Neighbors in historic Carver Crest say car lots and junkers are swallowing their community and their health, and they want Houston to act.

HOUSTON — What used to be a tight-knit, historically Black neighborhood in west Houston now looks more like a maze of car lots than a residential community. Neighbors in Carver Crest say mechanic shops, used car dealers, and junkyards have taken over their streets, and they’re running out of time — and houses — to save what’s left.

These blocks were once lined with family homes, front porches, and visible pride. Today, they’re lined with cars, many of them junked and undriveable, squeezed into every spare patch of pavement and grass. Longtime resident Catherine Felder, whose family has lived in Carver Crest since the 1940s, says the “for sale” and “under repair” rows feel endless: “It is not that many car dealerships in the world. It is not that many cars you have to be fascinated with where it’s gotta be row after row after row, lot after lot after lot the same thing.”


‘Wall to wall, back to back’

Felder describes what’s happening in blunt terms: “We’re having a lot of problems out here with these car dealerships and junk yards and wrecking yards where they bringing in the junk cars and stuff and then putting them in between our homes. And they wall to wall, back to back. Every little space they can take up.”

Where there were once neighbors, there are now bumpers and tow trucks. Cars line both sides of several streets, sometimes blocking the road. What’s left of the original community is small — District F Council Member Tiffany Thomas says only about 150 homes remain, and Felder’s house is now flanked by auto shops on multiple sides.


‘It kills us. We slowly die out.’

For Felder, the transformation is more than an eyesore; it’s a slow erasure. “What does that do to a community when you decimate like that, and you change the makeup of it so much?” she asks. “It kills people. It kills us. We slowly die out.”

Carver Crest’s residents are largely older, a vulnerable senior population now living nose-to-tailpipe with the auto businesses that grew up around them. Felder worries about more than just property values and traffic. She’s thinking about the air: “Think about what we’re taking into our system.”


A small win, but no long-term fix

Despite feeling outnumbered by car lots, neighbors are not going quietly. Felder has been tracking the changes and her fight against them since 2013, documenting new businesses and pushing back wherever she can. Recently, residents and Thomas notched a win: they mobilized in September to stop the replatting of residential land into commercial space for yet another mechanic shop.

Thomas says she’s “really grateful to the planning commission, who listened and heard the residents. They overturn that item right there in the meeting.” But she’s clear that one blocked project won’t fix a decade of creep. She calls community mobilization “key” right now, especially as older deed restrictions expire and Houston’s famously loose land-use rules leave neighborhoods like Carver Crest exposed.


When a $500 fine becomes just a fee

Houston’s lack of traditional zoning has long been both a badge and a headache. In Carver Crest, neighbors say it’s the reason their streets can turn into de facto industrial corridors with little warning. Thomas says city ordinances need to be updated and fines increased if officials want to curb the car chaos.

Currently, she says the $500 fine for violations tied to these businesses is small enough that some operators treat it as just another cost of doing business rather than a deterrent. Her greatest fear?

“When it is all said and done, and I look back 10 years from now, the remaining 150 homes of Carver Crest will be gone,” she said.

For residents like Felder, the fight is about more than cars and code enforcement. It’s about whether a historically Black neighborhood that’s weathered generations of change will be allowed to stay a neighborhood at all — or be paved over, lot by lot, in the name of someone else’s bottom line.

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