1 Make I-45 Better Coalition, a group of more than 30 organizations throughout Houston who are dedicated to monitoring and engaging with the NHHIP, extracted this data from the incredibly complicated Community Impacts Statement of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement published by TxDOT last year.

2 Other ‘not-so-Midtown’ typologies at the border include the Wheeler Transit Center, the (until recently) vacant Sears building, and a Fiesta grocery store.

Above, Left: NHHIP proposed extent | Above, Right: a sample section taken at C showing the change from existing freeway lanes to NHHIP-proposed freeway lanes

In conjunction with the NHHIP, half of Midtown Terrace Suites’ units will be displaced through right of way acquisition (along with 428 other affordable housing units along the proposed extention’s path). The Wheeler Transit Center next door will be remodeled to service Houston’s new ‘innovation hub,’ already in construction over the skeleton of the city’s first Sears. This escalated gentrification of the land formerly known as Third Ward into the body of Midtown as the result of a widening border is evident of the sociopolitical, economic, and biopolitical currents that have been flowing since before Midtown Terrace Suites was ever conceived, and provides the perfect impetus to reflect on the site’s history and future.

Above: 1913 map of Houston’s Wards, showing the original boundary between Third Ward and Fourth Ward (Midtown) at Main Street

Originally constructed in 1965 as a Days Inn, the Midtown Terrace Suites were converted to housing for homeless veterans in 2004 through a partnership between US Vets, a nonprofit, and the community development corporation Cloudbreak Communities. Before being converted to apartments, Days Inn worked with the nearby Military Entrance Processing Station to house newly-enlisted servicemen from across the region staying the night in Houston before being shipped out to basic training. As a result, several of the current residents and employees were visitors at the motel years before living or working there 3. As stated on their website, the US Vets driving mission is “the successful transition of military veterans and their families through the provision of housing, counseling, career development and comprehensive support.” To this end, residents can find an impressive array of counseling and development resources within the complex to aid them in meeting the sobriety and employment requirements of tenancy. The program seems to be achieving its intended effect: according to Cloudbreak, many tenants have maintained residency at the complex for upwards of ten years.

3 Most information about Midtown Terrace Suites’ specific history was garnered from on-site personal interviews with Oscar Yetzirah and Christopher Baker, who are employed by US Vets and Cloudbreak Communities, respectively. Oscar Yetzirah is himself a veteran who stayed in the Days Inn before deployment decades ago, and recalls learning of the conversion fondly.

Above: Midtown Terrace Suites as advertised on Cloudbreak Communities’ website

Noble as this all seems, the NHHIP is not the first bump in the road for Midtown Terrace Suites. Supporting our veterans is an aim that would appear to garner near-universal bipartisan support. However, affordable housing specifically geared towards the homeless population, regardless of veteran status, was a hard sell in up-and-coming 2000s Midtown. The project ran into a more disparaging bipartisan rallying point than supporting servicemen: an outcropping of the ‘not in my backyard,’ or NIMBY, movement.

There was a time when a property owners’ authority stopped at the lines of their parcel. Beginning with nuisance laws which developed over the course of the 20th century through often-racialized land management practices such as redlining, deed restrictions, and zoning, this has ceased to be the case. In today’s cities and subdivisions, residents are deeply invested in the streetscapes, parks, and other public amenities that their mortgages effectively pay for-- amenities that would purportedly lose value with the construction of nearby affordable housing. NIMBY is a demonstration of this investment. As with more formal development restrictions,the principles of ‘NIMBYism’ can be used for the powers of good, such as residents of the East Houston neighborhood protesting the erection of the Whispering Pines Landfill in the 1970s. More often, however, ‘Not in My Backyard’ is a cry taken up against affordable housing developments in protest to being saddled with the perceived burden of the people who live in them.

While NIMBY may appear at first glance to be motivated by decisively conservative values, the movement is complicated by the fact that homeowners typically support restricting development in their neighborhood regardless of political affiliation. A 2018 study conducted by William Marble and Clayton Nall at Stanford University demonstrated that while “liberals are more likely than [...] conservatives to support redistributive housing policies [...] support for such policies is nearly perfectly uncorrelated with support for the local high-density housing development that would also benefit lower-income families.”4 Or, to put it in the terms of a Houston Chronicle article from last year: “a surefire way to turn a bleeding-heart liberal into a raging conservative is to propose an affordable housing development in his or her neighborhood.”5 What exactly about affordable housing leads citizens to turn backwards on their purported political ideology? We are circling in on one major motivator for NIMBY movements: thinly-veiled racism and classism. Midtown was in the throes of gentrification in the early 2000s, when plans for Midtown Terrace Suites were first publicly proposed. According to the American Community.

Survey, in 1990 the neighborhood was approximately 11% white, 64% Black, and 25% Hispanicor Latino. Three out of every four residents were living in poverty, and nearly half did not have a high school diploma. By 2010, Midtown was 40% white, only 40% of residents were living in poverty, and 59% had at least a bachelor's degree 6. While these statistics are by no means exhaustive of the dynamics at play, they gesture towards the economic and racial demographic shift being driven by pricy townhome developments in the area 7. As part of a 2018 study titled “The Geography of Inequality,” Jessica Trounstine at the University of California, Merced, conducted a survey through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform that offered respondents “two developments with randomly assigned attributes including racial makeup, reservation of units for low income residents, monthly cost, parking, and development type.” The results are harrowing: “respondents reported that developments with more people of color and more poor residents would have lower property values, worse schools, and higher crime rates. In short, they saw these developments as making their neighborhood less desirable.”8 This was precisely the case for Midtown residents at the moment Midtown Terrace Suites was canvassing support for their renovation. As Oscar Yetzirah, a long-time US Vets employee, relays, “they did not want us here. They really did not want us here.”

