antiAtlas Journal #4, 2020

REMAPPING THE NEIGHBORHOOD Karen O’Rourke

Abstract: In ’s Third Ward, residents join with artists and architects to revitalize a historic African-American neighborhood. What can their maps tell us?

Biography: Karen O’Rourke is an artist and writer, emeritus professor at the University of Saint-Etienne. She is the author of Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (MIT Press, 2013) and a co-founder of La Fin des cartes?

Keywords: art as remapping, database mapping, urban redevelopment, architecture.

Fig.27. MF Problem, Mobile Block Party flyer (2011).

To quote this article : O'Rourke, Karen, "Remapping the neighborhood" published on July, 10th, 2020, antiAtlas #4 | 2020, online, URL : www.antiatlas.net/04-remapping-the-neighborhood, last consultation on Date

I. Neighborhood Dynamics Fig. 01. : the original shotgun houses. The houses on this block are rented to young mothers. Left: the Holman Street view. Right: The shared backyard. Photo: Rice Building Workshop, Live/Work, 2006:38.

Back in 1992 when artist Rick Lowe saw Happy Feet.” In the 1960s and 1970s, potential1 in the twenty-two rundown houses on population loss and disinvestment began to Holman street, his builder friends told him undermine that prosperity. “Dowling Street was they weren’t worth restoring. Better tear them like a small town within Houston,” notes down and rebuild. But he had in mind the photographer Earlie Hudnall, Jr, “and you know shotgun houses that structure John Biggers’s what has happened to small towns in America. 1 paintings of African-American communities. Most of them have died”. Desegregation saw Mobilizing volunteers from all over Houston to wealthier black families leave for the newly renovate the houses as spaces for art and integrated suburbs. Businesses shuttered. housing for young mothers, Project Row Houses Houses were torn down and longtime residents opened in 1994. evicted to make way for two major expressways that cut through the neighborhood fabric. In its heyday, Dowling Street was a thriving Other homes fell into disrepair and owners business district with grocers and could not get loans to fix them up. Absentee dressmakers, restaurants and repair shops, landlords neglected their properties. Taxes barbers and doctors, a lumber yard and a went unpaid. By the 1990s, the neighborhood printer’s. People came from all over to hear was in bad shape. Milton Larkin, T-Bone Walker, and Joe “Guitar” Hughes play at the Eldorado Ballroom, “Home of

Fig.02. Left: Third Ward townhomes. Photo: K. O’R., 2018. Right: One of six historic houses torn down on April 2, 2020, this single-family two-story home was built around 1930. Photo: Ed Pettitt.

2 Yet when Lowe and his friends began cleaning up the houses on Holman Street, the Would long-time renters be neighbors eyed them warily. What were the real displaced by rapacious motives of these young people in dreadlocks and spiked blonde hair “coming to rebuild, to developers, like the African paint, to restore decaying porches”?2 Americans pushed out of downtown Houston? gentrification. They reassure affluent home- buyers whose investments bring steep increases 3 The presence of artists in a run-down in land values, property taxes and rents. neighborhood often smooths the way for its

Fig.03. The Row House District, Houston. These maps show the 35-block area within Houston (left) and the Northern Third Ward (right). Maps: Rice Building Workshop, Live/ Work, 2006: 41-42

As prices in other parts of Houston rose, creative-class migrants from suburbia - young developers3 moved in on Third Ward, buying old professionals and empty-nesters eager to houses and tearing them down to build luxury reduce commuting time and enjoy urban townhomes. The absence of zoning in Houston amenities. Third Ward is less than ten minutes makes it all the more attractive to this new by car from Downtown, and closer still to construction billed as “green-friendly.” Midtown and the Museum District. Like Blocks of three and four-story dwellings built fortresses in hostile territory, the new above garages do make more efficient use of settlements stand aloof from the surrounding land than single-family split-levels sprawling neighborhood. on spacious lawns. They also reap more profit for developers. The moving vans bring in

II. “Doing” and “To-Do” Maps 4 Project Row Houses began mapping the neighborhood at the outset. A visit to the Mapping is a way for them to archives, online research and conversations study the site they plan to build with key participants have netted two kinds of maps: “doing” maps (praxis) and “(re)framing” on maps (aisthêsis). The former are instrumental maps made by people who plan to build in the Mapping is a way for them to study the site area, or who develop strategies for they plan to build on, its surroundings and revitalizing it, while the latter are symbolic infrastructure. It allows them to identify objects, artworks. They shape reality by assets or drawbacks, and to present their shaping the way we view it. projects to city authorities, clients, funders, builders. Many of the “doing maps” were made by architects. Project Row Houses Plans and Models

Architect Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez drew The shotgun is a narrow, rectangular one-story the5 first plans to obtain building permits and dwelling built on concrete block footings. It initial funding. She investigated the origins consists of aligned front and back doors, and of the site, and argued for its historical between them, three to five successive rooms. significance.4 Folklorist John Michael Vlach traces the form to West – specifically the Yoruba togun5 (house). After coming to the New World on hung their washing. In the evenings people sat slave ships, it was adopted across the out on the porches – “talking places,” as John southern U.S. It is well-adapted to unstable Biggers called them. Around mid-century, terrains, often near waterways; the cross- shotgun houses began to lose their appeal ventilation provides natural air-conditioning (they lacked central plumbing) and gradually in sultry climates. The Holman street houses became a marker of poverty. This is when Dr. are a modified form of shotgun built in the Biggers began painting them –to rehabilitate 6 late 1930s. Although they don’t share walls, them as an African-American cultural heritage. they are small and stand close together (only three feet apart). Behind them is a common backyard where children once played and women

Fig.04. Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, Drawing for building permit, 1994.

The drawings suggest that the original missing houses. In 1995 she was awarded a development6 contained thirty identical small grant from the National Endowment for the Arts houses, half of them facing Holman Street and to re-design the corner two-story building. the other half facing Division Street. Between Her plan defines “a flexible indoor/outdoor the two rows ran the narrow backyard. One map gathering place” with a kitchen, a restroom indicates which houses would serve as and a small vegetable garden. It reflects her galleries, residences and offices for the new vision of African-American culture as based on organization and includes one element of the reshaping the old and familiar, incorporating surrounding neighborhood, the parking lot skylight windows and a lattice-screened across the street. balcony to open up the original brick structure to its surroundings. She received an De Vazquez and her students at the University A.C.S.A. award for the completed design, but 7 of Houston built models of the main site and was unable to raise the money to build it. imagined interventions to replace five of the Fig.05. Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, PRH two-story, 3D renderings of the prospective re-design, 1995/2019.

On the right, Fig.06. Six Square House (1997-1999) was Rice Building Workshop’s first prototype for PRH. Top left: plan. Middle: assembling the panels. Right: The completed house in 1999. Bottom: axonometric drawings show the modular construction. Images: RBW/Construct website and Live/Work, 2006:58,60,61.

