Debra Brown knew exactly what would happen when her next-door neighbors sold her childhood home to a developer. She didn't like it, and she couldn't stop it.
The Houston Chronicle reports the developer would buy the lot and tear down the shotgun house her grandfather built on East 30th Street in Independence Heights. In its place a townhouse would rise, just like the one on her other side.
"I know whoever got it was going to build those skinny houses there, and take all of the memories with it," she said.
Brown, 69, is a fourth-generation resident of Independence Heights, the first black incorporated city in Texas before its annexation into Houston.
Today, Independence Heights is on the cusp of the same kind of transformation that has stripped away much of the historic character of many of Houston's older neighborhoods since the 1980s, even as it has brought new investment welcomed by some community leaders. The Houston precedent is clear: Freedmen's Town, west of downtown in the Fourth Ward, is nearly gone except for the street layout, a park with remnants of a church and bricks handmade by former slaves that residents had to fight to keep intact.
In Independence Heights, wrecking crews are tearing down old houses to make way for townhouses that feel like an extension of the long-gentrified Heights to the south. Skyrocketing property taxes are forcing out longtime families. The potential razing of more houses to expand Interstate 45, combined with heightened interest from developers, is accelerating the transformation.
Options for those looking to preserve the neighborhood are narrowing as development moves faster. Getting local protections for homes is one, but that requires not only city approval but also persuading people pressured by higher taxes not to sell.
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Developers argue that the new investment is revitalizing the community and giving residents who choose to sell more value for their land. But a coalition of neighbors sees more in these old houses than just structures to be cashed in and torn down. They see their legacy disappearing.
"It is taking a whole lot of history away," Brown said. "All I have now is memories of what was there or who was there."
Looking for houses they could own in the Jim Crow era, black families began to settle in 1908 in an area northeast of what was then the Houston city limits. About 600 people voted to incorporate into a city, Independence Heights, in 1915 with just two votes dissenting.
The city had three mayors -- one of whom faced down the Ku Klux Klan with a rifle -- before it voted to dissolve in 1928 so it could be annexed into Houston. Residents hoped the city would provide better services.
The improvements didn't come. Even after the roads were paved, which didn't happen until well into the 20th century, buses wouldn't go all the way into the neighborhood. On rainy days, residents trudged through mud to the bus stop and left their boots at a corner store or a neighbor's house before heading to downtown.
But it was a neighborhood where everyone knew everyone, and if a child misbehaved on the sidewalk on the way home from school, the odds were that her mother knew about it by the time she got home. Neighbors slipped in and out of each other's homes --shotgun houses (so named for a design that would enable a shot fired through the front door to exit through the rear) or low-slung bungalows built by carpenters like Brown's grandfather. Churches founded in the early 1900s lined what's now North Main Street, where many still stand and the same families are members.
Pastor T. Leon Preston II, who shepherds Yale Street Baptist Church, knows there's no way to stop the change. He hopes the community can direct it in a way that benefits longtime residents and newcomers. Still, he worries.
"My fear is that the community loses its identity, and it becomes something that we're not familiar with and then it becomes something that gets changed real quickly," he said. "When we lose this community, Houston loses a limb, a limb that was traditionally there, a limb that was vitally important, a limb that made the city what it was."
To Masoud Forghani, Brown's block of East 30th Street looked like an opportunity.
He noticed the lot next to Brown's on the tax auction block. By then, the Heights was prohibitively expensive and neighboring Garden Oaks was filling up fast. Independence Heights offered the perfect solution: barely outside Loop 610, a quick commute to downtown, cheap land.
He bought the lot in 2016 and three years later began work on a two-story, three-bedroom townhouse. He estimates he has about four months left on construction. He has no idea what it will sell for, but others in the area are selling houses from the mid-$200,000s to just under $400,000.
Forghani went in with a partner to buy a house on the other side of Brown's home -- the house she grew up in, which the family sold over 50 years ago. Just as she thought, he plans to build a house like the one on Brown's other side.
Brown calls the townhomes "skinny homes." They aren't to her taste, but that's not entirely the point.
Her home on East 30th Street, where she's been living for the last 30 years, was appraised at $123,230 in 2019. Eight years ago, it was $51,757. At her age, Brown gets a break on her property taxes. But when she dies and leaves her house to a descendant -- maybe the nephew she raised -- he'll be hit with property taxes that reflect the townhomes standing on either side.