4 Marble, William and Nall, Clayton. “Where Interests Trump Ideology: The Persistent Influence of Homeownership in Local Development Politics.” Stanford University , 31 January 2018. p. 5-6

5 Tomlinson, Chris. “Neighborhood groups fight to keep people in poverty by blocking affordable housing.” Houston Chronicle, 13 May 2019.

6 The American Community Survey is an ongoing survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. It regularly gathers information previously contained only in the long form of the decennial census. This data was retrieved using Social Explorer.

Above: a 2003 Houston Chronicle article reporting on Midtown residents’ concerns regarding the “indigent and addicted” populations Midtown Terrace Suites would soon house.

When considering the biopolitical dimensions of power enacted along border conditions, it is unsurprising that Midtown Terrace Suites and other resources targeting homeless residents are focused along the freeway. Thinkers of biopolitics including Roberto Esposito and Donna Haraway have written extensively on immunological discourse as analagous to processes of exclusion and admittance at geographic border conditions within the biopolitical horizon. In pre-industrial states governed by sovereign power, human bodies were thought to have a soul and seek divine paradise. In postmodern states governed by biopower, human bodies have an immune system and seek long, healthy lives. This shift means that the maintenance of self in postmodern society, whether on the part of an individual body or population body, is essentially a process of triaged exclusion. Desirable pathogens or people are allowed to permeate the border, while undesirable ones are marked as ‘other’ and excluded. That which is incorporated smoothly into the individual or population body is maintained and regulated as life, while that which is marked ‘other’ is rendered Agamben’s homo sacer, and allowed to die 9.

In practice, this equation of exclusion and inclusion is not always so neat. As previously discussed, while it is true that Houston’s freeways define the borders between neighborhoods of dramatically different economic and social composition, along and beneath these borders lies a third condition occupied by those unable to permeate in either direction. It is to these physical and cultural margins that the most vulnerable populations of a neighborhood are pushed. This phenomenon is immediately felt by any visitor to Houston driving alongside a freeway within the 610 loop, where robust homeless encampments occupy underpasses and unused green space between the snaking roads. Less explicitly displayed to the driver’s eye are the resources servicing these populations, such as Midtown Terrace Suites, SEARCH homeless services, and Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen-- all organizations in the gentrified Midtown and EaDo neighborhoods which will be displaced by the NHHIP. Perhaps in the messy actuality of exclusionary border conditions there is an opportunity for optimistic engagement. In her 1989 paper “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Opennes,” bell hooks posits that the margin is a site of creativity, power, and resistence. For hooks, there is power in choosing to locate onesself ideologically at the margin, even when one is invited into the ‘center.’ Though hooks writes explicitly about her lived experiences as a Black woman, there are obvious parallels between her thinking and our discussion of biopolitical borderlands. What might it mean to choose or to privilege space at the margin in a concrete sense rather than to be relegated to it? It is not a question that is easily answered in Houston, where proximity to freeways tanks real estate values and most jump at the opportunity to escape it.

For Midtown Terrace Suites, the right of way acquisition has led to just such an opportunity. Cloudbreak Communities and US Vets have worked together again to acquire St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, built in 1947 in the historically Black Fifth Ward neighborhood.10 The hospital will be transformed into a mixed-income housing development in line with the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation’s Lyons Avenue Renaissance initiative.11 When asked about his feelings on the displacement, Oscar Yetzirah’s reply is surprisingly zen. Lifelong Houston residents, he says, know that attempting to halt progress is a lost cause. The leadership at Midtown Terrace Suites is planning to ensure that the veterans in their care are covered throughout the displacement process, and that is all that can be done. “That’s the nature of this city,” he quips cheerfully. “It will always be developing.”

Above, Left: St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in 195712 | Above, Right: Render of the planned mixed-income housing development that will absorb displaced Midtown Terrace Suites

This is amazing news from a pragmatic standpoint. The tenants of Midtown Terrace Suites will not lose housing as a result of the NHHIP. However, it seems complicated that it is through being pushed into another community, a community that is less white, less wealthy, and less far along in the process of gentrification than Midtown, that Midtown Terrace Suites is allowed to continue occupying space in the city. Furthermore, Fifth Ward has a history charged by freeway expansion projects. In the 1960s, the neighborhood lost six-hundred and eighty-six homes, one-hundred and one businesses, eleven churches, and two schools to the construction of I-69 and I-10, an event that the community is still struggling to recover from economically and culturally.13 There are several high-profile developments planned for the area, including the St. Elizabeth’s project and a massive mixed-use complex just north of Buffalo Bayou headed by the same team as Katy’s City Center. Nevertheless, the area stands to lose big on affordable housing once again as a result of the NHHIP, and the Midtown Terrace Suites’ replacement units are a drop in the bucket amongst the looming town houses that have begun to populate surrounding vacant lots.14 Midtown Terrace Suites pulls together many uncomfortable Houston legacies. Because Houston is primarily a post-industrial city, it is unsurprising that these legacies are exemplary of the overarching relationships of domination that have defined the social landscape of the 20th century. We have the option to turn away from the processes of exclusion, gentrification, and unethical land acquisition that the displacement of this site brings to mind, and even to uncritically celebrate the salvation of a couple dozen units by a cross-town move. However, to do so is to miss a crucial opportunity for substantive engagement with our city’s psychic debt. It is my hope that by challenging the planning paradigms that rule displacement of sites such as Midtown Terrace Suites, we can begin a productive conversation to unravel new modes of development in Houston.