8 After founding the nonprofit and setting up there was other real estate around us”. “PRH its7 core programs –biannual exhibitions in the started to purchase more properties round art houses (“The Rounds” 1994), after-school town,” recalls former gallery director Shy workshops for neighborhood children (1995) and Morris. “Rick and I would go around to the the Young Mothers Residential Program (1996) - neighbors, knock on doors to educate the Project Row Houses turned to what Rick Lowe community about what was happening with 9 calls “real-estate speculation.” “We realized developers coming to buy their properties.” we were a real estate entity,” he says, “and 8 “We realized we were a real supported by grants that we applied for, and we had to be very creative about how we spent estate entity,” he says, “and the limited funds”.11 there was other real estate around us.” Working with nonprofit clients, the students “engage all facets Rick Lowe reached out to the founders of the Rice Building Workshop at . of the architectural process, Architects and Professors Danny Samuels and from conception through Nonya Grenader started Rice Building Workshop construction, allowing the act of in 1996 to give their students hands-on experience in building for the community. making to inform every aspect of Working with nonprofit clients, the students design.” “engage all facets of the architectural process, from conception through construction, After Lowe invited them to design a low-cost allowing the act of making to inform every house for the PRH campus, it took three years, 10 aspect of design”. In the Bauhaus tradition, and more than sixty Rice students, to complete the program emphasizes collaboration: students the “Six Square House,” a two-story 900-square- work closely with clients, consultants, foot structure inspired by the original row- contractors, suppliers, and craftspeople. “We house architecture. The modular side and floor had a very modest budget ($5k/year) from the panels were built on the Rice campus and School of Architecture, mostly for supplies assembled at the construction site.12 and tools,” notes Danny Samuels. “Generally, the projects that we built with students were Row House Community Development Corporation

Their design/build projects produced In 2003, Project Row Houses and Rice Building compelling8 prototypes. The next challenge was Workshop founded the Row House Community to increase the number of housing units Development Corporation to available for rent. When PRH purchased land construct affordable housing in Third Ward. adjacent to the Six-Square House, they asked The next year, they received funds from the the Rice workshop to draw up plans for a City of Houston to build four duplexes on structure that could be built by professional Division street. The houses repeat the clean contractors. The students designed a duplex lines and relative positions of the original superposing two two-bedroom apartments with shotguns with gabled roofs overhanging the large porches, and an outside staircase porches, yet they wear their structure on the connecting them. But construction had to wait outside in a harmonious, De Stijl-like five years while the nonprofit secured funding. composition of white pillars and crossbeams.

Fig.07. The Division street duplexes (2004). Left: apartment floor-plan and photo courtesy RBW/Construct. Right: photo Rick Lowe.

Row House CDC then acquired the land just behind9 them on Francis Street to erect eight In 2018, Project Row Houses launched a new new “Hannah” duplexes with federal funding initiative to enhance existing housing in (2008), before teaming up with Midtown northern Third Ward. PRH Preservation, Inc. Redevelopment Authority13 to build the “Anita” buys, refurbishes and manages rental (2010) and “Napoleon” (2013) duplexes in properties “to ensure long-term, safe, and 14 eastern Third Ward. To date, Row House CDC has affordable housing for its residents". A built 54 two and three-bedroom apartments grant from the Kinder Foundation allowed it to using Rice designs. purchase and rehabilitate twenty-one wood- frame structures built between 1930 and 1950, without raising rents.

Fig.08. PRH Preservation, Inc. Left: A model of the homes rehabilitated in 2018-2019. Right: These two- family houses were among the nineteen modified shotguns. Photos: K. O’R., 2019. Every Building on Dowling Street Emancipation Avenue

Fig.09. Dowling: Holman_Elgin, unsigned aerial view, 2001. Computer printout 11x16 in. Courtesy PRH Archives.

While these drawings and models focus Avenue) crossing at an oblique angle. Each one on10 the houses themselves, Rice Building bears the date and a title identifying the two Workshop (now Construct) also collaborated cross streets. They were made by digitally with PRH on wide-area neighborhood planning modifying the image, overlaying street names projects. and placing in the right column numbered street-level snapshots of individual One set of maps from 2001 surveys the properties. Red dots locate these lots on the 15 neighborhood using enlarged sections of an map. aerial view. The maps show six swathes of Dowling Street (since renamed Emancipation

Fig.10. below: Taft Architects - Nonya Grenader, “Project Row Houses. Neighborhood Development Existing Conditions,” undated. Computer printout 11x16 in. Courtesy PRH Archives. Another set of five maps bears the title However, because the fabric was so low- “Project11 Row Houses. Neighborhood Development density, and further depleted by removal, what Existing Conditions.” These drawings show we ended up showing was its very open nature. Dowling Street at a larger scale (1 in./100 Polly’s background was in biosciences, so she ft). Like the previous series, the maps are approached this very empirically. My thing is identified by block; here, Dowling 3200-3300 - trying to get the right mapping colors, and I between Francis and Elgin Streets. They were think these land-use drawings are some of the 17 made by graduate best we have done". student, Polly Ledvina: “Polly did a windshield survey of each building of each Projects first imagined in the street face of each block,” notes Danny Samuels early 2000s may be built decades 16. She placed the photos side by side on a linear street map to form a continuous later. panorama along Dowling Street, superposing the perpendicular street-level perspective of the Rice has developed an ongoing relationship properties onto the bird’s-eye view. The lots with PRH. Long-term planning means that are numbered and identified in the legend; when projects first imagined in the early 2000s may they contain a real estate office, a cold be built decades later. For an Eldorado Site storage facility or a service station, it Development study (2001), students proposed an appears in the drawing. African-American archive and exhibition space on Dowling Street. In 2018-2019, Row House CDC The large green patches of vacant land on both was again envisaging a PRH Gallery on what is 18 maps show the neighborhood to be sparsely now Emancipation Avenue . An overall populated. Even today on the ground, it looks redevelopment plan “to add housing and mixed- surprisingly rural for an area so close to the use to all available empty sites on the main 19 center of the fourth largest U.S. city. Of campus” , includes retail incubation spaces on these maps, Samuels writes “the big challenge Emancipation and Holman Street - sorely-needed in planning is to find the suitable graphic businesses that will probably employ local techniques to represent information. In the residents. Here, community groupings of two photo-montages, with graphic techniques duplexes and two extra-small houses (based on inspired by Ruscha and Hockney (did we have a 2003 prototype XS House) share a common Photoshop then?), we were trying to show the outdoor space. surface characteristics of the street fronts. Fig.11. A Row House CDC Planning Study with PRH Gallery and new housing, 2018. Courtesy Taft Architects.

III. Learning from Third Ward: Database Cartography

By giving statistics visual form, data- for having provided banks with a reason to driven12 maps reveal a wide array of refuse loans to residents of areas labeled characteristics shaping the neighborhood. They “hazardous.” The cities they surveyed show a offer interdisciplinary teams ways of pooling strong correlation between “hazardous” areas information and techniques to visualize the marked in red and neighborhoods undergoing results. Planners can fine-tune projections, gentrification today. bringing together detailed information from a household survey and comprehensive coverage By layering the HOLC map of Houston with 1940s from a national census. Combining information census data on race, Susan Rogers reveals that culled from various sources enables a big chunk of Third Ward identified as 98% researchers to analyze patterns of development “non-white” was also labelled “hazardous.” She over time and see larger trends at work. A writes “The power of the maps was to make recent interactive map made by the National discriminatory practices visible and provide a Community Reinvestment Coalition superposes verb for the practice of denying loans to current demographic and income data on Home certain areas of our cities — an act we now 20 Owners' Loan Corporation maps from the 1930s. know as ‘redlining’". The HOLC maps that rated the “residential security” of each neighborhood are notorious Fig.12. Houston HOLC street map. Map & Blueprint Co. Street Map, City of Houston, Texas, circa 1930.

