Post-Colonial House
If Midtown is the new Sharpstown, what will Midtown look like in 30 years?
Text by Harbeer Sandhu
Photography by Mark Armes
It’s 38° at 3:00 pm. I am walking around an apartment complex in southwest Houston that has been identified by the Southwest Defense Network as being managed by shady slumlords. In this and many other complexes all over Houston, managers take advantage of poor, overworked, uninformed and in some cases undocumented tenants by charging them indiscriminate fees for arbitrary “violations” that are not even mentioned in the lease (such as locking a bicycle to a balcony rail — $30). They neglect maintenance and repairs, allow garbage to pile up, ignore complaints about rats, roaches and bedbugs, and even fabricate accusations of criminal activity to harass tenants into moving and thus forfeiting their security deposits. This happens all the time.
A man on a bicycle cart sells duros — fried, pinwheel-shaped, puffed wheat Mexican snacks. The complex is littered with abandoned shopping carts.
A woman pushes a shopping cart filled with garbage bags to the overflowing dumpster. It is 38° at 3:00 pm and I see at least one broken window bandaged with a piece of cardboard and some masking tape. This is the Gulfton Ghetto.
Gulfton’s dense nexus of apartment complexes was developed in the 1970s, during Houston’s oil boom years. You know this story: the economy in the Northeast and Midwest “Rust Belt” was depressed as the American auto and steel industries declined; meanwhile, skyrocketing oil prices pumped money into Houston. Upwardly mobile young people flocked here in droves, where they found high-paying jobs and thousands of young, overpaid people just like themselves. It was the swinging 70s — sex, drugs, and disco flowed like Farah Fawcett’s mane.
Real estate developers capitalized on the demand for housing by building sprawling “adults only” apartment complexes of one and two-bedroom units. Each new complex tried to outdo its neighbor in terms of amenities offered to attract hip, young, single professionals. One such complex offered 17 swimming pools, 17 hot tubs, seventeen laundry rooms and two club houses. As Alex Wukman notes in “Remembering the Forgotten City” (Free Press Houston, December 2025), the cost of building the nightclub, alone, in one of these complexes was $1.6 million (adjusted for inflation).
Do yourself a favor watch this vintage 1980s commercial on YouTube.
