Houston

Houston’s twentieth-century and present-century displacements share a single mechanism: highway and downtown expansion taking Black and Mexican-American neighborhoods that city policy had already restricted to a few wards. Freedmen’s Town, founded in 1865 by African-American freedpeople just west of downtown, laid its own brick streets and built its own churches, schools, and insurance companies through the late nineteenth century. Houston’s Allen Parkway Village clearance in the 1940s, the construction of I-45 through the ward in the 1950s, and decades of rezoning and demolition after that reduced the original 40-block freedman settlement to a handful of surviving structures. The Second Ward, the historic Mexican-American East End, has followed a parallel path. Originally bounded by Buffalo Bayou to the north and Brays Bayou to the south, the neighborhood lost blocks to the construction of I-45, I-10, and SH 288 through the mid-twentieth century. The North Houston Highway Improvement Project, which TxDOT has advanced since 2015, proposes to take hundreds more homes, churches, and schools in the Second Ward, the Fifth Ward, and Independence Heights. The essays under this city hold the record of both neighborhoods and of the groups still fighting the takings: the Rutherford B. H. Yates Museum, the Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, Air Alliance Houston, Stop TxDOT I-45, West Street Recovery, and Ripley House.