Fig.13. Houston HOLC map layered with 1940s census data on race. Courtesy Susan Rogers. The Row House District Fig.14. “Row House District Land Development” (May 2005). 11x16 inch computer printout. Courtesy PRH Archives.

The rectilinear “Row House District to increase tax revenue to cope with the Land13 Development” map covers a thirty-five- fallout from decades of neglect and reduced block area in northern Third Ward. Part of a federal funding. Beginning in the 1970s, land-use plan drafted by a group called The cities all over the country embraced Row House District Collaborative, it shows gentrification as a solution for revitalizing 24 that PRH’s vision of the neighborhood has urban cores. With its low level of citizen grown, and along with it, its ambitions. For organization, Houston seemed to offer no 25 Deborah Grotfeldt, the founding director of viable alternative. Planners ostensibly Row House CDC, the area was small enough for adopted a policy of minimal state intervention them to monitor its development. They had a and used tax dollars to attract investors. fund for purchase, and were looking for “Thus, despite the local laissez-faire adjacent properties.21 A spreadsheet from the rhetoric,” writes Igor Vojnovic, “government archives bears information from public tax intervention in Houston's growth has been records on each property, including size, vital and has produced the extraordinary value, tax status and existing use. impacts usually expected from public 26 Identifying property owners and occupants involvement in local economic development”. (institution, owner, renter) gave the organization an overall view of the The City of Houston’s Third Ward Urban 27 neighborhood structure. The group included a Redevelopment Plan (LARA, April 2005 ) opens retired real-estate developer “and the task with a map of tax-delinquent properties. It was to identify parcels that could be aims to increase affordable housing aggregated for development by developers, opportunities, while “returning abandoned 28 according to certain guidelines”.22 They property to tax revenue producing land”. The prepared a report, but “but mostly it did not Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority (LARA) go anywhere”.23 If it had been successful, it was started in 1999 to acquire vacant, tax- would have allowed them to scale up their delinquent properties in rundown operations. neighborhoods, clean them up and sell them cheaply to developers who were then required to build affordably-priced houses on the lots. PRH’s vision of the neighborhood But the City has been remiss about follow-up. has grown, and along with it, its Between 2007 and 2017 it spent nearly $10 ambitions. million for 1,403 lots, yet in 2017 only 362 houses had been built on those lots.29 At the time, the City of Houston was looking The Emancipation Park Neighborhood

A decade later, the maps tap into the characteristics of Third Ward have all but resources14 of information visualization via disappeared under layers of automatically networked databases. The physical gathered geodata locating everything from grocery stores to evictions and crime hotspots. Americans. When the City of Houston broke Emancipation Park was founded in 1872 by ground for a 33.6-million-dollar renovation of former slaves who pooled their money and the park in 2013, northern Third Ward was bought land to celebrate Juneteenth, the already under siege. High-end townhomes were holiday marking the end of slavery in Texas.30 going up all over, as developers rushed to Donated to the city in 1916, it was for many cash in on the neighborhood upgrade. years the only municipal park open to African

Fig. 15. The Emancipation Park neighborhood. MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Recommendation for Democratic Engagement. Shared Ownership and Wealth Generation in Houston’s Third Ward, Draft Report, 2015:7.

As the level of concern rose in the neighborhood revitalization, the EEDC was neighborhood,15 Project Row Houses partnered advised to adopt four wide-sweeping with local stakeholders31 to found the strategies: build political power, strengthen Emancipation Economic Development Council in community ownership, increase housing choice 34 the summer of 2015. The EEDC promotes and generate community wealth. community-driven redevelopment engaging longtime residents, most of whom are renters. The next year another team from MIT developed By increasing the number of rent-controlled a more detailed plan with EEDC working groups. 35 apartments available and supporting small It involves six strategies. The first entails business and mixed-use development, they aim creating a community land trust to buy to revitalize the Emancipation Park area for properties. Families purchase the house and its current inhabitants. lease the land under it from the nonprofit land trust. This reduces the purchase price and the The idea came after Rick Lowe invited urban annual property tax. In exchange, buyers agree planners from Third-Ward-based Texas Southern to limit the resale price so the house will University (TSU) to consult with neighborhood remain affordable. The 2015 draft identifies residents and make recommendations. They older privately-owned properties as “suitable defined priorities for enlarging public partners for a land trust.” The final report discussion and suggested that the community distinguishes three zones with differing 36 gain more control of land by creating a development trends and proposes for each an community land trust.32 Later, Lowe invited appropriate acquisition strategy. The maps researchers from the Massachusetts Institute straighten the oblique angles of the earlier of Technology’s Community Innovators Lab (MIT maps, using more easily processed rectilinear CoLab) who helped set up four working groups forms for clarity. to study key community issues.33 This led to the creation of the EEDC. To effect

Lester King and Jeffrey Lowe’s mobilization, as stakeholders attempted to ethnographic16 study describes the debates overcome Houston’s “extraordinarily weak 37 within the EEDC during the early stages of community development tradition”. By mutualizing costs, the land trust offers “empowering our renters”, “saving our history owners who risk foreclosure an alternative to and our homes”, seeding “new community-owned selling to developers. Yet in Houston, or worker-owned cooperatives and businesses,” building wealth is equated with private hiring “local” and developing “support property. Workgroup participants expressed services”. this as a conflict between family (retaining full ownership of land means they can leave it By mutualizing costs, the land to their children) and community (if they or their children sell to outsiders they will be trust offers owners who risk contributing to the community’s demise. Where foreclosure an alternative to 38 will the renters go?) selling to developers. This was not the only attempt at grassroots What these efforts have in common is that they organizing in the neighborhood. Not long after focus on redevelopment initiated by the EEDC, the Northern Third Ward Consortium neighborhood residents. was formed in October 2015 to lead a participatory planning effort. The 193-page plan they produced lists their priorities:

Right: Fig.16. “Land Ownership,” MIT DUSP Workshop Report, June 2016. MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Emancipation Park Neighborhood: Strategies for Community-Led Regeneration in the Third Ward, 2006. Third Ward as a “Complete Community”

Zooming out, by 2018, the maps cover infrastructure (sidewalks, police stations, the17 whole Third Ward, one of five underserved bike lanes) and demographic data (housing by neighborhoods chosen to participate in type, median household income, commercial and “Complete Communities,” an ambitious industrial land use). The maps locate “community-led” revitalization project potential assets (active civic clubs, historic launched the year before by the City of landmarks, pre-1940s buildings, grocery Houston. stores…), and liabilities (illegal dumping sites, crime hotspots…). Compiling the findings of its own and five earlier studies, the Third Ward Action Plan The plan aims to repair and preserve existing identifies no less than 27 goals and 77 housing, particularly “historic” houses built projects in nine focus areas, identifying as before 1940, to protect them from demolition its top priorities housing, education, and and maintain the character of Third Ward. economic opportunities.39 The same base map is used to make eighteen maps geolocating both Fig.17. “Maps of Opportunity Zones and Complete Communities,” City of Houston, Third Ward Complete Communities Action Plan, 2018:7. Maps: Community Design Resource Center (CDRC) University of Houston.

