HARD TIMES ON HOUSTON'S SHITTY EAST SIDE

Despite a few bright spots, like the Astros and Rockets, or its thriving eclectic underground live music scene, H-Town is pretty shitty, a textbook example of what the country would look like if ruled strictly by business interests, all sprawl and strip malls, soulless for the most part, except for grass-roots patches of culture that necessarily arise here and there, but usually without institutional support--in short, people, by and large, are regarded and treated by the powers that be as consumers and workers only.

It's no wonder that Houston is the place that the patriarch of the Bush family calls home. It's exactly the way old George wants it to be.

Of course, once you get outside of Loop 610, which encircles the innermost part of the city, it's even shittier. To the southwest lies the bland bedroom community, which occupies land once farmed by prisoners growing sugar cane, known as Sugarland. Sugarland gave us Tom DeLay. 'Nuff said. To the west lies the once down-home town of Katy, which has also gone the way of the bland suburb, but which gave us country singer Clint Black, actress Renee Zellweger, pitching great Roger Clemens, and, one of my favorites, comedian and political dilettante Janeane Garofalo, all of whom got the hell out, with good reason I might add. To the northwest and north lie Klein and Spring, still kind of countrified, but also going the way of cookie-cutter and corporate chain suburbia--Lyle Lovett came from Klein, but that was before it started to gentrify so disgustingly; he, too, got the hell out. To the northeast lies the former lumber and oil producing land now known as Kingwood, yet another gargantuan suburb, utterly devoid of meaning, and with a culture of sterility. Kingwood produced me. I, too, got the hell out.

But head due east on I-10 and you will encounter the shittiest of the shitty. Once you hit Beltway 8, which encircles Loop 610, and pass the yeasty smell of the Budweiser brewery, the petrochemical plants start to dominate the landscape. Head a couple of miles further east and you start to both see and smell the noxious emissions coming from these plants. The rent is cheap here because the gasses in the air are so annoying and dangerous. That's why the area is a diverse mix of working class whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans. Most people on the east side work for a living.

And that's what I did when I lived there for six years. I rented a place near a neighborhood called Woodforest, a depressing would-be suburb/enclave composed of working class whites with managerial and upper middle class delusions of grandeur. You could just feel the racial and classist sense of elitism coming off the place--I felt much more camaraderie with the people of color there, who, unlike the nervous and clumsily pretentious white folk, were just fine with being working class. Every weekday during the school year, I hopped in my car and made the twenty minute drive further east to teach high school in Baytown, the epicenter of Houston's shitty nature, about which I have posted before, here and here.

Anyway, the point to this depressing rant is that Houston's east side is in the news again. Twice, in fact.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Pollution in east Harris County poses greatest health risk

Concentrations of a dozen air pollutants in the Houston area pose significant risks to public health, with the greatest risks in east Harris County along the Houston Ship Channel, according to a task force of public health and toxicological experts convened by Mayor Bill White.

The landmark study, which was led by the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, and included eight experts from five institutions throughout the state, marks the first time the city has scientifically screened some of the compounds that enter its air, and ranked them according to their health risk.

And

Seven of the 12 compounds that scientists said posed a definite risk to public health, especially to the elderly, young, and sick, are known to cause cancer. Eight are linked to respiratory ailments. Several others tinker with the reproductive and immune systems.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, this kind of study, screening for toxic emissions, is what the EPA is supposed to do, but seeing as how the agency is under the control of President Bush, well, you know, the city itself had to lay down the money to do it--it's a safe bet that the EPA will be persona non grata when it comes time to try to get the petrochemical plants to clean up their act. At any rate, Houston's east side is clearly much more dangerous than is popularly understood, which matches my experience in Baytown encountering people or friends and family of people with weird birth defects, strange cancers, and bizarre respiratory ailments. Good thing I rarely went outdoors during my time there. Unfortunately, most people aren't the homebody that I am.

It's pretty bad.

But wait, it gets worse. Again from the Chronicle:

3rd man in Aryan gang held

A third member of a white supremacist prison gang has been charged with capital murder in connection with the kidnapping and fatal stabbing of a Baytown man.

The arrest of Larry Welch, 20, of Baytown, is the latest development in a sweeping investigation that also has resulted in 10 members or affiliates of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas being charged with engaging in organized crime.

Most of the members became acquainted in prison, where they first joined the gang, authorities said.

Click here for the rest.

The Aryan Brotherhood is traditionally a racist white prison gang, the kind of group that raped Ed Norton's character in the shower in the film American History X. They've had a presence on the far east side since at least 1998 when I started teaching in Baytown, but it always sounded like they were a bunch of beer-swilling idiots fresh out of the pokey: it now appears they're trying to establish a serious and permenant existence on the outside as an actual crime organization. The developmentally disabled east side, where working class whites ridden with class anxiety intermingle regularly with blacks and Mexican-Americans, is the perfect hatchery for these rotten eggs.

I would have never believed it, but it seems that the shittiest of the shitty in Houston is about to get even shittier. I'm glad I don't live there anymore.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$