PLUM GROVE, Texas (AP) - It was a cold winter morning and her birthday, ample reasons to stay in bed. But Lee Ann Penton-Walker couldn’t sleep.
The Houston Chronicle (https://bit.ly/2jET51t ) reports outside, a crew was starting to clear the overgrown thicket across from her house for a new road, one that would stretch like a runway for nearly 2 miles.
While snarling saws sliced into tall pines, Penton-Walker grabbed a folding chair, a pitcher of Bloody Marys and a 12-pack of Michelob Ultra and headed to the front yard. It was about 7 a.m. She sat there until dark, seething.
“That’s when I knew paradise was lost,” she said of that day in December 2015.
Penton-Walker, who has spent nearly all of her 48 years in this leafy Liberty County enclave of some 600 residents, knew it wouldn’t stay the same forever. But the road was part of something she never expected to see here: sprawling subdivisions that resemble the infamous colonias along the border with Mexico.
The developer, New Caney-based Colony Ridge Land, has carved more than 9,000 lots from woods in and around Plum Grove. In neighborhoods with names like Bella Vista and Montebello, property owners - mostly working-class Latinos - occupy concrete-block houses, battered trailers and shacks of wood and tar paper while pursuing part of the American Dream.
The newcomers speak joyously of Eden. Among them, Carlos and Janet Macedo are constructing a house - one wall and window at a time - on a half-acre they bought for $20,900.
“We want a better life for our kids,” said Janet Macedo, who works as a network technician with her husband. “You don’t have that in an apartment.”
The sudden emergence of the neighborhoods has raised tensions in a small, rural community that hasn’t changed much in generations.
As with a similar bare-bones subdivision in Montgomery County, some longtime residents worry about the quality of development and the increased pressure on public services.
They also reflect the white anxiety that fueled Donald Trump’s political rise. They fret that Plum Grove will become unrecognizable, with too many strangers, too many cars and trucks on narrow country roads, too many children who can’t speak English in the schools.
After the election, someone spray-painted the words “Build That Wall” on a billboard for Terrenos Houston, the sales and marketing arm of Colony Ridge. The sign is across the street from where Penton-Walker lives.
She wants a wall of her own to replace the chain-link fence around the house. And she wants the developer to pay for it.
“As sure as Mexico is going to build that wall for Mr. Trump, they are going to build that wall for me,” Penton-Walker said.
Plum Grove, just off Interstate 69, is located some 40 miles northeast of Houston. The Pentons - like the Arrendells, the Enloes, the Morrows, the Pounceys and the Reeds - are rooted generations-deep in its sandy loam.
A century-old Baptist church stands near the intersection of the two roads that lead in and out of town. There are ranch-style houses, log cabins and double-wide trailers with Confederate flags. But there’s little else here, not even a spot where old-timers can chitchat over coffee.
Residents incorporated Plum Grove in 1968 to avoid becoming part of Houston or other nearby towns.
Since then, the City Council hasn’t levied taxes, provided any services or even bothered with a telephone line or regular hours for the portable building that serves as city hall.
The 1980 census found 455 people living within the city’s 8 square miles. Thirty years later, the population was 636, more or less.
Still, there was an expectation that the fast-moving edge of metropolitan Houston would reach them, too. They had heard rumors of the woodsy landscape becoming “another Kingwood,” the master-planned community with high, handsome homes.
But the expanse of flat, relatively inexpensive land in Plum Grove and unincorporated Liberty County was transformed in another way. In 2011, Colony Ridge began selling half-acre lots with basic electricity, water and sewage hookups for between $20,000 and $30,000 apiece, seeking to entice buyers through advertisements on Spanish-language television and radio.
The company offers financing for as little as $500 down, but the interest rate runs as high as 14 percent - more akin to credit cards than mortgages. Many of the fresh arrivals start with used trailers or tents and then upgrade as their finances improve.
Colony Ridge’s five subdivisions have paved roads and parks with soccer goals and swing sets. But they don’t yet have sidewalks, streetlights or shoulders and curbs along the roadways.
By the end of 2016, the developer had sold nearly 7,200 lots, according to Liberty County Appraisal District records. Only a fraction of the lots have structures.
Housing policy experts define such places as “new colonias” because of the substandard dwellings and inability of many residents to pay for connections to utilities.
A Colony Ridge spokesman, Kurt Johnson, said the projects provide an opportunity for people with no credit or bad credit to own land within commuting distance of big-city jobs. The newcomers threaten Plum Grove’s cozy insularity, he said.
“It’s a stealth issue,” Johnson said. “They say there are too many people on the roads. They say there are too many people in the schools. They don’t say there are too many Hispanic people.”