Fig.18. “Map of Existing Plans and Studies,” Third Ward Complete Communities Action Plan, 2018:6. Map: CDRC, University of Houston. Who Owns Third Ward?

Mapping Third Ward assets for the EEDC city, school, university etc. (public 40 in18 late 2016, Susan Rogers and her design team ownership)”. The composite view can be broken at the University of Houston ask “Who owns down to form a series of separate maps showing Third Ward?” “We used 2016 public data that, although developers owned 7% of the provided by the Harris County Appraisal parcels in 2016, this was offset by the District — this provides ownership information combined holdings of Midtown TIRZ (4%), by parcel,” notes Rogers, “so we divided out churches (8%), institutions (35%) and “what’s churches, we identified corporations, LLCs left” (46%), which meant that Third Ward still 41 [Limited Liability Companies], etc. that owned was, in a sense, “up for grabs”. more than five parcels for the developer maps, Midtown TIRZ owned, and then for institutions

Fig.19. “Who Owns Third Ward?” Maps: “Polis: Towards the Political Reconstruction of the City. The Case of Third Ward” presentation by Susan Rogers at the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, Oct. 22, 2018. Database Mapping 19 Today database mapping techniques are part of the toolkit of corporate productivity At best, the plans serve to – and bureaucracy. It would be easy to dismiss coordinate redevelopment efforts the neighborhood revitalization plans as ineffectual (or even as a smokescreen for and obtain funding. “business as usual.”) Artist Libby Bland takes the planners to task: “Houston’s Third Ward is When Mayor Turner launched Complete suffering from both rapid gentrification and Communities in April 2017, he planned to planning fatigue. Despite being under the redirect 60 percent of the city’s local and jurisdiction of at least seven different federal housing subsidies to the then-unfunded neighborhood and city plans, there are three initiative, but that was before Hurricane and four-story townhouses being built on every Harvey. To compensate the shortfall, he set up other block that are all wildly unaffordable an improvement fund to allow the private to the majority of Third Ward residents. The sector —specifically banks and endowments —to existence of a plan, without any ability to bankroll projects, suggesting that funders enforce or fund the initiatives that it form an advisory board to oversee the 45 details, is largely just a broken promise”.42 allocation of funds. In March 2019, a grant from Houston Endowment enabled him to appoint Why can’t the plans stem the flood of “wildly the first director of the Mayor’s Office of unaffordable” townhouses roiling the Complete Communities to “ensure [that] neighborhood? In Houston, zoning doesn’t projects identified through a public engagement exist: “development is governed by codes that process are implemented, funded and managed 46 address how property can be subdivided. The efficiently”. Projects abound in Third Ward. City codes do not address land use”.43 If the To convince the City to invest in a community Department of Planning and Development doesn’t chess park, for example, Ed Pettitt, chair of regulate land use, how can it “enforce” plans the Parks & Neighborhood Character Work Group, drawn up by local residents’ organizations? enlisted volunteers to build a prototype on a “Many public officials seem to have their hands vacant lot loaned by Third Ward developer tied because of developers’ influence on Ciara Jarmon and arranged with local merchants decision-making,” writes Isabelle Anguelovski: for donations of picnic tables, signposts, “It’s a historic issue. Real estate planters and bike racks. development is at the core of Houston’s economic development”.44

( ) IV. “(Re)Framing” and “Remapping”

Most of the artistic mappings reframe “new social relations demand a new space”, the20 neighborhood to highlight underrecognized then producing that space requires developing African-American cultural values. If their new representations. authors believe, as Henri Lefebvre wrote, that Writing Community

The Communograph map (2015) grew out of map and network, it mobilized “five research Communograph21 House, a multimodal project built platforms,” including an exhibition, two by Ashley Hunt together with six Houston public conversation series, two tours, a artists (Regina Agu, Journey Allen, Lisa E. temporary “welcome center” for Project Row Harris, Rebecca Novak, Ifeanyi “Res” Okoro and Houses and a blog realized by University of 48 Michael Kahlil Taylor) and fellow Angeleno Houston students. Public art practitioners Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle as part of Round 35 Mel Chin, Rick Lowe, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (2011). In the past Hunt has mapped what he and Shrimp Boats Project gave lectures at the calls “the aesthetics of mass University of Houston. Photographer Ray incarceration" (The Corrections Project).47 Carrington and historian Stephen Fox led tours of Third Ward. The exhibiting artists The title Communograph was chosen “to combine organized “Sidewalk Talks” on such topics as ‘community’ with ‘writing,’…so as to ground “Entrepreneurship in the Third Ward” (Regina this research in a writing of community from Agu). the perspective of the community itself.” Both

Fig.20. Ashley Hunt, Communograph Map (2015) printable map 11X16 in.

The final map, designed by Hunt, shows Memorial Park (the former headquarters of the22 main PRH campus on its own (recto) and in People’s Party II whose founder was killed by its neighborhood (verso). The simplified a police sniper in 1970). Domino tiles rectilinear design aligns it with earlier PRH punctuate the speech scroll winding around the walking maps while the flat blocks of color outer edges. Domino games are a leitmotiv both evoke the visual identity of a museum outreach at PRH and in the neighborhood. The flip side program. This latter-day mappamundi crowds situates the campus in greater Third Ward and information into every available space. tells the story of places like Riverside Bank, Inserts picture landmarks like the Eldorado Texas’s first Black-owned bank, founded in 1963. Ballroom, Six-Square House and Carl Hampton Siting History

With Monuments: Right Beyond the enhance their spaces and “celebrate the values Site 23 (2014), a collaborative “map” running of cooperation, entrepreneurship, self- through all seven art houses and connecting determination, resistance, and communal 50 them to sites in the neighborhood, Otabenga responsibility”. For Round 40, O.J. & A. Jones & Associates49 draw attention to represented key neighborhood sites in the “individuals, institutions, and events” that exhibition spaces and placed commemorative 51 have significantly marked Third Ward history. plaques at two of those sites. The installations highlight traditional strategies used by African-Americans to

Fig. 21. Above: Plaque “Progressive Amateur Boxing Association”. Otabenga Jones & Associates, Monuments: Right Beyond the Site (2014) Round 40, Project Row Houses. Photo: Alex Barber. Left: installation “Lanier East Hall Men’s Dormitory”. Photo: Alex Barber.

