In America’s Poorest City, a Housing Breakthrough

*All it takes is creativity and people coming together. The main problem here is poverty, so this housing is about more than just shelter; it’s an example of how things can work. VL

By Amanda Kolson Hurley, MSN News

La Hacienda Casitas opened in Harlingen, Texas, earlier this year. It is fully occupied and has a waiting list.

Brownsville, Texas, sits high in the rankings where cities want to come in low. It’s the poorest city in America, with 36 percent of its residents living in poverty. (By contrast, the poverty level in the nation’s richest city, San Jose, California, is 10.8 percent.) It has among the country’s highest rates of diabetes and obesity, conditions that are estimated to affect up to half the local population. Other cities in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley don’t fare much better: McAllen, 60 miles to the west, is second-poorest in the nation.

This part of South Texas is known for its colonias , neighborhoods that developers conjured out of worthless land back in the 1950s to sell in small lots to poor, mostly Hispanic buyers, sometimes with false promises of improvements to come. There are about 1,800 colonias in Texas, and many still lack basic infrastructure like paved roads and sewage.

“Somebody who makes $8.50 an hour, they’re never asked, ‘What do you want?'”

Against this backdrop, the body of work produced in and around the city over the last few years by a small design nonprofit and the local CDC is all the more remarkable.

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