[TexasPlaya]

An example about Houston's historically black neighborhood..

Chronicle: How Houston's Third Ward is fighting gentrification

...When a multimillion dollar renovation was finally unveiled at the historic Emancipation Park, neighbors wondered: Will this hasten gentrification? As the University of Houston grew and expanded its student housing footprint into the neighborhood over decades, residents asked: What about us?...

...There have been several interventions meant to curb the tide and create affordability. Federally funded, city-administered down payment assistance programs, coupled with the city's Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority (LARA), took vacant tax delinquent property and sold it cheap to developers who agreed to produce homes at affordable price points. Low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC) are responsible for the Houston Housing Authority's first new development in a decade that opened recently in Independence Heights...

In a state that's often hostile to city-led efforts to create or preserve affordability, those efforts are not insignificant. But more is needed, argue neighborhood advocates. Something that doesn't just provide subsidies for affordable homeownership but that changes the game entirely....


...So as the City of Houston set about creating its own Community Land Trust (CLT) with the aim of making homeownership affordable, Third Ward was among the neighborhoods watching with particular interest. A land trust promised to be different from the city's past affordability programs in several ways, not the least of which was longer term affordability....

A more extreme example...

Texas Monthly: The Battle of the Blue Cat Café
How an anti-gentrification boycott became a proxy war between the radical left and the alt-right.

On a recent Friday afternoon, the Blue Cat Café, in East Austin, hummed pleasantly with activity. Patrons lounged on couches or sat pecking away at their MacBooks as half a dozen cats roamed freely over and around them. A server went from table to table with an iPad, taking orders for whimsically named vegan dishes like Alley Cat Tacos and BBQ Briscat. Apart from the cats and the feline-themed decor, the cafe seemed like just another shabby-chic hipster hangout. Anyone willing to pay a $5 “kitty cover” could come inside, order a coffee, and play with the adoptable cats.

The cozy atmosphere made it easy to forget that the cafe is ground zero for an intense public debate over gentrification, a flash point for long-standing tensions between the majority-Hispanic neighborhood and wealthier, whiter developers. It’s a conflict that has now expanded beyond the neighborhood, becoming yet another skirmish in the national battle between the alt-right and the radical left. All over a cat cafe...