In May 1967, three years before Kent on.” The artists embedded a bronze plaque in and24 Jackson State, Houston police raided the the sidewalk outside the Association’s Lanier East Hall Men’s Dormitory at Texas headquarters. Another plaque commemorates the Southern University following a student former free health care facility “People’s demonstration. To intimidate protesters, they Party II: Carl B. Hampton Free Clinic” (1970- fired thousands of rounds of ammunition and 1971). trashed students’ belongings in what has been called a “police riot”.52 Even as it “reenacts” Other houses represented the Blue Triangle a period photograph, OJ&A’s installation YWCA and the Unity National Bank (formerly revisits sixties aesthetic debates, using the Riverside Bank), the latter in the form of a skewed perspective of Daniel Spoerri’s picture- shrine: crowd-control rope and stanchions lead traps (in 1962, Spoerri rotated an entire room to a large boli-like figure with an opening at in the Stedelijk Museum so visitors felt like the top, “a giant, Afrocentric version of a 54 they were walking on the wall)53 layering it piggy bank”. The sixth house showcased hand- with anthropomorphic piles of clothing. Here painted signs for local businesses by the pillow and bedspread, the stereo speakers, traditional Third Ward craftsmen Israel plaid shirts and red suitcases conjure up the McCloud, Bobby Ray, Walter Stanciell and V. young people whose rooms, and lives, were Woodard, and the seventh served as an turned upside down, leaving viewers to imagine education house - a venue for workshops, the impact of the bullets. lectures and gatherings.

In the house devoted to the Progressive The Animating History Project (2016) draws on Amateur Boxing Association, white punching the 1949 Houston City Directory to build bags hang from the rafters to form an “all- “excitement about potential change in the 55 over” environment, a ring delimited by four Dowling corridor”. Under the direction of parallel red lines on the walls. Jamal Cyrus three professors at the University of Houston, notes that it “was made in reference to a Susan Rogers, Ronnie Self and Fiona Buddhist martial arts training room.” Founded McGettigan, students in Architecture and in 1968 by the Reverend Ray Martin, “Houston’s Design teamed up with peers in the College of First Fighting Preacher,” the P.A.B.A. “fights Art to research, build and place in the crime, drugs, racism” by teaching kids how to physical landscape 22 six-foot high map pins box. As Martin puts it pithily, “You can’t showing prominent Dowling Street businesses. open a knife or fire a gun with a boxing glove

Fig.22. University of Houston, College of Art and College of Architecture and Design, Animating History Project, 2016: 6 of the 22 six-foot tall map pins. This project was a collaboration among Fiona McGettigan’s students in the College of Art, and those of Ronnie Self and Susan Rogers in the College of Architecture and Design.

Shaped like the 20-pixel teardrop icons zoom factor. While Bartholl’s nine-meter tall from25 online maps, the site-specific sculptures pin superposes map and territory to state the contrast views of successful establishments obvious, Animating History distributed the with the vacant lots and boarded up buildings familiar icons along the city thoroughfare so that have replaced most of them. The passers-by could imagine what the neighborhood structures recall Aram Bartholl’s Map (2007), had lost. Implicit to this vision is what it a “life-size” red marker erected in cities might become. like Berlin and Taipei, its proportions scaled to those of the Google Maps icon in maximal Fig. 23. Researchers compared a recent aerial photograph of the area with the same swathe of Dowling Street from the 1951 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Houston, using the 1949 Houston City Directory to identify the businesses that had disappeared. Maps courtesy CDRC, University of Houston.

Why settle for anonymous big-box stores Shop, Johnson's Dinette, Bartholomew Shoe with26 huge parking lots when residents could Repair, Dowling Junk and Supply Co., M&M find inspiration in the wide range of Optical Co., Brooks PM Detective Agency, Ann neighborhood shops that their elders could Beauty Shoppe, Bryant’s Poultry Co., Webster 56 once walk to? Writing about the project, Appliance Co…. Adelle Main conjures up the prosperity of that bygone era merely by listing their names: Nanking Food Market, People's Foot Health Fig.24. Marc Newsome aka Marc Furi, I Love 3W. Round 47, 2017. Photo by the artist.

Nostalgic “ode to the Historic Third play Cornelius Vanderbilt, eliminating Ward,”27 satire denouncing the pitfalls of competitors and controlling industries. gentrification, parody of a classic marketing Players amass fortunes from rent paid by campaign, Marc “Furi” Newsome’s I Love 3W others landing on their properties. Yet the mixes its metaphors with verve. Part of Round objective is not to accumulate wealth, but “to 47, “The Art of Doing: Preserving, bankrupt your opponents as quickly as Revitalizing and Protecting Third Ward” possible. To have just enough so that 58 (2017), it featured within its row house a everybody else has nothing”. The Landlord’s Monopoly “Gentrified Edition” mural, an Game was originally designed in 1903 by outsized pair of dice, a game table and a set Elizabeth Magie to denounce the robber barons of photos of Third Ward landmarks. Outside, of her time - the Carnegies and Rockefellers. painted on the façade, was the giant logo With the idea that playing it would make inspired by Milton Glaser’s I [heart] NY.57 The people realize that private ownership of land installation was completed by three real- was wrong (or as Henry George claimed, an 59 estate signs: a house-shaped "Home for Sale" “erroneous and destructive principle”) Magie and two hearts on the front steps reading “created two sets of rules for her game: an “Open House” and “I’m Gorgeous Inside.” anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded Instead of Boardwalk and Park Place, the when wealth was created, and a monopolist set properties players can purchase include South in which the goal was to create monopolies and 60 MacGregor Way, (Houston’s first crush opponents”. She thought players would public housing complex) and The Bottoms – a prefer the first, morally superior set of steal at just $60. Minimal outlay for maximal rules. But it was the second version, profit: a speculator’s dream! The Outta Here aggressively marketed by Parker Brothers, that Moving Company appeared, along with greedy became the Monopoly we know. By feigning to real-estate developers and calculating sell Third Ward landmarks, this “Gentrified homeowners, in the artist’s 2008 short film Edition” brings the Landlord’s Game into the “Here Comes the Neighborhood— A Gentrification twenty-first century. A community land trust, Comedy.” anyone?

The Monopoly game allows ordinary people to

For The TréPhonos (2018), Jeanette mediators who connect the neighborhood and the Degollado,28 Matt Fries and Julian Luna retooled world at large. At the bakery Crumbville, TX, old payphones to play authentic Third Ward TréSonik (curated by Marc Furi) proposes field sounds, and placed them at strategic recordings of neighborhood venues such as neighborhood sites to form a “map” embedded in Frenchy’s Chicken on Scott Street. Outside the 62 the territory. Seeing themselves as “author- S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, TréSankofa (Kofi producers,” the trio engaged residents of The Taharka) offers a repertoire of stories told Tré to provide 100% local content: “the by Third Ward residents, while TréMixTape payphones all have ‘ambassadors’ who are also (Sunny Smith) facing Wolf’s Pawn Shop, the curators of the phones,” notes Degollado61, features songs by local musicians like Big Brandon Willis and Baba Ifalade. Mapping helps to create patrimony. Unable to To preserve a neighborhood, its character, its prevent the demolition of Freedmen's Town in social fabric, its way of life, Fourth Ward two decades ago, artist-activists “museumification” is hardly an ideal solution. today are focused on saving Third Ward before Turning Emancipation Avenue into an African- it’s too late. In these maps, they redefine American Rialto would likely increase real- what culture is worth preserving, and why. I estate values, even if it brings jobs. David Love 3W and The Tréfonos highlight specific Harvey has shown how the emphasis on qualities Third Ward places that establish its unique to a place is used by capital to authenticity and uniqueness, claiming extract monopoly rent.63 If preserving Frenchy’s Chicken and The Bottoms as forms of historical landmarks can possibly save a few collective cultural capital. Animating History homes from being bulldozed, then cultural cultivates nostalgia for dentists’ offices and tourism would be, at best, a pharmakon - both domino parlors that were once part of the medicine and poison. everyday landscape. Fig.25. Jeanette Degollado, Matt Fries and Julian Luna, The TréPhonos (2018). Top: TréSonik, a soundscape curated by Marc Furi. Photo: K. O’R., 2019. Bottom: map of the sites, Jeanette Degollado, 2018. Taking Back Third Ward Fig.26. Top: Phillip Pyle II, Coming Soon Whole Foods Third Ward, sign, 2012. Photo: Phillip Pyle II. Bottom: Susan Rogers’s map of grocery store locations in Houston (2011) shows Third Ward to be a “food desert”. Rogers and Oran, “Food For Thought”:38.

