The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

by Alan Ehrenhalt

  The parochialism of Philadelphia politics is merely one more reflection of the widely felt parochialism of its culture, the native orneriness that not only sets races and classes against one another, but casts seemingly similar communities as rivals rather than cooperating entities. Janet Rothenberg Pack, a public policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a few years ago that “Philadelphia is remarkable in terms of its provincialism. It’s a city of neighborhoods but the neighborhoods don’t like each other.” Alan Greenberger, the economic development commissioner, put it a little differently. “Being aggravated and contentious is part of who we are,” he said. One would be foolish to blame all of Philadelphia’s troubles, or even most of them, on its parochialism and insularity. But it matters.

  Philadelphia is still the only large American city in which no one is surprised when parade watchers boo Santa Claus, where fans boo their sports teams for failing to win a second consecutive championship, or where grandmothers at the stadium insult spectators who happen to be wearing the wrong jersey. These are small things, taken alone, but when added together, they contribute to a reputation that ultimately has its bearing on the level of investment and needed in-migration that the city cannot fully succeed without. The cities that are gaining ground in the postindustrial world are cosmopolitan and diverse, and for the most part tolerant. Philadelphia, despite its vibrant center and cultural richness, has yet to make that crucial transition. “I’ve lived in the Midwest, California, and Florida,” the newspaper columnist Monica Yant Kinney wrote late in 2010, “but in no other place have people fixated as much on the hyperlocal specifics of where one rests her head.… As long as Philadelphia remains an island—unlike, say Cook County, which envelops Chicago and thirty suburban townships—territorial grudges linger.”

  It would be foolish to pretend that all successful big cities in America have fully overcome such grudges. And it seems quite possible that Philadelphia, with a much more diverse population cohort in 2012 than it had in 2000, will make steady progress toward surmounting them. In the meantime, however, parochialism is a problem that affects not only the city’s social climate but its economic prospects.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE URBAN SQUEEZE

  AT THE CORNER of Dowling and Elgin streets, in the middle of Houston’s Third Ward, is a small green plot of land called Emancipation Park. It has been there since 1872. Emancipation Park was the place where ex-slaves gathered for a celebration every year on June 19, the anniversary of the day in 1865 when they learned they had been set free. They sang and danced and ate smoked meat and drank red soda water. Many of the freed slaves lived in the neighborhood; they could buy ten acres of farmland for a relative pittance, although not many had anything resembling the means to afford it. Emancipation Park was a gathering place through the decades, as black businesses and institutions grew up around it. In the 1940s, Cab Calloway sang “Minnie the Moocher” at the El Dorado Club, just adjacent to the park.

  Farther up the street on Dowling were all the symbols of what was called the “parallel black economy”: churches, insurance companies, funeral homes, movie theaters, beauty and barber colleges, and photography studios. At Twenty-fourth and Dowling was the headquarters of the Grand Court Order of Calanthe, an organization whose cornerstone reveals that it is “Dedicated to Negro Womanhood.”

  The park, the Calanthe clubhouse, and the El Dorado Club building are unusual in one respect: They are still there. Most of the tangible institutions of segregation-era black life exist only as photographs and dim memories now, their remains part of the landscape of vacant lots that take up more space in this part of the Third Ward than the buildings that remain. The vast expanses of empty land give the Third Ward almost a rural Southern quality. It is possible to see the remnants of the old neighborhood as a precious heritage that needs to be preserved at all costs; it is also possible to see them as a nearly empty wasteland afflicted by poverty, crime, and drugs, and far more in need of massive redevelopment than of any nostalgic commitment to the past.

  This commercial building in Houston’s close-in Third Ward, once a social center for the city’s black community, is one among many dilapidated structures that have been vulnerable to the onslaught of new residential development and middle-class gentrification. (photo credit 7.1)

  Between the vacant lots are shotgun shacks, rickety wooden houses unlike anything one sees in the dilapidated sections of any city outside the South. Many of them were originally built as servants’ quarters to house the black maids and laborers who worked in the homes of the affluent at the southern end of the district, in the MacGregor neighborhood along Brays Bayou. Few of these structures are more than twelve feet wide, and the lots are rarely more than thirty feet wide. The rooms lead straight back from the front door, with a living room first, then a bedroom and a kitchen and usually a bathroom at the rear. They are nearly all owned by absentee landlords, some the descendants of original owners who have long since moved away and do not want to spend money on repairs. But despite their condition, they provide shelter for renters who cannot afford to rent anywhere else. Their one notably desirable feature is cross-ventilation, created by the absence of hallways, that sends a breeze moving straight through the house during the sweltering summer months.

