A recent report by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research explains how the affordable-housing crisis in Houston is likely to grow worse, fast. Among its points:

• Fewer subsidies for affordable housing = faster gentrification. More than 85% of Harris County’s low-income housing units receive no government subsidies. That means that in a neighborhood where property values are rising fast, most landlords aren’t contractually obligated to stay affordable, and are free to hike rents or replace shabby-but-sturdy buildings with luxe townhomes or highrises. Since Houston has a lower percentage of subsidized housing than other cities, our neighborhoods gentrify faster.

• Subsidies are expiring. Within the next 20 years, the clock will run out on federal housing assistance requirements at nearly 60% of Houston’s subsidized housing – which is to say, on more than 30,000 units. And it seems unlikely that landlords will choose to renew: Many of those units are inside the 610 Loop, in what the report calls “gentrification-prone locations.”

• Wonky solutions exist. Tax abatements, TIRZ set-asides, public-private funds, cooperative ownership by residents… 

Bottom line: The Houston area needs to figure this stuff out fast, before housing is even less affordable.

For a deeper dive: Download the whole report.

🎄 Bah, humbug: The Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association urges Texans to buy their live trees now. Supply-chain problems have made plastic trees harder to come by, driving up demand for the kind that shed needles. Plus, higher shipping costs mean that tree lots are charging higher prices. (KXXV-ABC)

🗺 How Asian voting power will be diluted: Texas’ Asian population has boomed, but new congressional maps, aimed at re-electing Republicans, also dilute Asian-American voting power. Fort Bend County serves as a case study: Asian-American voters have been “cracked and packed,” split among three congressional districts by drawing new lines straight through heavily Asian neighborhoods.  (Texas Tribune) 

⛺️ “Decommissioning” homeless camps: On the appointed day, groups that serve the homeless swoop into an encampment. Housing navigators and case managers set up tables to meet with residents, then a METRO van drives the willing to a converted hotel where they’ll live until they have permanent housing. The unwilling are asked to leave the site, which workers clean, clear and fence off. An influx of federal COVID funds has sped up this process, known as “decommissioning” – and it’s being studied by other cities, including Austin, Dallas and Denver. (Houston Chronicle)

🥭️ Yes, we’re still receiving comments and questions related to our November 8 item on persimmons.

Karen Bernstein writes that her persimmon tree yields tons of fruit, which she usually leaves to be eaten by squirrels and birds. This year, though, black flies ate her persimmons – “big suckers, like Jeff Goldblum-size flies.” What, she asks, is happening?

I called the experts. Carol Burton, director of education at Urban Harvest, says that when persimmons are left on a tree, birds often peck the unripe ones, and the breaks in their skins accelerate ripening. Flies follow.

If you want to eat your tree’s persimmons – or just to keep the flies away – Burton recommends harvesting early and letting the fruits ripen, unpecked, indoors. “The old Japanese tradition,” she says, “is to ripen them in rice.”

🥭️ Tyler Horne, director of farmers’ markets at Urban Harvest, told me that one reason persimmons aren’t more familiar to most Americans is because the trees were once in heavy demand not for their fruit, but for their wood. Expensive golf drivers (“woods”) had heads made of the hard wood from American persimmon trees (D. virginiana). 

 Starting in the 1980s, “metal woods,” such as Callaway’s Big Bertha, made it possible for golfers to drive the ball farther, and persimmon-headed clubs were left to gather dust in garages. Now, though, they’re enjoying a minor comeback – a revival in Europe, and appreciation by the occasional American player who likes their vintage vibe. 

“Consider the resurgence of vinyl records,” Shawn Allen wrote in Sports Illustrated last year. “There are many more efficient and effective ways to listen to music these days – radio, phone, computer – but with vinyl, the audio quality is higher and the experience is more enjoyable.”

CHATTER: REMEMBERING THE BARON  💸💸💸

Our item yesterday about the River Oaks house with the indoor back yard – the former home of Baron Ricky di Portanova and his wife, the Baroness Alyssandra – prodded aviation historian Michael Bludworth’s memory.

“I spent hundreds of hours at the baron’s place on River Oaks,” he writes, “and with them at their place in Acapulco. It’s both over-the-top and sad, in a decadent way. I’m happy I spent that much time with them – they weren’t loathsome – but ya know, welcome to excess! I hate how Houston is known for excess.”