Loophole keeps Pleasantville homeowners from getting post-Harvey repairs

“It’s just frustrating,” she said, noting that recent rains have damaged her home even more.

Pleasantville, located just inside Loop 610 in east Houston, prides itself on being one of the first historically Black neighborhoods in the country protected by deed restrictions. In a city with no zoning, minority neighborhoods lacking deed restrictions often find themselves encroached upon by industry that negatively impacts property values.

But the General Land Office says it can’t spend the money to rebuild the type of homes that the Pleasantville Civic League says are required by those deed restrictions — namely houses on concrete slabs with garages. The GLO said the language doesn’t actually mandate those specifications and that the civic league never formally created the architectural control committee that could veto inferior, less-expensive structures they are proposing. The GLO has also told homeowners that they may owe the government money if they back out of the contract because they are unhappy with the quality of home they are planning to build.

The fight is disheartening to Pleasantville residents, who feel like the government is undermining a historic community that residents have spent seven decades building and maintaining.

“None of it makes sense, and by doing this in this historic community, they are literally destroying the property values of all of the homes,” Pleasantville Civic League President Mary Fontenot said. “You’re tearing apart the fabric of the deed restrictions in this historic community on what one might consider a loophole or a technicality.”

The Pleasantville neighborhood was established in northeast Houston in 1948, during a time when neighborhoods were being developed around city’s edges for returning servicemen. Many of the new subdivisions had deed restrictions saying “None of the lots… shall be used, owned or occupied by any person other than of the Caucasian Race.” But Pleasantville, developed by Melvin A. Silverman, did not.

Instead, he worked with Judson Robinson, Sr. — who founded a national association for Black real estate agents at a time when they were barred from the National Association of Realtors — to explicitly market a deed-restricted neighborhood to Black Houstonians. As a result, families with the means of buying homes flocked there, and the resulting community has boasted its share of firsts: Houston’s first Black City Council member elected at large, one of the first Black Marines in the country, the first Black surgical nurse at the Houston Veteran’s Hospital.

“They were trying hard to live the American dream and escape Jim Crow,” said Robinson’s grandson, Judson Robinson III, of the people who moved to Pleasantville. “Anything that would resemble living like a real American was heavenly.”

That’s why, he said, he finds the housing being built by the GLO “a sad situation.”

The GLO, which last year took over the city’s $428 million effort to repair and rebuild single-family homes damaged by Harvey, says its hands are tied by federal stipulations on how Department of Housing and Urban Development funding can be used.

Though the land office is legally bound to abide by deed restrictions and local housing codes, HUD can revoke funding for a project if the GLO cannot prove “cost-reasonableness” and the need for “non-traditional housing costs,” such as garages and fencing, said GLO spokeswoman Brittany Eck. If the deed restriction on a home conflicts with HUD requirements, which include, for example, the need for a home to be built at least 2 feet above base flood elevation, then that home would be ineligible for participation in the Homeowner Assistance Program.

The original deed restriction for Pleasantville, filed to the Harris County Clerk’s office in June 1950, states “No building shall be erected, altered, placed or permitted to remain on any lot other than one detached single-family dwelling not to exceed one story in height and a private garage for not more than two cars.” It goes on to say that any new homes must be “approved by the architectural control committee as to quality of workmanship and materials, harmony of external design with existing structures, and as to location with respect to topography and finish grade elevation.”

While the GLO acknowledges the existence of the deed restrictions in Pleasantville, differing interpretations of the document have led to a disagreement between the land office and the civic league, which the GLO does not recognize as a legal authority.

The deed restrictions permit garages, but don’t actually mandate that each house have one. Because they are not explicitly required, HUD would likely reject paying for them, Eck said.

“If (the civic league) doesn’t have legal authority, we cannot say to HUD they have legal authority…and that this expenditure that goes beyond what is eligible under HUD rules is permissible. If we don’t have that documentation, which was never presented, then HUD will say we shouldn’t have allowed that expense,” Eck said.

The GLO maintains homes don’t need a green light from the civic league because it has not legally established the presence of an architectural control committee, which would have to sign off on any new developments, according to the deed restriction.

Legal experts, however, say that whether the civic league has established itself as a legal authority is irrelevant, since individual property owners can still sue to enforce deed restrictions.