"At one time, I thought we would be able to save it. I stay positive. I do believe that it can be saved," she said. "But then, I don't know."
Forghani thinks the development is helping residents realize the value of what they have: He sees people cleaning up their yards, repairing their roofs and painting their homes.
"When their children inherit, they can sell for much more," he said. "They either pay more taxes or it's giving them a great investment opportunity to sell and invest somewhere else. It's a win-win for everyone."
Independence Heights properties can be easy targets for developers. Many are handed down generation to generation without a clear deed transfer. Some who inherit don't realize it falls to them to keep up the property taxes.
A 2015 study by professors from the University of Essex and Washington University in St. Louis found that the least-educated white population had a dramatically higher rate of will-making than the highest-educated black demographic, said Thomas Mitchell, co-director of Texas A&M's program in real estate and community development law. One theory holds that a culture of seeking legal assistance for wills and deeds wasn't enshrined in black families because lawyers in the Jim Crow era wouldn't represent them.
Some developers, like Forghani, find property on the auction block. Others go door-to-door or send mail. Signs pop up all over the neighborhood asking residents to sell their homes. Shawn Ali puts up black-and-white "I PAY MORE $$$ FOR HOMES/LOTS" signs on light posts, until people like longtime resident Tanya Debose rip them down. Forghani offers $45,000 to $50,000 for a 3,000-square-foot lot and sells it to a developer for $70,000.
"A lot of those people have a personal value to their property or to their home, and I understand it's hard letting go of something like that," he said. "But at the same time, their property value will be worth more than it ever was. It's just how the economy works. If we're trying to boom the city, trying to get more people here, we gotta clean the city up."
Debose tries to drive a different path through the neighborhood every day. Developments are popping up so fast she worries she might miss something.
Over the summer, she got a text asking if she'd be interested in selling her own home.
"I'm sorry, is there a for sale sign in front of my f---ing house?" she said. "Because there's not."
Debose is a fourth-generation Independence Heights resident and one of the most visible advocates for her community. But even she isn't sure what can be done.
"For so many years, we, as black people, were forced to have to listen to history that didn't include us in schools," she said. "And so now, we're uncovering our truths. We are going back, and we're digging it up. But the race that we are up against is the fact that our environments are disappearing and the evidence is in this environment."
She turned down a street lined with identical blue-gray townhouses, each with a different university flag out front, and rolled her eyes.
"We went to bed one night and woke up and all this was up," she said. "And it's right in the middle of a national historic district. There's no protection other than bragging rights."
Independence Heights was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. But the real protections come from a local historic district designation. Two blocks on 31 1/2 Street have such a designation, as does one other house. But as developers have swooped in, it gets harder to meet the threshold of a "contiguous district" needed for local protections. The next-best option is to protect individual houses.
Preserving historic buildings isn't easy in a city with a strong pro-business and property rights tradition.
"It's challenging right now because there's so much development occurring," said Minnette Boesel, chair of the Houston Archaeological and Historical Commission.
Boesel, whose department oversees local historic designation, said she wants to see an application as soon as possible from Independence Heights.
But there's more to preserving old Independence Heights than just applying for a historic designation.
"Some of the biggest challenges facing people in these neighborhoods are the increasing land values," said David Bush, executive director of the nonprofit Preservation Houston. "The preservation ordinance isn't going to address that."
Debose and community leaders are working with state legislators to develop a heritage tax exemption to prevent displacement: If a family has owned a house for 50 years and a descendant is still living there, taxes don't increase.
Independence Heights advocates have pushed back against the incoming highway expansion, especially after the Texas Department of Transportation didn't mention the neighborhood in a 2,300-page report on historical resources the project would affect. Lone Star Legal Aid, a legal service for the poor, sent a letter to the agency that outlined the history it missed and proposed options including gateways that would mark entry into Independence Heights, historic building preservation and flood mitigation.
The planned highway expansion would take 44 Independence Heights properties, including 31 homes and a church.
Carlos Swonke, director of the Texas Department of Transportation's environmental affairs division, said the agency applied its criteria for historic resources, and the parts of Independence Heights impacted didn't fit the standards.