  Historic though it may be, the upper Third Ward is an important part of Houston’s future not because of its past or present, but because of what it might become. It lies in the shadow of Houston’s downtown, which contains a forest of oil company skyscrapers, an immense convention center, theaters and concert halls, municipal parks, and a baseball stadium. Not many people live within the strict confines of downtown—that is in part because, unlike in Chicago or New York, there are few old office buildings to convert to residential use. In the words of Bob Eury, the downtown economic development manager, “We’re supply-constrained down here. The downtown was basically abandoned. There was a hollowing out of the core. We tore it all down.” But 140,000 people work downtown every day, most of them members of Houston’s multiracial middle class, and they have moved at a rapid pace into the neighborhoods that surround the inner core on the north and west, and now gradually in the eastern corner as well. Most of them live in neighborhoods that are less convenient to their jobs than a home in the Third Ward would be—if the vacant land sprouted townhouses and the remaining shotgun shacks were sold to developers. Right now, the Third Ward has approximately fifteen hundred newcomers living in recently erected two- and three-story townhouse buildings. It is quite possible that there could be twenty or thirty thousand new residents if the ward acquired the momentum of a building boom. That would be a majority of the ward’s population. As former Houston mayor Bill White once said, “The Third Ward is the epicenter of gentrification.”

  But despite the pent-up demand, it is not gentrifying rapidly at the moment. The reason is not the residual effects of the recession. The reason is Garnet Coleman, the Texas state representative who represents the area and is determined not to let it happen.

  Garnet Coleman, who is fifty years old, has represented the Third Ward and adjoining parts of central Houston since he was thirty. He was born to social prestige and political influence in Houston’s black community. His father, John B. Coleman, was a widely respected physician and banker. The building where Garnet Coleman’s office sits, on Almeda Avenue at the southern end of the old Third Ward commercial district, is the John B. Coleman Center.

  As a state legislator in Austin, Garnet Coleman has been widely recognized for his efforts in health care, particularly for protecting funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But as a power broker in Houston politics, he has focused on a much different goal: keeping middle-class townhouses out of the upper Third Ward. His method is simple: buying land and holding on to it so it can’t be developed. There is no one quite like him in any inner-city neighborhood in America.

  To understand what Garnet Coleman is doing, it is necessary to try to see the Third Ward
the way he sees it—as a place where his family has lived for a century, as a place whose few remaining landmarks are a shrine to African American culture, and, most important, as a place whose poor black residents will be forced to leave as shotgun property owners sell their land and the buildings are torn down one by one. There is nothing in Garnet Coleman’s record or his public statements that suggests he is a racist. “I’m an egalitarian like everyone else,” he told a reporter in 2009. “Talking about the racial aspect of all this, or saying this is born of race, is not something I feel absolutely comfortable with.”

  Coleman insists that he wants economic development in the Third Ward. He just wants it to build on what’s been there—or the remains of what’s been there—for the past hundred years. “If somebody’s going to move into the Third Ward,” he said in 2010, “I don’t care who you are, just become a part of it. Don’t come into the community, renovate your house, then act like the people who have been living there have no standing.”

  In fact, Coleman wants to discourage the arrival of a black affluent elite as much as he does a white one. He insists that young professional townhouse buyers have no desire to form close relationships with members of the existing community, merely a wish to live in a convenient place near urban amenities and wall themselves off from their neighbors. “Quite frankly, this is personal,” he concedes. “We just don’t want to be the only people who have to adjust to the world. We’d like the world to adapt to us a little bit.”

  Coleman’s methods are both legally complex and economically simple. He isn’t spending his own money to buy land. He’s spending money that belongs to a tax increment financing district, which he sits on the board of. The special districts, known in Houston as Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones, receive a substantial amount of money from the city each year for the ostensible purpose of increasing the overall property value of city neighborhoods and reaping the financial benefits of the higher value. Tax increases generated by new development stay with the TIRZ for a period of twenty-five to thirty years, and bonds are sold to make improvements based on paying bondholders back with the added increment. The TIRZ districts have the right to build or support affordable housing in the communities where they are located, but they also have the right simply to acquire vacant land or abandoned properties and hold them for an indefinite period.

  Coleman, as a major player in the Midtown TIRZ, has control of a large pot of money. As state representative, he has sway over the appointment of a substantial number of the TIRZ board members. In the past decade, the Midtown TIRZ has spent roughly $15 million to buy 1.5 million square feet of land in the northern section of the Third Ward, closest to downtown. The land is sold to churches and nonprofits with restrictive covenants that block any eventual sale to private developers. In most cases, the price is about $10 a square foot. The previous value of the land was $3 to $4 a square foot. If the land were available now on the open market, Coleman estimates, the value would be closer to $25. If he wanted to, he believes, he could sell it for even more and developers would simply sit on the land themselves, waiting for the right moment to promote a gentrified townhouse project.

  “Our goals are two-pronged,” he says. “One is to provide affordable housing; the other is to prevent gentrification. Has the affordable housing been built? No. But that was only part of the objective. If you ask me, we should just keep buying land and banking everything that we buy. This is a chess match. There aren’t many tools left for communities to protect themselves.”

  At the start of the last decade, the Third Ward as a whole had a population of slightly more than fifteen thousand, of whom roughly twelve thousand were black and about one thousand were white. But Coleman has not focused his land banking on the entire ward—he’s focused on the northern sections, represented most clearly by census tract 3123, concentrated north of Alabama Street. In 2000, census tract 3123 was still almost exclusively black—2,088 African Americans to only 67 white residents. Data from American Community Survey reports toward the end of the decade showed a considerable increase in the white population. But none of the figures count the land on which no structure remains standing at all. A 2000 census map of tract 3123 shows large blocks of land colored in gray, meaning that the land is undeveloped. Coleman has succeeded in keeping the amount of gentrification down in the Third Ward, but at the cost of increasing the amount of emptiness.