“Deed restrictions can still be enforceable even if there is no architectural review committee,” said real estate attorney Richard Weaver. “It is well-settled law that restrictive covenants are treated as contracts between property owners in the subdivision. For this reason, property owners in the subdivision can bring suit to enforce the deed restrictions.”

The issue, it seems, then comes down to the interpretation of the deed restriction itself. The GLO says the deed restrictions do not specify the necessity for garages or concrete slab foundations, as opposed to pier-and-beam bases. Fontenot says that the architectural committee would require those to be consistent with existing homes in the area, and says the GLO is trying to save money on a technicality.

Fontenot said that GLO contractors never presented participants with designs that would be covered under the deed restrictions, and that the civic league is prepared to take the GLO to court.

“We think we will win in a court of law,” Fontenot said. “What we’re asking is nothing different, nothing special. They screwed up, they didn’t do their due diligence, and that is very clear, and maybe it’s going to cost them some money right now, but that’s on them.”

Joseph Barras, 60, calls his enrollment in the Homeowner Assistance Program the “worst decision (he’s) made.” He says he had already repaired the roof and much of the home’s woodwork, but signed onto the program thinking that he would have options to improve the home.

Barras didn’t like the options he was presented and tried to pull out of the program, saying he’d rather finish renovations himself, but was told the contract he signed was binding. The home, which he inherited from his parents and in which he has lived his entire life, was later demolished, and he is now renting another home with his wife until a new one is built.

The new home will be a smaller, “shotgun style” house and won’t have a garage, like the last home did, Barras said.

“When they came and started tearing the house down, everyone in the community couldn’t believe that this was happening to this home. Everyone respected my parents’ home, my mother used to decorate it for Christmas and everyone all over would be pointing to this house. Some people had tears in their eyes,” Barras said.

Lela Johnson died before her home could be rebuilt through the program. She had pleaded for a car port to shield her from the elements while unloading her car, said her daughter Laverne Johnson, before acquiescing to the plan. Laverne says the home under construction has a much smaller footprint than the original house and no garage.

Fred Leon Hamilton, whose home has been rebuilt, says that his new home — built without a garage — is nice, but that the six months between moving out of his old house and into the new one drained his savings. Many days, as he tried to stretch his paycheck to cover the costs of a motel, he had to choose between forgoing meals or sleeping in his truck.

Similar concerns to those in Pleasantville have been raised in the Sagemont area in south Houston, another deed-restricted neighborhood where some residents worry that new GLO developments will drop property values in the area, according to the South Belt Leader.

State Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, said he hoped the GLO would sit down with residents of Pleasantville to come up with options they all could all agree on. “We can’t let GLO come and bum-rush people that need their homes done and force them to accept homes that are less than what they’ve had and what they deserve.”

Federal laws do require agencies to consider the impact of their developments on properties that are listed in or eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places, a designation which Fontenot says she has been fighting for. The GLO, however, consulted with the Texas Historical Commission and concluded that “no historic properties (would be) affected” by the new homes, senior deputy director Heather Lagrone wrote in a letter to Fontenot.

Pleasantville residents and the GLO have been locked in their struggle for months, without a clear resolution in sight. If a resident decided to withdraw from the program after signing a contract, they would have to reimburse the land office for work already done, according to letters sent by the GLO to residents in the program.

In a city without zoning laws, deed restrictions are one of the only ways for Houston residents to exert control over their surroundings, and if they’re not consistently enforced, they lose their power, experts say.

“It’s significant for any neighborhood to lose their deed restrictions because they’re really the strongest protections, and in many cases the only protections, neighborhoods have because Houston doesn’t have zoning,” said David Bush, executive director of Preservation Houston. “When they lapse, they’re very difficult to put back in place because it takes 75 p ercent of the homeowners to vote to reinstate them.”

The stakes feel even higher for Fontenot and the Pleasantville Civic League, who take pride in being the first deed-restricted community for middle class Black Americans in Houston.

“It almost seems more personal than anything else at this point, because you’re going in and destroying a historic community, destroying property values in a community that has held its own for a long time. Life happens, right, and it hurts a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean you can go in and say ‘We’re going to do it the way we want to do it,’” Fontenot said.