Another kind of “mapping” consists of calls from disgruntled residents of other carrying29 out ephemeral actions on the ground neighborhoods asking why Whole Foods wasn’t to modify onlookers’ perception of a territory. coming to their area. After a weekend of news cameras and buzz, the city was told to remove 65 Phillip Pyle II has undertaken what he calls the sign by Whole Foods themselves”. Although “community outreach” in the form of guerrilla the upscale organic franchise recently bought street art. In August 2012 a sign displaying by Amazon may not be a good fit for the the logo and font of a well-known Texas chain neighborhood (who said its food was appeared overnight on a vacant lot at the affordable?), Pyle II claims that his sign corner of Holman and Dowling Streets. It read “helped create a feeling in the Third Ward "Coming Soon, Whole Foods Third Ward.” Its that maybe it did deserve a grocery store or makeshift appearance (the edge of the sign at least a place where vegetables could be 66 behind it is still visible) didn’t stop it purchased”. It laid the groundwork for an from being taken for the real thing. “A unrealized project - the Emancipation Park popular local real-estate blog64 posted a photo Community Association (EPCA) , a precursor for of the sign and the comments ranged from the EEDC, for which Pyle II designed signs. delight to fear,” notes the artist, “Existing Whole Foods locations in Houston answered Fig.27. MF Problem, Mobile Block Party flyer (2011).

Autumn Knight and Robert Pruitt, discussion with the police and the owner led working30 together under the moniker MF Problem, to nothing, they decided to displace the have organized several events that temporarily traffickers by throwing a party in the gas remap places in Third Ward. In the summer of station’s parking lot. They wound up hosting 2011, the neighborhood had undergone a wave of four Mobil Block Parties. Party-goers brought thefts, and the Mobil station at the corner of food for a potluck dinner and danced to music Francis and Dowling streets was the site of a provided by a local DJ. The artists stated thriving drug trade that made people feel that “Engaging that corner was an attempt to unsafe at night. Pruitt notes that “in the “‘take back’ part of our neighborhood lost to 68 daytime it’s really pleasant, people with illicit activity”. families and kids. But when the sun goes down, it becomes almost dangerous”.67 After

Fig.28. MF Problem, flyer for A Sunday Social, July 7, 2013. Image courtesy Autumn Knight.

31 Two years later, when the real-estate website Neighborhood Scout drew the nation’s attention to the criminal potential at the intersection of Sauer and McGowen Streets,69 Guests were encouraged to dress in their the duo decided to host an afternoon social on Sunday Best and “bring a dish to share”.70 The that very corner. As a public art event, A documentation on the artists’ website show the Sunday Social was meant “to counter the trappings of a picnic complete with tablecloth temporary yet damaging description of this and paper plates, boom box and barbecue, area,” by drawing on “rural/Southern/African attended by a joyous group of PRH stalwarts American traditional picnics, socials, and “fellowshipping” and posing for photos. jubilees that include dancing, live music, food, and socializing.”

Fig.29.The Black Guys, 24 Hours, performance, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCh6zXN7K8 Video: Phillip Pyle, II. Screenshot from the video.

Another instance of performative squatter house,’ he said. Next door, a hanging-out32 was 24 Hours (2014), a “behavioral squatter smoke house. The illicit activity event” performed by The Black Guys (Phillip that sometimes takes place is part of the Pyle II and Robert Hodge) at a Third Ward bus reason the duo chose a bus stop for their stop. The bus stop dedicated to blues singer homage to the Art Guys. ‘We're kind of 71 Lightnin’ Hopkins, designed by Robert Hodge, reclaiming our bus stop back,’ said Hodge”. was located on the Project Row Houses campus just opposite the Mobil station. Referring to In their analysis of these three informal Houston duo The Art Guys’ 1995 performance works, Willie Jamaal Wright and Cameron working 24 hours non-stop as clerks at a Stop- “Khalfani” Herman conclude that they are non- N-Go convenience store in the Museum District, institutionalized, provisional rather than The Black Guys’ homage involved interacting permanent, they create new publics, and “pose with bus riders and passers-by as well as the continued existence of alternative observing informal neighborhood activities: geographies in the Third Ward that do not fit “Sitting at the stop, Pyle points across the in the city and developers’ restrictive model 72 street to a bungalow behind a pile of garbage for neighborhood development”. that spills into the street. ‘That's a

Conclusion

“Houston has shown over the past ten social scientists, nurses, business owners, years33 that it has little to no regard for the builders… - organize to resist gentrification history of its neighborhoods,” says Rick Lowe and make their voices heard. To rebuild in the documentary Third Ward TX (2007),73 “it community, they begin on the ground. They tear is very business friendly. And what that means out old wallpaper and renovate houses, they is it puts the goal and objectives of put mulch around trees for a chess park. lucrative business above the human value of 74 the neighborhood.” Third Ward may still be a “food desert”, but it has grown oases: NuWaters Food Cooperative This may be changing, slowly, as neighborhood (2014) sells fresh fruits and vegetables from activists - artists, architects, designers, its urban farm; Ella Russell proposes freshly- baked pastries at Crumbville, TX (2016). and make its streets safer. Her vision of a Nearby Doshi House serves vegan paninis, vibrant city is embodied in the intricate fajitas and curries. Third Ward may lack sidewalk ballet “in which the individual stores, but it cultivates entrepreneurs. To dancers and ensembles all have distinctive build community wealth, EEDC chair Assata parts which miraculously reinforce each other Richards has helped to found two worker-owned and compose an orderly whole”.77 Houston’s cooperatives: The Third Ward Cooperative Third Ward still has a way to go – for Community Builders (2019) operates throughout sidewalk ballets to happen, it will need more Greater Houston, and the certified nursing sidewalks. assistants who form the Third Ward Community Care Cooperative (2020) provide home care to The third form of mapping simplifies, sometimes Third and Fifth Ward residents. In 2018, when to the point of caricature, and approaches the the City of Houston set up a city-wide non- problem from a different angle. profit community land trust, she became its first board president. Its goal was to place It’s the same vacant lot, but it 1,100 homes in its care within five years.75 takes on new meaning collectively. As they remap their neighborhood they produce a counter-power. Long-term relationships allow Reframing is the artist’s stock-in-trade. As plans to remain in a drawer for years awaiting Assata Richards puts it, “artists reshape funding. With volunteers, donors and students reality for us.” PRH’s founders did that from who earn credits instead of salaries, building the outset: You say shotgun shacks are for the community becomes possible. It took substandard housing, we say they’re a Row House CDC the better part of two decades priceless cultural heritage. Others followed but it has built 27 duplexes, and more are in their lead. Neighborhood Scout’s statistics the works.76 say that passers-by have a one in thirteen chance of being crime victims at the corner of The database maps give citizen planners a more Sauer and McGowen, MF Problem say that corner nuanced vision of the area by augmenting the is an ideal spot for a Sunday get-together. traditional bird’s eye view with ground-level It’s the same vacant lot, but it takes on new information collected automatically and meaning collectively. This requires building imported from multiple databases. Yet the trust (to convince people to come) but it is a plans detail the kind of neighborhood that far cry from “magical thinking.” It is Jane Jacobs eulogized in her 1961 book Life important that the freshly-painted row houses and Death of Great American Cities. Against sparkle in the sunlight, that the picnickers the conventional wisdom of her time, Jacobs wear their Sunday best, that the community argued that mixed use, population density and taste desirable change. diversity contribute to a lively neighborhood

