Photo: Patricia Moore

The human and financial costs of neglecting older neighborhoods are huge.

Substandard housing abounds across Texas.From the older neighborhoods of big cities and small towns to the fast growing colonias along the Rio Grande, communities contain dilapidated, deteriorating housing. Unfortunately, this housing is often the only affordable housing available to low-income families.

Much of the housing in older neighborhoods is destroyed through arson, converted to commercial uses, gentrified, or neglected to the point that it simply falls down. Residents of older inner city neighborhoods are often the elderly and children. As neighborhoods deteriorate they become magnets for crime, making the people who live there captives in their homes. The loss of affordable housing through neighborhood deterioration is huge. It is many times more expensive to build new housing than to maintain or rehabilitate existing housing. It is hugely inefficient to replace the existing public investment in infrastructure (streets, utilities, schools) in new subdivisions.

Photo: Patricia Moore

Photo: Alan Pogue

503,119 Texas houses are substandard.

Photo: SADA

Source: Housing Assistance Council, Washington, from 1990 US Census data

Texas four largest cities rank first through fourth in the nation in the rate of physically deficient low income owner occupied housing.

Source: 1995 State Low Income Housing Plan, Texas Dept. of Housing & Community Affairs, p.18.

1.9 million Texas households will need housing assistance by 2000

Photo: Alan Pogue

Source: 1996 State Low Income Housing Plan and Annual Report, Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs, p 2-6.

Photo: Marla Valesquez

Private very low-income rental units in Houston fell 28% in four years; a net loss of over 136,000 affordable housing units.

Source: American Housing Survey, Bureau of the Census.