populous city in Texas, a distinction that owes to the boom in oil and gas refining and shipping that continues to undergird the region’s economy today.
That same year of 1939 saw the Third Ward’s El Dorado ballroom, the famed Black owned and operated music venue, open just across the street from Emancipation Park, a local gathering place for Juneteenth celebrations established in 1972. . The historic El Dorado ballroom currently shares a building with the Sankofa Research Institute office, where institute founder Dr. Assata Richards met with my class in May 2018 and introduced us to the CBA strategy of organization and the creation of intergenerational relationships. Rice Management Company acquired the property in 1945 and has been leasing it to Sears ever since (Kouish). The Sears store then enjoyed the influx of post-war consumption around the same time that Third Ward became a predominantly black neighborhood. Many members of the neighborhood’s large Jewish community were moving to new suburbs, especially Meyerland, and many black people from East Texas and Louisiana were arriving to live in Third Ward.
My personal history is important as a motivation here. I visited Third Ward for the first time during a trip for my tenth birthday with my grandparents in 2009. We visited Galveston Beach, the San Jacinto monument, Battleship Texas, the NASA headquarters, and a little white house on Tuam street where my grandfather lived for the first decade or so of his life in the 1950s. Meaningfully, the house was the only destination on our trip where as white people we did not get out of the car. When I chose to come study at Rice seven years later, I would be the fourth generation in my family to live in Houston at some point. Now that I have gradually begun to grow a sense of attachment and identification with the city, I am more curious about my elder relatives’ experiences here.
During a visit to my hometown of Tyler, Texas last year, I spent a family pizza outing spontaneously interviewing my grandad about his memories of the Third Ward. He told me about biking his paper route, going swimming at the whites-only MacGregor Park, and other memories that I wish I had recorded. His family moved to the Heights in the late 1950s, and he lived his adult life in northwest Arkansas before he and my grandmother moved to Tyler to be closer to my dad.
I had become one of those people with a deep personal connection to the Third Ward area–and that was just from one family member living there decades ago, but also the family memory after that attached to the place. So I could barely fathom how much the streets and houses and accumulated memories of the neighborhood residents meant to those who had lived in the Third Ward for generations. This simple road-trip stop, pizza restaurant conversation, but also the importance of memory as an intergenerational legacy, had shown me just how much place could matter. I felt an obligation to facilitate in the defense of the Third Ward area.
Part II: What’s in a corner?
After the Innovation District was announced, there was a renaissance of writing about the history of the surrounding site by local and grassroots preservationists, real estate writers, and architecture historians. The Sears building’s transition from its original Art Deco-style iconography to a massive fortress wrapped in austere tan metal cladding attracted special attention. According to a blog post curated by a local real estate company, the design decision occured due to a combination of an increasingly popular 1960’s Brutalist style as well as a reaction to the threat of “civil unrest” and “riots” (Heights Blog). Barry Moore gets more specific in a Rice Design Alliance blog post, writing that “in the tumultuous aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assasssination in 1968, local Black Panther activist Lee Otis Johnson organized an 8,000-person strong memorial march, which unsettled much of the business community (Moore). Sears, watching from a Chicago torn apart the same summer, reacted by bricking up almost all the Houston store’s show windows and cladding the elegant upper stones with beige metal.” The changing architecture of the building told a story about Third Ward histories of activism.
Searching the internet for more information about this event leads to another Rice Design Alliance article: JD Pluecker’s “Flashpoints on the Road to Black and Brown Power: Sites of Struggle in Houston in the 1960s and 1970s.” The piece includes a digital map plotting these sites and their stories. In addition to the “Lee Otis Johnson affair,” two more of the events occured within two miles of the Sears: a a 1967 police attack on Texas Southern University students who were aligned with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the 1970 police murder of Carl Hampton (Pluecker) near St. John’s Baptist Church.
