Illustration from the cover of Houston Free Press

Christof Spieler

The Soul of Houston

This month’s issue of the Houston Free Press has an article (click on “features”) on Wilshire village, the long semi-abandoned 1940 apartment complex at Alabama and Dunlavy. It quotes a former resident:

“Houston has changed so much since 1965 when I went there to attend Rice. All the old places have changed. Rice Village is unbearable overbuilt and congested… I actually liked Houston back in those old days. It has a soul back then, which I think has since been sold to the devil.”

The issues cover illustrates the question “is Houston selling its soul” with pictures of condos, lofts, and the Ashby highrise. The devil, obviously, is the developers.

I’m not cheering on the bulldozing of Wilshire Village. But it’s hard to look back on the history of Houston and conclude that developers have stolen its soul. It’s probably more accurate to say developers are Houston’s soul.

Our city was founded as a real estate fraud. The Allen Brothers were just two real estate guys out of New York looking to make easy money. They went up Buffalo Bayou to locate the highest navigable point. But someone already owned that land: there was no way to make money selling lots. So the brothers just kept going and figured marketing trumped reality. The first steamship didn’t make it to Houston until 2 years after the city was founded, and it took three days to go from today’s 610 loop to Downtown. But the claim that Houston was a port convinced enough people to come here, and those people took the effort to cut the trees and clear the channel to make that claim true. Houston is a self-fulfilled prophecy.

Every condo developer who puts up a “coming soon” sign before financing is in place is the Allen Brothers’ spiritual heir. Sometimes (often, in fact) their bravado proves hollow. But sometimes, it adds up. A city is built on hucksterism and pretension and ambition and greed. The Heights, Montrose, the East End were all real estate schemes. A city is not created on the desire to do right; it’s created on the desire to make money and show off.

Of course, developers are nothing without people to move in. But those people are driven by the same goals. The Germans of the East End, the Cajuns around the Ship Channel, the Michiganders along FM1960, the Pakistanis in Hillcroft, and the Guatamalans of Gulfton all came for a chance to get a job or start a business. And the developers’ work gave them a place to do that. Cookie-cutter apartment complexes, mudane strip malls, and bland subdivisions become communities because of the people who move there; when they move on, new people move in and new communities are formed.

We are lucky that developers do not always get their way. We are all fortunate that Houstonians fought to save bayous, to protect historic houses, to keep Downtown streets from being roofed over. Some projects deserve never to see the light of day, some buildings deserve to be protected. But you can’t freeze a city. Every building we love stands in place of a long-gone earlier building someone else loved. Every neighborhood changes at least once a generation. Even if the buildings are the same, the people are different.

Are developers destroying Houston? Surely, they’re tearing down buildings. They’ve been doing that as long as there has been a Houston. But that’s how Houston stays alive. Change is not something that happens to cities; it’s the lifeblood of cities. Without developers, there would be no city.

So you say that Houston had a soul in 1965 and has lost it? In 1965, we were ripping apart down neighborhoods to build freeways, leveling subdivisions to build Greenway Plaza, and letting urban neighborhoods rot. Surely, someone was saying then that Houston had a soul in 1940 but lost it. And in 1940, they were saying Houston has a soul in 1910. The city keeps changing. But, as long as we have new residents trying to create new lives, as long as people are scheming and agitating and building, as long as someone care enough to lament we have no soul, Houston has a soul.

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