The suburb of Kingwood grew out of an oak forest about 25 miles from downtown Houston, its shaded lawns defying the Texas heat with their greenness.
A planned community with pools, golf and shopping, Kingwood opened in 1971 as an orderly alternative to sprawling Houston, which resolutely refused to use zoning to control its growth.
But last summer, Kingwood residents awoke to what many considered the ultimate suburban nightmare: They found themselves in the city.
Houston, acting under a favorable state law, forcibly annexed Kingwood, gaining authority over its population of 53,000, its utilities and, most importantly, its high-income tax base. The annexation is now the subject of a lawsuit by outraged Kingwood residents.
Houston officials defend the takeover as the nation’s most dramatic instance of a city fighting back against commuters who take refuge in the suburbs.
“A city cannot afford to lose its tax base to surrounding areas where citizens establish communities just outside the city lines,” Houston Mayor Bob Lanier said in an interview. “They get to enjoy the amenities of the city but don’t contribute financially. It’s wrong.
“Many people believe the loss of the tax base and decay of the inner city is the biggest problem facing this country,” Lanier added. “I feel that way, too.”
Houston is one of many big cities suffering from suburban flight. But it is unusual for cities to have the power to lay claim to outlying communities.
Big, rolling Texas, however, has been merely chopped into counties, with cities empowered to annex the “extra territorial jurisdiction areas” just outside their borders.
Houston has carried out 22 annexations over the last five years, and Kingwood is by far the most extensive. Many of the annexed areas include large shopping malls. Much of Houston’s revenue comes from sales taxes.
Annexing the areas around the malls has been a boon to Houston’s coffers. While the Houston metro area and Boston metro area each spend about the same amount per capita, Houston draws $10,947 per person in sales, while Boston pulls in only $7,273, according to federal figures.
But many people in the suburbs around Houston, spurred by the Kingwood annexation, are crying foul.
“This boils down to very fundamental rights of self-determination and consent of the governed,” said state Sen. Michael Galloway, who led the fight against Kingwood’s annexation in the Texas Legislature. The Senate, with a majority of House members as co-sponsors, approved the bill, but it was bottled up in the House Calendars Committee by a chairman allied with Lanier.
“I believe the very purpose of a municipality is to provide more services than you get at the county level,” Galloway said. “So why do you need a bigger municipality to come in when you’re already getting the services you need? That’s just bigger government.”
Kingwood residents say they are paying, on average, an extra $600 per family since annexation. Houston’s addition of 1 percent in sales tax, higher water bills, and steeper fees for cable television service more than offset a slight decline in property taxes, the residents say.
But Houston officials say that Kingwood residents get the protection of a larger police force and a fire department staffed by professionals, as opposed to the mostly volunteer crew that used to fight blazes there.
Lanier acknowledged that many, though not all, Kingwood residents are paying more, but he insisted it is their fair share: Before annexation, he argued, commuters from Kingwood would clog Houston’s roads and enjoy the protection of Houston’s police and fire departments without paying a nickel.
Moreover, he said, Kingwood’s insistence on a separate government deprived Houston of economies of scale. For instance, Houston invested $2 billion to collect and purify surface water. Kingwood saved money by drawing its water from wells.
The lawsuit by Kingwood residents, which contends that annexation deprives them of voting rights, due process, and equal protection under the law, is likely to go to trial this fall.
Outside the courtroom, however, both sides have invoked touchy issues of wealth and class.
New homes in Kingwood cost from $70,000 to $1 million. Kingwood is 92 percent white. Houston, whose population was about 1.8 million before the annexation, is 62 percent black and Hispanic.
“They make a standard class-envy type of argument,” said John Harris, president of the Kingwood Annexation Strategy Committee, the residents’ group opposing linkage to Houston. “They say Houston’s a beaten-down poor place where incomes are low, and the people in the suburbs have this obligation to help them. But that ignores the fact that Houston has an enormous industrial tax base.”
Houston’s political leaders, for their part, made it clear they have little sympathy for affluent Kingwood residents campaigning for their civil rights.
When hundreds of Kingwood homeowners showed up at the state capitol in Austin singing an abbreviated version of “We Shall Overcome,” state Rep. Harold Dutton of Houston, who is black, quipped, “I’ve never seen a bunch of white people singing `We Shall Overcome.’ Before they come down here and waste our time, they should at least know the words.”
Showing the complexity of the issue, however, another view in the minority community holds that Houston could elect its first black mayor this year, but the 35,000 white voters from Kingwood could tip the balance away from a minority candidate.
City Councilor Jew Don Boney, who is black, voted against the annexation, contending the move would strengthen the white power structure.
