Revitalizing Our Inner-City Neighborhood — Without Gentrification

I didn’t want to simply have a nice house in a bad neighborhood

Image credit: poco_bw.

I bought a little house a couple of years ago. It sits on a mostly quiet street in a mostly Black subdivision, with a good amount of Latinos. The larger area of Houston, of which my subdivision is a part, is called Sunnyside, and it has a reputation for being a tough neighborhood.

I was born and raised not far away, in an area called South Park. Like most people from such neighborhoods, I grew up dreaming of one day being able to buy a big house in the suburbs, and park a European sedan next to a big SUV in the garage.

I’d had an adult life full of speed bumps and false starts. So by the time I was finally able to clean up my credit enough and save a little money to buy a house, I had long since woken up from dreams of suburbia, and escaping the kind of neighborhoods that were responsible for my very existence.

Predictably, most of my friends (including those who were from the same kind of neighborhood) thought I was crazy for buying a house in Sunnyside. I was convinced of my own genius. I had a plan to have a plan.

I wanted a house in the kind of neighborhood where I’d grown up because looking back on my own childhood, I…