Settegast has the shortest life expectancy in Harris County. Why?

The poor life expectancy in Rivera’s neighborhood has drawn the attention of group of organizations, including Urban Land Institute Houston, Harris County Public Health, the Houston Land Bank and the Kinder Institute. Using a $27,000 grant from ULI Houston’s parent organization, the nonprofits and government staff are drawing up an action plan for Settegast. Rather than trying to pinpoint the causes of the neighborhood’s short life expectancy — which can be very difficult to do — the group is turning to residents to understand their most pressing concerns.

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The strategy involves hiring residents such as Rivera to go door to door and organize workshops to gather information on what issues people living in Settegast are struggling with, based on the notion that addressing such concerns will likely impact health outcomes. So far, pollution and the lack of resources, such as grocery stores or doctors, have ranked among the top problems cited by residents.

“We’re trying to look at how historical and current discrimination in different planning and development practices are impacting the health and well-being of residents today,” said Elizabeth Van Horn, an urban planner and public health analyst at Harris County Public Health who is the project manager for the effort.

‘A forgotten community’

Settegast was settled in the 1940s by Black families who found many other residential areas restricted to them, according to city planning documents. The neighborhood, named for a pair of land-speculating brothers, was made up of small homes on large lots and dozens of churches — including Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, which later moved to a larger campus in southwest Houston. Many who grew up there remember the community as self-contained and close knit, a place where schoolchildren knew their neighbors so well they could walk through their backyards en route to and from school.

For a time, the community had its own high school, which produced a surprising number of professional athletes for its size, including Greg Pruitt, a Heisman trophy finalist who played for the Cleveland Browns and Los Angeles Raiders, and Carl Roaches, who played for the Houston Oilers and New Orleans Saints. Many families kept guinea hens; when the local schools had parades, horseback riders in cowboy hats and boots joined the cheerleaders and marching band.

Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer

But after Houston school districts were desegregated, the high school closed, and eventually the school district did as well. Residents like Rivera remember a period of decline. Many of the early homeowners died without wills, leaving their properties unclaimed by heirs and eventually in foreclosure, according to Michael Frazier, who grew up in the neighborhood and worked as a tax assessor for the local school district. Others lost their homes after falling behind on taxes.

The rate of homeownership, which, as recently as 2013, stood at 60 percent, fell to 44 percent. Many residential properties became parking lots for 18-wheelers and car repair shops, common sources of frustration for neighbors who want to maintain the neighborhood’s residential character. 

Rivera said that after seeing the changes in her community, she has long felt “Settegast is a forgotten community within the city of Houston and (Harris) County.” So she was excited to hear about the Urban Land Institute’s grant to improve the neighborhood.

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Jessica Fuentes felt similarly when she heard about the project that won the grant, titled Actions for Health Equity in Settegast. Fuentes lives in the neighboring community of East Houston, and said the same set of problems face both, and she hoped that finding solutions in one would help the others.

So Fuentes, who speaks both English and Spanish, and Rivera joined the program as community ambassadors. In the past year, the two have spent more than 100 hours knocking on doors and calling neighbors; Actions for Health Equity in Settegast has hosted eight focus groups, six listening sessions and four presentations to the community.

Making a plan

So far, the grant staff has heard people are worried about lack of access to healthy food and healthcare, as well as poorly maintained infrastructure and  environmental health concerns, said Van Horn. Many of the problems that have cropped up during the program’s data collection have ties to the neighborhood’s history. 

In the 1966, the Houston-Harris County Economic Opportunity Organization attempted to distill the issues plaguing Settegast in a researched report. The authors noted, among other issues, that while Settegast had been annexed by Houston and its residents were paying the city taxes, the neighborhood had no city water, no sanitary sewers, unpaved streets, a “complete lack of drainage facilities,” and a lack of public resources, such as libraries or healthcare.

Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer

Today, while Settegast has been connected to city utilities, the drainage remains a pressing concern as the neighborhood is prone to flooding. Unlike much of Houston, where storm sewers drain rain from roads, the city installed open ditches along streets in Settegast. Rivera, whose home flooded during Harvey, pointed to a ditch across the street from her home, where a pipe was supposed to facilitate the flow of water under a driveway. The pipe could not be seen for the leaves crowding its opening. The neighborhood also has a problem with people illegally dumping tires, furniture and other trash in ditches, which chokes off access, making it harder to drain stormwater.

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Settegast still does not have its own public library, and the nearby Lakewood branch is no longer an option either. It flooded during Tropical Storm Allison, Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Harvey, and has been closed ever since. Library officials have said they’re looking for a new location.

Van Horn was frustrated by the lack of progress. “Many of the concerns seen in 1966 are still concerns experienced by residents today,” she said.

And the propensity of industrial uses — such as auto shops, scrap yards and truck yards where large semis often idle — to set up shop in Settegast traces back to the very reason many minority families, then banned from other communities by deed restrictions, first moved to the neighborhood.

Nearly all communities protected by deed restrictions in the early 20th century excluded minorities, pushing Black and Hispanic residents into neighborhoods without restrictions. As a result, many of the property types banned in a deed-restricted community — such as industrial sites, liquor stores, multifamily homes — could pop up at any time in the communities where minorities settled, often destabilizing the neighborhood or prompting sudden price swings.

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Now that Actions for Health Equity in Settegast has gathered its data on issues facing the community, the next step is coming up with an action plan to address them. Van Horn said the group was considering steps such as holding a community resource fair, helping seniors file for property tax exemptions, finding ways to connect residents with more fresh food and working with the nonprofit Air Alliance to monitor air quality. The group’s plan will be released sometime in April, she said. 

Van Horn said she hoped the project would be able to make connections between history, infrastructure, land use, housing quality, access to groceries and services and the health of individuals, because, “It all impacts quality of life.”