  There are those who think Coleman, for all his acknowledged political and economic influence, is on a fool’s errand—that the Third Ward is simply too close to downtown to prevent a demographic inversion, and that one will come relatively soon no matter how much land Coleman is able to bank. What Coleman is saying, says University of Houston architecture professor Tom Diehl, “is, ‘Give us our blight.’ Eventually they are going to get booted out to the suburbs. There’s no way to stop it.”

  Coleman is no fool. He knows that is possible. But he believes he can assemble enough land to stop the transformation—and the eviction of his constituents—for years, if not decades. “If we weren’t banking land it would be over. It would all be filled in. Whole city blocks would be townhouses. There would be the equivalent of New York row houses.”

  ONE REASON Coleman can be fairly certain of his point is that something very similar happened in the 1990s, in the adjoining district of Houston’s old inner city, the Fourth Ward.

  Before the Third Ward became the center of Houston’s African American life, that distinction belonged to the Fourth, a smaller enclave that sat just to the west of the downtown commercial district. The Fourth Ward was the home of Freedmen’s Town, where slaves settled immediately after the Civil War as they moved north along the Brazos River from rural south Texas. Like the Third, the Fourth Ward was a neighborhood of shotgun houses and brick streets, the bricks handmade by the residents themselves, many of whom were skilled masons. A majority of its residents were black, and they formed the largest concentration of black residents anywhere in the Houston area. More than 80 percent of the city’s black doctors lived there.

  By the 1930s, however, the Fourth Ward had been eclipsed by the Third as a place for middle-class blacks to live, and it slid deeper into poverty and disrepair. Construction of Interstate 45 in the 1950s essentially cut the neighborhood in half, further consigning it to a status as downtown’s ugly and unvisited backyard. By the 1980s, more than 50 percent of the residents were below the federal poverty line. To most Houstonians, the ward was known mainly as home to the decrepit and dangerous Allen Parkway Village housing project, 963 low-rise redbrick apartment units constructed as a home for defense workers during World War II. Forty years later, it was a haven of crime and crack addiction. The city spent years debating plans to tear it down and replace it with more livable housing units for the ward’s dwindling number of residents.

  Finally, in the 1990s, Mayor Bob Lanier and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development agreed on a plan called Houston Renaissance, under which most of Allen Parkway Village would be bulldozed. Developers would replace a majority of the units with new subsidized housing designed to echo the area’s shotgun architectural past. In return, they would be permitted to build market-rate townhouses on much of the rest of Fourth Ward land, reaping profits that would allow them to finance the subsidized component.

  The intention was not to obliterate the Fourth Ward’s history and existence as a neighborhood, but that is what happened. For all the blight, there were 530 formally designated historic structures left in the ward as late as 1984; today there are fewer than 30. Some subsidized units were built, but most of the shacks were replaced by modern redbrick townhouses on land bought cheaply by the development firm Perry Homes. These dwellings sold at market rates to downtown office workers and covered much more of the ward than the original Houston Renaissance plans had called for. Many of them were gated at the entrance. Critics complained that Perry Homes had simply grafted suburban-style tract housing onto a fragile but irreplaceable piece of Houston history.r />
  Defenders of the transformation insisted that there was little in the Fourth Ward worth preserving. “When you look at what they were being displaced from,” said loft developer Larry Davis, “the houses were totally run-down; they should have been torn down. The only culture displaced was a culture of needles and syringes.” Some of the remaining residents felt the same way. “If it’s historic, it needs to be restored. Don’t just leave a crack house sitting there. A lot of the people in the historic preservation society don’t live in this neighborhood,” one of them told a reporter in 2007. “They are not having to deal with people using these homes for prostitution, drug dealing, and drug using.”

  For his part, Mayor Lanier vehemently insisted that bulldozing the Fourth Ward out of existence had never been what he wanted. “Gentrification was never my goal,” he said a few years ago. “If you restrict it to rich people, I think that would be a mistake. I like to see mixed-income presence.” Nevertheless, the fact remains that virtually all of the Fourth Ward, including Freedmen’s Town and hundreds of nineteenth-century shotgun houses, has ceased to exist. In 2000, there were only 635 black people living in the ward. The Fourth is precisely the kind of noncommunity that Mayor Lanier professed not to desire. And it is the specter that haunts Garnet Coleman as he continues using public funds to buy up land and prevent gentrification from spreading.

  Of course, in the Third Ward, as in any neighborhood, it makes an enormous difference whether one is a renter or an owner. Those who own their properties potentially stand to benefit from a sustained increase in their value. But in the Third Ward, there simply aren’t very many owners—and those who do own houses face the prospect of their property taxes rising so high that they will be forced to sell out and leave the neighborhood behind.