But after the public outcry, TxDOT will release an updated historic resources report that includes discussion of Independence Heights. It won't change the number of houses taken.
When Shelby and Steven Butera moved to Independence Heights in 2013, their new neighbors had just one request: If the rooster gets too loud, don't call the cops. Just call over. They'd happily shoot the rooster and eat him for dinner.
The old neighbors, Shelby learned, hadn't enjoyed living next to the crowing. But she likes the chickens. She and her husband moved from Montrose, in part because they enjoyed the country-in-the-city feel of Independence Heights. Where else could she see a man, crouched jockey-style over a horse, gallop across traffic at 8:55 p.m. to make it to the Ralston Discount Liquor before it closed at 9?
The Buteras live in the Independence Heights area but outside the original historic black township. Their particular corner is deed-restricted, keeping investors away. They've updated their home's interior but kept the exterior the same.
"I didn't want to be that person that comes in and has the one eyesore house that doesn't belong," Shelby said. "My intention is not to push other people out but to get to know those people and to become a part of their fabric, and just to embrace where it is that I am."
What's hardest for the old residents is watching the neighborhood turn from a place where everyone knew each other to a place of strangers with fences too high to see over.
Velicia Toliver's parents grew up a street apart from one another in the neighborhood. One of her uncles who lives in the neighborhood came back from his military service with mental health issues. Everybody used to know him, and knew his tics.
But recently, she said, her mother got a phone call. Her uncle had been throwing rocks at a stop sign, and a newcomer was taking a video and threatening to make a call. They presumed she meant to call the police. Luckily, her father's mother was in the area and collected her uncle before anything escalated.
"I took it for granted," said Toliver, a 46-year-old teacher. "I think to a certain extent we all did, and that's why we're in the situation we're in now. I think we felt the thing was to get out of the neighborhood, not realizing the bottom would fall out."
There are Independence Heights residents who leave unwillingly, and there are those born and raised there who left of their own accord. Melvena Scott took her three children out in the 1990s, alarmed by the drugs she saw and the violence that came with them.
Only one of her children -- her daughter -- is still alive.
Scott's parents raised her on the 1400 block of East 36th Street in Independence Heights. Sixty-one years later, her son was shot just a few doors down. He left four children.
Eugene Scott was fatally shot in May. He was the second son Scott lost to gun violence. After her middle child was shot in 1993 at age 15, killed in a gang initiation for his Oakland Raiders jacket, Eugene went up to his older brother's casket at the funeral, grabbed his face and said, "Wake up, man. Wake up, man."
Her old neighbors who gathered at the hospital when Eugene died told her that they heard her scream, "Not again!" She doesn't recall it.
Scott says law enforcement in the neighborhood is lax, "but I know that they know what's happening. The detective on my son's case, she told me they know everybody."
The area developers have noticed. Jeff Gaines, whose company has sold 19 properties in Independence Heights and has contracts for 16 more, sent a letter dated Sept. 12 to city officials. When he complained, he said, officers told him: "It's a bad area and we do not have the resources."
The Houston Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Ask anyone what Independence Heights will look like in five to 10 years and the answer is: nothing like it does now.
For developers, it means they have to buy now before land tips into the price point of the Heights. For Preston and his flock at Yale Street Baptist, it means he's not just preaching for a historical black church anymore. He's balancing the needs of other communities while keeping his longtime constituents happy.
For Debose, it's a race to preserve what she can.
"If you didn't get ahead of it, if you didn't get ahead of the game and be proactive, then it's already too late, once you start to see these things pop up," Debose said. "It's too late."
Debose knows who lives in nearly every old house in Independence Heights. She points out the beautician in a bungalow whose house keeps getting flooded; a house with original doors and original windows that she wants to get declared historic and that has a 98-year-old owner; another old house owned by a woman named Pat who's fighting with her family because they want to sell and she doesn't.
When she drives, Debose has a speech ready just in case she runs across someone who looks like they might need to hear it. When she noticed two men doing repairs on an old house, she pulled over and leaned out the window.
"All these folks buying houses they don't want to rent to us," she said. "You know they're trying to move us out of this community."
The two men nodded.
"A lot of people are selling," said the owner. "I'm not trying to go nowhere."
Debose smiled. She approved.