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank David McFadden, Shyriaka Morris, Marc Newsome, Floyd Abraham,34 Michelle Barnes, Jamal Cyrus, Newsum, Ed Pettitt, Shannette Prince, Phillip Jeanette Degollado, Ryan Dennis, Sydney Pyle II, Assata-Nicole Richards, Susan Rogers, Garrett, Deborah Grotfeldt, Karin Halperin, Bert Samples, Danny Samuels, Jérôme Sans, Sheila Heimbinder, Ashley Hunt, Karen George Smith, River Teyssèdre, Sheryl Tucker Jennings, Autumn Knight, Nelda Lewis, Jesse de Vazquez, McKenzie Watson, Carol Zou. Lott, Jeffrey S. Lowe, Rick Lowe, Michael

Notes

1.Quoted in Andrew Garrison, Third Ward TX (2007).

2.As early PRH volunteer Karen Jennings writes in an email message to the author, May 27, 2018.

3.This is why, in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, anti-gentrification protests have targeted artists specifically.

4.Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, email message, July 25, 2018. See her “African-American Art and Architecture: A Theology of Life, Death and Transformation” Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 86th Annual Meeting, 1998:304-310.

5.John Michael Vlach, “The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy,” in Common Places, eds. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986:58-78.

6.According to de Vazquez, they were rental properties built by Frank and Katie Trombatore, the Italian immigrant owners of the corner grocery store. “African-American Art and Architecture”: 307. Historian Stephen Fox refers to the 2400-2500 blocks on Holman as “Frank Cash Row” in “The Historic Context & Site,” Live/Work: The Collaboration between Rice Building Workshop and Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, Rice School of Architecture, 2006:40.

7.From the A.C.S.A. Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, email message, July 25, 2018. Tucker de Vazquez, “Project Row Houses: an intervention”, ACSA 1997 :160. PRH finally bought the building in 1999 and Rick Lowe renovated it himself.

8.Rick Lowe, interview with the author, July 25, 2018.

9.Shyriaka Morris, email message, September 30, 2018.

10.Danny Samuels and Nonya Grenader, “The Collaboration of Rice Building Workshop and Project Row Houses,” Ryan N. Dennis, ed., Collective Creative Actions, PRH, 2018: 33.

11.Danny Samuels, email message, Aug. 31, 2019.

12.Construct website: https://arch.rice.edu/projects/construct/six-square-house

13.In the early 2000s state representative persuaded the Midtown Redevelopment Authority to use funds earmarked for affordable housing in Midtown (where land had become prohibitively expensive) to buy properties in Third Ward instead, through the Midtown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ). https://midtownhouston.com/affiliated-organizations/mra/. By 2016, the authority had banked 3.5 million square feet of land in Greater Third Ward. Developers who buy these properties from the MRA agree to build “affordable” houses and rental units. Leah Binkovitz, “In Houston, A Radical Approach to Affordable Housing,” Urban Edge Blog, Kinder Institute, June 6, 2018. https://kinder.rice.edu/2018/06/06/houston-radical-approach-affordable- housing

14.PRH website: https://projectrowhouses.org/prh-preservation

15.Danny Samuels thinks that this “keyed each location into a database of other characteristics.” Email message, Aug. 30, 2019.

16.Danny Samuels, email message, Aug. 30, 2019.

17.Danny Samuels, ibid.

18.As a venue for other types of shows, including circulating exhibits. Danny Samuels, email message, Sept. 30, 2019.

19.Danny Samuels, email message, Aug. 30, 2019.

20.Susan Rogers, “Hazardous: The Redlining of Houston Neighborhoods,” OffCite, Oct. 4, 2016. http://offcite.org/hazardous-the-redlining-of-houston-neighborhoods/

21.Deborah Grotfeldt, interview with the author, April 18, 2019. In 2010 Rick Lowe mentioned selling land to developers to be able to buy more strategically-located properties. See Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made, Duke University Press, 2013: 354, n.33.

22.Danny Samuels, email message, Aug. 31, 2019. A few years later The Community Artists’ Collective collaborated with a real estate developer with disastrous results. They wound up losing their property altogether. Michelle Barnes, interview with the author, April 18, 2019.

23.Danny Samuels, email message, Aug. 31, 2019.

24.Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith, “The Changing State of Gentrification,” Tijdschrift Voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 92(4) 2001:464–77.

25.Joe R. Feagin and Beth Anne Shelton, “Community Organizing in Houston: Social Problems and Community Response”, Community Development Journal, 20/2, April 1985: 99–105.

26.Igor Vojnovic, “Laissez-Faire Governance and the Archetype Laissez-Faire City in the USA: Exploring Houston.” Geografiska Annaler 85(1) 2003:19–38.

27.City of Houston Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority, “Tax Delinquent Properties”, Third Ward Urban Redevelopment Plan (April 2005):3. http://www.houstontx.gov/planhouston/sites/default/files/plans/ThirdWardUrbanRedevelopmentPlanMF.pd f

28.Ibid.:2.

29.The City helped low-income buyers to purchase 2007 houses from 2009 to 2013; but in 2017, among those once-subsidized houses, only 463 were still limited by restrictions to keep them affordable. Rebecca Elliott and Mike Morris, “Lost Money: Officials haven't kept close tabs on Houston's low-income housing fund, which is struggling to meet its mission”, , 2017 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/lostmoney/

30.On June 19, 1865 - two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

31.St. Phillip Missionary Baptist Church, Trinity East United Methodist Church, Trinity United Methodist Church, Wesley Chapel A.M.E. Church, Row House CDC and Sankofa Research Institute.

32.Lester O. King & Jeffrey S. Lowe “We want to do it differently”: Resisting gentrification in Houston’s Northern Third Ward, Journal of Urban Affairs, 40:8, 2018:1171-1172.

33.Dowling corridor development for community wealth building, partnerships with anchor institutions, housing development and CLT, political engagement.