When I first heard these narratives connecting the state-sanctioned violence on black communities and people to the physical architecture of the Sears building, I thought the stories held significance as metaphorical groundings for questioning the relationship between the site’s future physical transformations and its impact on current day black lives and communities. I still think this link is valid, that there is a symbolic echo of past violence with present planned redevelopment. For me, as someone from outside of Third Ward, Pluecker’s event map and Moore’s framing are a reminder that if the Sears owners and operators sensed the physical proximity of these events enough to react as they did, there is precedent for the Third Ward community’s knowledge that the Innovation District is indeed a part of their neighborhood. As a place, they see their own histories through it and should have a say.
This knowledge is often commonly dismissed by opponents of HCEDD who argue that the Innovation District resides in the Midtown neighborhood, thus reducing its pertinence to the Third Ward community. This claim only proves the impact of another infrastructural mark on the neighborhood’s landscape that is much more significant in local histories and memory: the fragmentation of Third Ward by the construction of Highway 288 in the late 70s and early 80s. This separation created the nominal division between Third Ward and Midtown as well as the acceleration of gentrification on the west side of the highway. The highway displaced thousands of families and cut off Almeda Road from the rest of the neighborhood, replacing Almeda as the fastest route into downtown and hurting businesses that lined the thriving Black commercial corridor.
The Innovation District is yet another attempt by the powers-that-be of Houston to dice up a neighborhood and use the power of place for the elite, not the neighborhood residents. The location of the proposed Innovation District is certainly within the Third Ward and the attempts by its proponents to redefine the space as “in Midtown” speaks even more as to how marginalized communities literally have their land stolen from them and approportioned into “more desirable” (or in this case, “already gentrified”) areas.
Part III: Whose city is it?
The Third Ward is the epicenter of what is becoming a ubiquitous gentrification pattern in Houston as well as is the community with the most deeply rooted, active, and numerous collective efforts to preserve, protect, and revitalize the neighborhood. The Third Ward Comprehensive Needs Assessment Data Report conducted by the Sankofa Research Institute and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy describes the neighborhood residents’ high voter turnout and collective strengths. Houstonians from the Third Ward have high confidence in interpersonal relationships and care networks, as well as high rates of participation in civic groups (Quianta et al.).
These strengths are part of what made Third Ward an ideal candidate for the signature program of Mayor Sylvestesr Turner’s administration: the Complete Communities initiative. Third Ward was among the five structurally neglected, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods, including the neighborhood where Turner himself was raised and still lives, chosen as the program’s pilot cohort. Residents and organizations of each neighborhood designated by the status of “Complete Community” collaborate with the city to form an action plan based on reviews of local needs and an extensive community workshop series. The program is meant to promote sustained, focused, and community-led achievement of the action plan’s goals with the support of the City as “a committed neighborhood partner” (City of Houston, 3).
In the Third Ward Complete Communities Action Plan, one of the highest priority action items is to develop Community Benefits Agreements in partnership with area anchor institutions (City of Houston, 19). HCEDD’s strategy not only directly aligns with the existing Complete Communities initiative, but the community leaders, civic groups, churches, and neighborhood investment organizations responsible for developing an action plan that reflects the incredible community participation and enthusiasm.
On April 12, 2018, almost exactly one year after the Complete Communities initiative was launched, Mayor Turner joined Rice President David Leebron and a host of other local prominent economic leaders at the announcement ceremony for the Innovation District in the carved out Sears building lobby itself. For the first time, the general public was made aware of Rice Managing Company’s property holdings in the area.
Houston’s political and economic leadership brought forth a two-pronged origin story to explain their enthusiastic promotion of this project. The first layer explained that Rice’s property had been one of three sites included in Houston’s bid to be the site of Amazon’s secondary headquarters. Hurricane Harvey hit right as bids were due and Turner’s attempt to leverage the event as an illustration of Houston’s resilience was not enough to get Houston noticed. With or without Amazon, however, Houston still found itself caught between an inevitably obsolete economy built on oil and gas and the impending doom of climate-change induced floods.
