HAUS Project makes Houston Press cover

Living together, on purpose

Jay Blazek Crossley, Jul 19, 11.

The Houston Press cover story for the week of July 7 - 13, 2011 looks at the Houston Access to Urban Sustainability Project (The HAUS Project), a new nonprofit organization dedicated to providing affordable, sustainable, cooperative housing in Houston’s urban core, and which began as a Houston Tomorrow workgroup two years ago:

This is Houston’s first housing co-op: a community under one roof where members share resources and labor for the good of the environment, their social lives and their bank accounts. They cook and clean for each other. They fight with each other. At the end of the day, they come home to each other — and try not to sleep together.

Co-ops took hold in most major urban areas in the ‘60s and ‘70s as a way for free-spirited college students to live cheaply. They’re still thriving across the country in progressive hubs. Austin alone has 20 co-ops. But Houston somehow escaped the co-op craze entirely. Despite several attempts, co-ops never caught on here. Now, a collection of pioneering young professionals — not time-warped hippies of the past — are setting out to prove that intentional communities like co-ops will work in Houston. Under founder Jay Crossley’s lead, they aim to build five green co-ops in Houston’s urban core within the next five years. They’re planning to expand the model to families, as the next house is designed for parents and their children. After that, the group wants to start a giant college co-op in the Third Ward that will mix students from Texas Southern University, the University of Houston and Rice University.

While Crossley thinks the co-op model would be a great way for the Third Ward to become a cultural mix, several from the area are skeptical. State Representative Garnet Coleman, who actively fights gentrification in the ward his family has called home for generations, doesn’t get why ten successful, predominantly white individuals would want to share a house anyway. “Ten in one house is a lot,” he said. “What is the purpose of doing this? What do they call this stuff — new urbanism? Is that what this is supposed to be?” Crossley’s priority is to provide affordable housing for all Houstonians, but particularly for people who already live in the Third Ward — a goal he’s not sure the rest of the house shares, and one he fears will be glossed over when he moves back to Austin at the end of the year.

Although Coleman applauds the environmentalism of the project, he can’t see it catching on with African-American professionals, who want privacy and a yard, he says. “If I’ma buy a house, that’s the reason I buy it: because I want my privacy,” he said. “There’s a difference in the expectation in use of property by culture.”

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Above all else, Crossley wants the catalog of five HAUS co-ops — the Rosalie HAUS for young professionals, one for families and at least one Austin-style shitshow college co-op — to be a racial mix. It’s something that didn’t happen with the first house, which is predominantly white and doesn’t include anyone from the Third Ward. Such a dream is hard enough to pull off now, if Coleman is right about the model not making sense to African-American adults. But it might be even harder to accomplish in the near future.

“I feel sometimes like a lone voice talking about the problem of light rail,” Crossley says. The town homes and condos that surround his house are the future for much more of the Third Ward, he says, should nobody help the neighborhood brace for skyrocketing property values. “Any other city in the world would have a plan for affordable housing, and how the people in that neighborhood can be involved in planning for their future and stay there, once it’s a much nicer neighborhood because it has access to really high-quality transit.”

With or without these co-ops, gentrification isn’t about to stop, says Danyahel Norris, an attorney and legal research instructor at TSU and longtime Third Ward resident. He first started noticing gentrification in 2000 during his senior year at UH, when he watched a crack house turn into an upscale residence. Norris wrote an article published last year in the Thurgood Marshall Law Review outlining different ways that residents of the Third Ward can hold onto their property. One major strategy is to enforce deed restrictions, neighborhood covenants designed to retain the look and character of a certain area. In unzoned Houston, they’re powerful weapons residents can use to stave off gentrification, but only if the residents know what they say. “Most of them don’t check out their deed restrictions,” Norris said.

Norris doesn’t know of a unified effort to stop gentrification in the Third Ward. Though he urged such an effort in his article, he’s not optimistic of one springing up before the rail hits.

Neither is he convinced that Crossley’s plan for a tri-school co-op is a realistic model for the neighborhood. Having gone to both UH, a public school, and TSU, a historically black university that is also public, Norris can’t imagine either of them mixing — let alone with Rice, a private school. “As nice of a thought as that is, I think when you talk about making people live together — not hang out occasionally, but when you’re talking about living in the same space…it sounds like a nice idea in theory, but the practical side is a little more difficult,” he said. Even if the co-op served just one school, Norris said that the challenges in Houston are much greater than those in Austin. Rice students have excellent on-campus housing already, making it an insular cocoon few wish to leave. TSU and UH, on the other hand, are both schools with a heavy commuter contingent. Many students at both schools have part-time jobs. Who has time to cook for ten after class and work?

Crossley admits a multicultural co-op is not going to be easy to pull off. His initial attempts at TSU fell flat. “I tried to reach out and figure out how we get a student group at TSU to lead this project,” he said. “It just didn’t work.” Crossley plans to keep trying, but if the concept of co-ops catches on only with white people, they’re the ones who will lead them. In that respect, co-ops could just become the new face of gentrification. “Personally,” Crossley said, “I am sort of torn about how this works — how this particular project, whether it’s a force for evil or good.”

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It could be the perfect opportunity to start stirring the melting pot. Rick Lowe is the founder of Project Row Houses, an organization that transforms abandoned shotgun houses in the Third Ward into exhibit spaces for African-American artists. Lowe says he’s watched the Third Ward become more diverse since he moved here in 1997, and it’s a good thing, as long as those moving in become part of the neighborhood. “If they move into the neighborhood understanding that there are plenty of youth around that need mentors, that need all kinds of support, families and organizations that need it…if they’re coming to participate in that way, then it’s not any different than blacks or anybody else coming to the neighborhood,” he said. But if the move is to establish an insular community, it’s a different story. “Then the question becomes, why choose the location that you’re living in?”