As more people moved into the subdivisions, longtime Plum Grove residents complained about illegal fires, pooling sewage, trash piles, loud music, heavy traffic and wrecks. They also began criticizing their elected leaders, with unsubstantiated talk about back-room deals and bribes.
“Your mind can go wild thinking about how this happened so quickly,” said Sharla Enloe, who has lived in the town for 47 of her 64 years. “It won’t go away, but I wish it would stop.”
Enloe said she talks nearly every night to her husband, Gerald, about moving.
The house they built here in 1980, on land owned by his family for more than a century, is where they raised two children, played volleyball with neighbors after Sunday services and enjoyed the quiet at night.
A nearly constant stream of cars and trucks now passes by their house along Plum Grove Road, making Enloe afraid to let her grandchildren ride bicycles through town.
“I don’t know where we would go,” she said. “But we can’t live out what we have left in this little community. It’s not a good Grove.”
Not far away is the lot where the Macedo family is building their home. After buying the land, it took four years of saving nearly every dime before they could start construction. That meant they and their four children crammed into a trailer on the property for a while.
The family moved into an unfinished three-bedroom house in June.
Carlos and Janet set aside $800 every other week to make improvements. They recently installed a shower and shingled the roof. The next project is hanging drywall. Until then, a sign, “Happiness is Handmade,” dangles from an exposed stud in the kitchen.
One recent night, Carlos, 44, stepped outside to watch the sun drop below the trees while Janet warmed mole for dinner.
“This is nice,” he said. “At my apartment, I only see cars.”
Their goal is to complete the house within the next year. Janet’s sister and brother-in-law, meanwhile, are living in the trailer while they wait to build nearby.
For nine consecutive nights before Christmas, the Macedos and some neighbors gathered to re-enact Joseph and Mary’s biblical search for lodging. The procession, called a posada, is a communal ritual in rural Mexico that involves prayer, music and food.
The tradition helped to bind the emerging community, and it was one of the reasons why Janet, 33, said she feels comfortable and safe here. While there wasn’t extra money for big gifts, she already has one in mind for her youngest child, who is now 5, for next Christmas.
A bicycle.
For all the promise of the neighborhood, the Macedos can see the problems of rapid growth, too. They worry that nearby schools can’t handle the surging enrollment.
When the academic year began in August, there weren’t enough seats on the bus for everyone attending Cleveland High School. Students swarmed it to make sure they had a ride to campus, some 10 miles from the new subdivisions.
To fix the problem, the school created additional routes and assigned pickup times for students. Janet’s three teenage children get on the bus at 6 a.m. for classes that begin at 7:15 a.m.
“The schools aren’t ready because everything is so new,” she said.
The Cleveland Independent School District, which includes Plum Grove, has grown by some 1,100 students over the past three years, bringing its enrollment to 4,677, an all-time high. Half of the new enrollees are learning English as a second language.
To meet the new demands, the five-campus district has added 14 temporary buildings, purchased six buses and hired 24 teachers.
A few of the new hires can speak Spanish, but the district needs more bilingual teachers. It has sent recruiters to Puerto Rico, arranged for work visas and offered stipends of up to $4,000 as lures.
“We’re really struggling to find them, because they’re in high demand across Texas,” said Darrell Myers, who is in his third year as Cleveland’s superintendent.
The Liberty County Sheriff’s Office also is feeling stretched. Even before the recent population growth, the department was understaffed, with 35 deputies to cover nearly 1,200 square miles.
Capt. Ken DeFoor said the department doesn’t log calls by specific area, but the county began to see an increase after 2012, when deputies responded to 6,576 emergency calls. They received 8,103 calls in 2015 and were on pace through the end of October to repeat that number for 2016.
“Unless someone does something to control development, the sheriff’s office won’t have the manpower or equipment to handle it,” he said.
The department has plans to build a substation near Plum Grove, as does the Cleveland Fire Department. Plum Grove’s volunteer fire department alone had responded to 324 emergency calls last year, up from 147 calls for 2015, officials said.
By at least one estimate, Liberty County will have some 120,000 residents by 2020, up from 76,000 in 2010. The surge has alarmed county leaders, and they have urged state lawmakers to give them the regulatory tools to gain control of the situation.
In Texas, county governments have little, if any, authority to implement zoning and building codes in unincorporated areas. Liberty County responded to the new colonias by increasing the minimum lot size to 1 acre - a move that forces developers who want to sell smaller lots to negotiate with county officials over standards for housing and infrastructure.
With more growth expected because of the planned extension of the Grand Parkway through the remote area, Liberty County Judge Jay Knight told a state Senate committee in May that he was “worried about subdivisions of lesser quality.”