A Texas Architects online magazine article pinpoints this second layer of the Innovation District’s origins (Kouish). There is the “growing sense among [Houston’s] entrepreneurial and political elite that the [oil and gas] economic model is going to fail at some point… just as the manufacturing economy did in the Rust Belt. The fear is Houston will be left behind.” Indeed, Rice Management Company representatives themselves have claimed that this development is going to prevent Houston from becoming Detroit. After the Amazon bid failed, the South Main Innovation District became a sort of Plan B for constructing a new sector of Houston’s economy built on ones and zeros and signals and chips.
Mayor Turner has consistently appeared side by side with Rice’s President Leebron to champion a vision “to make Houston the next great center for startups and imaginative endeavors in the digital universe.” At the Innovation District’s announcement ceremony, Turner celebrated that the Innovation District would be “the pivotal physical home for our work on the next frontier.”
HCEDD’s work to secure a Community Benefits Agreement for the development represents a fundamental tension testing the limits of Mayor Turner’s ability to simultaneously please the business/developers and maintain the integrity of his commitment to marginalized neighborhoods and their abilities to thrive.
Conclusion
The strength of a Community Benefits Agreement rests above all in the strength of the coalition’s collaboration, coordination, and solidarity. Community can be a dangerous word because it is so easily co-opted for the preservation of the status quo. But this corporate construction of “community” misses the point and lacks the power of real community.
At the core of community is love for people and place. Therein lies the potential for transformative solidarities emerging from shared place, people, knowledge, needs, concerns, visions, and desires. This sharing not only unifies people into solidarities but allows for the synthesis of expertise and understanding between members of communities, strengthening these groups, balancing competing needs.
The development of a CBA to prevent the further disruption of the Third Ward shows the power a community can have even in the face of overwhelming institutional power. The current coalition continues to grow and organize in order to claim a stake in their own future and the future of their neighborhood. Through collective action, neighborhoods and communities can be protected and advocate for their own best interests.
Works Cited
“A 1930s Houston Time Capsule: The Sears Building Unveiled.” The Heights Blog, Circa Real Estate, 24 May 2018, heightsblog.com/houston-sears-building/.
City of Houston, July 2018, Third Ward Complete Communities Action Plan.
Kouish, Ben. “Rice Is Transforming a Midcentury Sears Into an ‘Innovation Hub’ for Houston.” Texas Architect Magazine, Texas Society of Architects, 2019, magazine.texasarchitects.org/2019/05/03/rice-is-transforming-a-midcentury-sears-into-an-innovation-hub-for-houston/.
Miller, Doug. “Transformation of Sears Building into The Ion Begins in May.” Rice News and Media Relations, Rice University, 30 Jan. 2019, news.rice.edu/2019/01/30/transformation-of-sears-building-into-the-ion-begins-in-may-2/.
Moore, Barry. “From the Cite Archives: When Good Buildings Go Bad.” Rice Design Alliance, Rice University, 12 Apr. 2018, www.ricedesignalliance.org/from-the-cite-archives-when-good-buildings-go-bad-by-barry-moore.
Moore, Quianta, et al. Sankofa Research Institute. Baker Institute for Public Policy, 2019, Sankofa Research Institute, www.bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/21d6e093/chb-pub-thirdward-102119.pdf.
Neighborhood Gentrification across Harris County: 1990 to 2016 . Kinder Institute, 2018, Neighborhood Gentrification across Harris County: 1990 to 2016 , kinder.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs1676/f/documents/Neighborhood%20Gentrification%20Across%20Harris%20County%201990%20to%202016_0.pdf.
Pluecker, John. “Flashpoints on the Road to Black and Brown Power: Sites of Struggle in Houston in the 1960s and 70s.” Rice Design Alliance, Rice University, 1 Feb. 2017, www.ricedesignalliance.org/flashpoints-on-the-road-to-black-and-brown-power-sites-of-struggle-in-houston-in-the-1960s-and-70s.