34.MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Emancipation Park Neighborhood: Strategies for Community-Led Regeneration in the Third Ward, 142-page Report prepared for the Emancipation Economic Development Council, June 2016: https://issuu.com/mit- dusp/docs/mit_dusp_houston_workshop_report_ju:16.

35.Establish a community land trust, make mixed-use development happen, propose temporary experimental projects in vacant lots, create people-centered green infrastructure, preserve the Third Ward and organize the community. Ibid.

36.Zone 1 has seen much townhome development and rising prices. Zone 2 has many undeveloped lots belonging to churches and Midtown TIRZ while zone 3 has historic owner-occupied homes, undeveloped lots, and despite many demolitions, little new construction.

37.King and Lowe, “We want to do it differently”:1171-1176.

38.King and Lowe:1171-1172.

39.City of Houston, Third Ward Complete Communities Action Plan, 2018:7. http://www.houstontx.gov/completecommunities/thirdward/

40.Susan Rogers, email message, Oct. 1, 2019.

41.In 2012, Rogers noted the presence of “nearly 1,000 vacant lots in Third Ward,” adding that the siting of an additional 134 vacant lots owned by the Midtown TIRZ was “wishfully strategic—a lot on nearly every block.” Were they placed strategically, she wonders, “to eliminate the possibility of wholesale redevelopment and the displacement of residents?” Susan Rogers, “Destruction in Speculation,” https://superhouston.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/destruction-in- speculation-5-2/

42.Libby Bland, PRH blog, https://projectrowhouses.org/blog/fellows-update-libby-bland-1

43.https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/

44.Isabelle Anguelovski, “How Greening Strategies Are Displacing Minorities in Post-Harvey Houston”, Green Inequalities, The Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, July 16, 2018. http://www.bcnuej.org/2018/07/16/how-greening-strategies-are- displacing-minorities-in-post-harvey-houston/

45.Jasper Scherer, “Turner looking to private sector for Complete Communities funding”, Houston Chronicle, August 29, 2018 https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Turner- looking-to-private-sector-for-Complete-13192347.php

46.“Mayor Turner Announces Director of City’s Complete Communities Initiative,” March 18, 2019 https://cityofhouston.news/mayor-turner-announces-director-of-citys-complete-communities- initiative/

47.Ashley Hunt, http://correctionsproject.com/wordpress/

48.http://www.communograph.com/

49.According to their official biography, the collective (Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans and Robert A. Pruitt) was founded by artist and educator Otabenga Jones in 2002. Their namesake is Ota Benga, a Congolese Batwa Pygmy who was kidnapped and brought to America in 1904 as part of an anthropological exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

50.Artists’ statement. Round 40 was curated by Ryan Dennis. See Ryan N. Dennis, “Art for the People’s Sake,” Gulf Coast Magazine 27/1 2014 and Kelly Klaasmeyer, “Two Third Ward Exhibitions Show the Importance of Perspective,” Houston Press, April 14, 2014.

51.The installations evoke the aesthetic vocabulary of site/non-site, without using Smithson’s terms.

52.Jamal Cyrus, email message May 8, 2020. In the mêlée, one officer was killed by friendly fire.

53.In the collective exhibition Dylaby.

54.This description is based on that of Kelly Klaasmeyer, art.cit. A boli is a Bamana power object.

55.Susan Rogers, email message to the author, Oct. 1, 2019.

56.Adelle Main, “On Dowling”, SuperHouston https://superhouston.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/on- dowling/.

57.Probably the most oft-imitated design since Monopoly, Glaser’s logo, itself based on Robert Indiana’s Love (1965), was part of a 1976 campaign to attract tourists at a time when the city was bankrupt, known more for crimes and garbage strikes than for museums.

58.Richard Marinaccio, quoted in Christopher Ketcham, “Monopoly is Theft,” Browsings. The Harpers Blog, October 19, 2012 https://harpers.org/blog/2012/10/monopoly-is-theft/?single=1

59.Henry George, Progress and Property. An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth... The Remedy, San Francisco, 1879. Preface to the Fourth Edition,1880. https://schalkenbach.org/library/henry-george/p+p/pp-into-to-Fourth- Edition.html.

60.Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, London, Bloomsbury, 2015. See https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind- monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html

61.Jeanette Degollado, interview with the author, June 14, 2018.

62.Self-Help for African People through Education.

63.“Monopoly rent arises because social actors can realize an enhanced income stream over an extended time by virtue of their exclusive control over some directly or indirectly tradable item which is in some respects unique and non-replicable.” David Harvey, “The Art of Rent”, Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution [2012], Verso, 2013: 90.

64.http://swamplot.com/whole-foods-market-flag-planted-in-the-third-ward/2012-08-20/

65.https://phillippylethesecond.myportfolio.com/emancipation-park-community-association. See Carrie Schneider, “Emancipation Park, Emancipatory Art: Flipping the Gentrification Playbook” OffCite Jun. 19, 2017 http://offcite.org/emancipation-park-emancipatory-art-flipping-the- gentrification-playbook/

66.Ibid.

67.Robert Pruitt quoted in Willie Jamaal Wright & Cameron “Khalfani” Herman, “No ‘Blank Canvas’: Public Art and Gentrification in Houston's Third Ward,” City & Society 30/1, April 2018: 89-116.

68.MF Problem, artists’ statement: https://mfproblem-blog.tumblr.com/post/51562718802/sunday- social-is-a-derivative-of-the-mobile

69.Every year the website lists the 25 neighborhoods that have the highest predicted rates of violent crime. In 2013, they identified the Sauer-McGowen area as the fifteenth most dangerous neighborhood in the U.S. https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/25-most-dangerous-neighborhoods- 2013. At the time, that part of northern Third Ward had been undergoing gentrification. Artist Robert Pruitt (quoted in Wright and Herman:104) sees the rating as a tool “to gentrify a neighborhood,” by pressuring owners to sell at lower prices.

70.https://mfproblem-blog.tumblr.com/post/51562718802/sunday-social-is-a-derivative-of-the-mobile

71.Leah Binkovitz, “24 hours at a bus stop: It's art.” Houston Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2014.

72.Willie Jamaal Wright & Cameron “Khalfani” Herman, “No ‘Blank Canvas’: Public Art and Gentrification in Houston's Third Ward,” City & Society 30/1, April 2018: 89-116.

73.Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, Richard Fisch, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution [1974], New York, Norton, 2011:12.

74.Andrew Garrison, Third Ward TX, 2007.

75.Susan Rogers and Maria Oran, “Food For Thought: Mapping Houston neighborhoods reveals a great divide in access to grocery stores and suggests possibilities for bridging the gap,” Cite, The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, Vol. 85, Spring 2011:36-39.

76.Official website: http://houstonclt.org/about-us/. Mike Morris, “City plan to expand affordable housing will rely on land trust, subsidies,” Houston Chronicle, March 1, 2019 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/City-plan-to-expand- affordable-housing-will-rely-13656027.php

77.Despite the difference of scale with commercial developers: for example, in 2019 Enterra Homes was poised to build more than 30 high-end townhomes on Emancipation Avenue in one fell swoop.

78.Jane Jacobs, Life and Death of Great American Cities New York, Random House, 1961:65.