Knight didn’t mention Colony Ridge by name, but Trey Harris, who owns the company with his brother, was sitting in the chamber, well aware that the county leader was talking about his projects.
Harris, a former professional boxer, doesn’t shy away from a fight. After Plum Grove rejected plans for new plats within the city limits in October 2015, he filed a series of lawsuits, including one that accused Penton-Walker of defamation and business disparagement during her brief stint as the town’s mayor.
“Ms. Walker’s untrue statements directly attack Colony Ridge’s business operations, claiming that Colony Ridge is not properly developing the land, not properly complying with development laws, not properly building roads, not properly installing utilities, selling and promoting ghettos and slums, and perpetuating an ’underground railroad’ for illegal aliens,” Harris said in an affidavit. “These statements have all been published to third parties and are extremely damaging to Colony Ridge’s business.”
Penton-Walker told the court that she believed all of her comments were true at the time and that she supported “proper development,” regardless of the race or identity of those buying the lots. She also accused Harris of trying to intimidate her and others for voicing “legitimate concerns.”
State District Judge Mark Morefield dismissed the case in part in November and ordered Harris and Colony Ridge to pay Penton-Walker’s legal fees, which totaled nearly $60,000.
“Everything I said was as a statesman,” she said.
Penton-Walker, who works for a development company, became Plum Grove’s mayor in 2015 in response to the rapid growth. While she was in charge, the council began to adopt ordinances to control development, as well as the city’s first building codes and new rules for noise, signage and food trucks.
She also pushed for the creation of a property tax - 52 cents per $100 of appraised value - to raise revenue for public services, such as police and street maintenance. But the proposal proved unpopular, and she lost her bid for re-election last May.
“If they had given me that tax, I could have fixed this problem,” said Penton-Walker, who is considering running for office again.
Some Liberty County leaders share Penton-Walker’s concerns about the new subdivisions but concede that Harris has followed existing rules.
“My understanding is that the developer has done everything within the law,” said outgoing state Rep. John Otto, a Republican whose district includes Plum Grove. “It seems to me that the law needs to be changed.”
Otto, who didn’t seek re-election in November, said counties should be able to shape growth with “reasonable land-use regulations,” rather than letting growth shape them. Developments like the new Plum Grove subdivisions “define what the land will look like and be for generations,” he said.
Complaints also have come from residents of the new developments. They said the subdivisions lack proper drainage and the roads are too narrow for the volume of cars and trucks using them.
“We thought it would be a quiet development for retirees,” said Maria Pineda, 66, who sells candy, bottled water and other items from the front porch of a small house that she built with her husband. But their son, who is a deputy constable in north Harris County, later told them, “This is no place for you.”
It’s unclear what Plum Grove will do next. There’s a new council after voters rejected Penton-Walker and her allies last year. The city and the county don’t have the money for all the needed road upgrades.
Harris, meanwhile, has suggested that the city remove the subdivisions from its political boundaries so that he can form a municipal management district with the power to impose taxes and fees for additional infrastructure and services. The creation of the district would require legislative approval.
Already, Harris, through the property owners’ associations for the new subdivisions, has hired a bilingual deputy constable to patrol the area 40 hours a week.
Jerry Ferrell, one of the newly elected council members, said Plum Grove will need to decide within the next year or so whether to act like a full-fledged city by collecting taxes and providing services or dissolve. He said he has asked neighbors why the town exists and for what purpose.
“I haven’t got a good answer yet,” said Ferrell, who has lived in Plum Grove for five years.
But Daniel Morrow, 42, a lifelong resident who also was elected to the council in May, said he doesn’t expect many changes in the governance of Plum Grove. Other than road damage, he said, the concerns are overblown.
“There were tents and shacks at first” in the new subdivisions, Morrow said, “but they’re being replaced by houses.”
Critics “can’t see that transformation,” he said, adding that it upsets him that others “only bring up the Hispanic people.”
Penton-Walker, meanwhile, finds herself nostalgic for the Plum Grove of yesteryear.
As a child, she raided gardens for cucumbers and tomatoes and hid in the woods to eat her pickings. She later bought her late grandmother’s house, a single-story structure of gray brick beneath the dense canopy of an old pin oak. She chatted up neighbors walking by.
She and her husband, Rodney, have stopped sitting in their front yard, which faces the long road into one of the new subdivisions. Instead, they built a deck in the back with a view of an overhanging oak, an old pecan tree and pink magnolias.
“I’ve spent a lifetime under these trees,” she said. “They were my grandmother’s trees. Why should I leave?”
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Information from: Houston Chronicle, https://www.houstonchronicle.com
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