This was originally featured in the Houston Chronicle’s HouWeAre newsletter about race, culture and identity. You can sign up here.
Land. Property. Ownership.
From the Constitution’s early stipulation on who held voting power to Manifest Destiny, sharecropping and redlining, land and property — and more importantly, who owns and controls them — have equally reinforced systemic injustices and helped create access to mobility and freedom.
R.A. Schuetz, the Chronicle’s real estate and business reporter and Looped In podcaster, covers real estate, development and entreprenerial trends in Houston — where diversity is the cornerstone of the city’s potential.
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Q: Tell us a little but about yourself.
A: I’m from San Antonio, where I was introduced to newspapers by the San Antonio Express News. They have a program called the Teen Team, which gave me the chance to tag along with veteran reporter Vincent T. Davis as a high schooler (the Spurs were on their way to a championship, so we looked at what it was like to live next to the stadium). As a somewhat shy teenager, I loved having an excuse to go out and talk to people about their lives, and I began to do it every chance I could, joining my high school, then college papers — though it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that I decided to give it a go as a career.
Shout out to Davis, who’s still at it in San Antonio, and whose stories you’ll occasionally see in the Chronicle!
Q: What drew you to covering business and real estate?
A: Real estate shapes all aspects of our lives – where we live, eat, work, unwind, go to school. The fabric of our cities is tied up with our identities and quality of life. So the decisions, policies and market forces that impact that fabric really grab me.
Q: In the past couple of years, and particularly after George Floyd’s murder, there seems to have been a rise in more intentional investment and diverse development. Based on real estate trends, do you think it was part of a natural surge already starting to happen in underrepresented communities or do you think there was some link to George Floyd and the racial reckoning that was happening?
A: It’s a really good question. I’m definitely hearing more about developers trying to give the community a voice and perhaps a chance to share in the wealth. Technology and new laws are creating new techniques for doing so — such as crowdfunding. But there have long been people in real estate who have more on their mind than a profit.
For example, when I was writing about Christopher Senegal, a developer who recently bought a group of Fifth Ward homes with the promise not to raise rents, his approach struck me as unusual. In an effort to keep tenants in place in a low-income area where he expects property values to rise, he found a property that included both rental shotgun homes, which generated enough income to cover monthly costs, and vacant commercial space, which could be developed to increase profits.
But as I reported the story, I found out that Senegal’s promise to do right by longtime residents was a big part of why the previous owners, Birdie and Albert Stevens decided to sell the property to him in the first place — they, too were making decisions with the community in mind. And the reason why Birdie Stevens’ father, a former sharecropper, even owned the property was because the owner before that recognized how much he helped the tenants. That owner, Dr. Samuel Dittman, offered Birdie Stevens’ father owner financing — and while many landlords in Houston offered Black families unfavorable financial arrangements with terms meant to prevent them from ever taking full possession of the their deeds, according to government reports, Dittman was as good as his word.
That’s all to say there are many examples of people who have opened doors in real estate historically. While it’s hard to track that over time, I do hope a rising number of thoughtful people are becoming doorkeepers.
Q: The real estate market is probably one of the top indicators of disparity and inequity, whether it’s racial, gender-based, socioeconomic. What are you seeing personally as home prices continue to skyrocket?
A: In recent years, home prices have grown much more quickly than incomes, widening the gulf between who can buy a home and who cannot. Those who had already purchased a home saw their wealth increase as the value of their home soared; those who had not saw the prospect of doing so grow more and more difficult. The ratio of home prices to incomes in the Houston area still isn’t as bad as in other parts of the country where I’ve lived – for example, San Francisco and New York City. But some of the things I’ve seen in those cities, I’m beginning to notice a lot more here than I had when I moved to Houston in 2018. People are making smaller spaces do and moving to places less convenient to where they work. Stress around housing is becoming more palpable. And tenant organizing is becoming more visible.
Q: There are the disparities, but you’ve also covered a lot of really cool, hopeful stories, from Third Ward development to the Sixth Ward project for seniors displaced by Harvey to anti-homelessness campaigns. Which of these stories really stood out for you?
A: This is such a hard question! I loved all of those stories. A lot of people in Houston are doing really cool things. A recent story I wrote involved Houstonians cracking the code on a nationwide problem — how to make housing choice vouchers, a federal program that subsidizes rent for low-income families, palatable to landlords. The nonprofit NestQuest makes arrangements with the management of apartments zoned to high-performing schools, agreeing to take on the payments and maintenance, among other headaches. NestQuest then sublets them to housing-choice voucher families with school-age children, whom they provide with additional supports.
Q: Anything else you want to add?
A: If y’all love real estate, give our podcast, Looped In, a listen. Thanks for having me!
Do you have a story to share or know of one that needs to be told? Share it with us here.
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