Mayor John Whitmire has asked the Houston Housing Authority to halt plans to move residents into The Pointe At Bayou Bend – a controversial and long-delayed East End housing project, until further environmental testing is completed.
“The level of lead discovered is higher than what is safe for the public,” Whitmire wrote this week in a letter addressed to HHA Chairman Joseph Proler. Further, he stated that the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality “has indicated that the submittals by HHA to resolve the violations are insufficient.”
His request to halt the project centers around concerns about the wellbeing of future residents, which – according to the HHA’s plans – will include roughly 400 families by 2025.
“The health and safety of the citizens of Houston is of the utmost importance,” Whitmire wrote in the letter. “It is imperative that the full 21.68 acres property, which includes the southern portion upon which the apartment complex is located, as well as the undeveloped northern portion, is determined to be safe and free of environmental dangers.”
The mayor’s concerns stem from a December 2022 incident on the northwest side of the property at 800 Middle Street where construction workers dug up incinerator ash while installing sewer lines. The TCEQ cited the housing authority for four violations: failure to remove the ash in a timely manner, failure to notify the TCEQ, failure to obtain a proper sample of the ash, and failure to maintain documentation of sampling procedures.
The mayor now is asking the housing authority to complete additional environmental assessments on the portion of the property to the northwest of the apartment complex. This portion used to house ash piles from the city’s municipal trash incinerator, which was located nearby between the 1920s and 1960s.
Both the HHA and InControl Technologies, the authority’s longtime environmental contractor, previously told the Landing the property is properly cleaned up.
“At the request of the Mayor’s office, we’ve already completed additional testing on the housing development site which confirms there are no concerns. We are also conducting additional environmental assessment of the surrounding undeveloped property before proceeding with resident move-in,” Houston Housing Authority CEO David Northern said in a Friday evening statement.
The HHA provided the requested supplemental information to TCEQ and “to our knowledge” have addressed outstanding questions, said Northern.
The TCEQ did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
Residents were slated to begin moving into the 398-unit affordable housing complex next month, though Harrison said a precise date had not yet been agreed upon.
A history of issues
The mayor’s request to halt move-ins is the latest in a series of delays that have bedeviled the complex originally planned to house residents displaced from the HHA’s Clayton Homes community when it was razed for the widening of Interstate 45.
Clayton Homes already was in dire shape when it was closed in 2022 for the I-45 expansion project: 112 of the units had been deemed uninhabitable after tainted floodwater from Hurricane Harvey settled in in 2017, resulting in “astonishingly high levels” of E. coli , as well as elevated levels of lead and arsenic.
When the Texas Department of Transportation purchased the property in August, 2019, the department agreed to pay for the relocation of all tenants; TxDOT and HHA agreed that 80 percent of the units would be built within a 2-mile radius of Clayton Homes. It took the housing authority a little more than six months to identify such a location, at 800 Middle.
In the meantime, the hundreds of residents who moved out of Clayton Homes have been scattered throughout the area; many were placed in some of the city’s other public housing complexes, including Irvinton Village and Cuney Homes; others obtained vouchers from the HHA to rent from private landlords.
Northern told the Landing last month that he expected at least 20 percent of former Clayton Homes residents to relocate to the East End complex in its first two phases of move-ins, which he said were slated for this August and next January.
The HHA first purchased the property at 800 Middle in October 2020, using $54.4 million in federal funds. In the four years since, it has been a lightning rod for public and private concerns from nearby residents, developers, the city, environmental experts and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Last summer, the property’s environmental issues — and neighbors’ dissatisfaction — made it onto TV news , riling housing authority leaders. In an early-August email to then-Mayor Sylvester Turner and U.S. Rep Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, Northern wrote that through “rigorous testing” under the supervision of TCEQ “we have reaffirmed our commitment to transparency and the safety of our site, known as 800 Middle.”
The problem, Northern wrote in the email, which the Landing obtained via a public records request, was not the property or the soil. Rather, he blamed “sinister forces at play, attempting to exploit vulnerable populations for personal gain. These forces are propagating the ‘Not In My Backyard’ (NIMBY) agenda and disseminating misinformation about contamination to undermine our efforts.”
Whitmire’s letter to the housing authority, however, states that he is “greatly concerned” by the TCEQ’s findings. He further noted in the letter that the “TCEQ will not sign off on the certificate of occupancy until the above mentioned violations are resolved.”
Whitmire, via his spokeswoman Mary Benton, declined further comment Friday.
“The letter speaks for itself,” Benton said.
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