Ever wondered why so many of Houston’s streets are gouged and crumbling while others...
Glory Medina and her daughter Jade, 6, flag down a bus Tuesday, July 19, 2022, near their apartment in the Gulfton neighborhood in Houston. Medina took several buses that day to drop off her daughter at daycare, get an allergy shot and to donate plasma for rent money. She said Gulfton doesn’t feel like home. “There’s nothing to embrace, nothing that makes you feel good here,” she said as she was talking about the lack of public spaces, trees and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.
The answer isn’t as clear-cut as we’d like, although clearly, some TIRZs are outliving their purpose and others never seemed motivated by the seminal goal for the zones: to improve blighted neighborhoods. A lack of transparency makes it hard to monitor the entities and hold them accountable for their use of taxpayer money: While TIRZ board meetings are open to the public, information about complex deals is spread across too many reports to comprehend.
These contrasts are common across the city. The very streets teeming with pedestrians and bus riders often have narrow sidewalks that end without warning and bus routes without shelters.When a TIRZ is established, the amount of property taxes from the area that go to the city treasury don’t increase even as the value of the land increases. The taxes on that difference in value — the tax increment — instead flow to a special account where the money can be invested within the zone.
Fair or not, Houston has embraced this concept with more fervor than any other Texas city. The 27 of these zones created by City Council encompass nearly a quarter of Houston’s tax base. Some do cover blighted areas, butNeighborhoods without a TIRZ fight for scraps from Houston’s general budget. Two years ago, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo likened the process of allocating then-scarce COVID-19 vaccines to the “Hunger Games.
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