Sixth ward residents upload to YouTube

Residents of Houston's sixth ward, which was founded around 1877 and is the largest collection of victorian homes in the region (apart from Galveston), are taking their words of pro-preservation to ever-popular YouTube.com. Their messages relate the importance of the neighborhood in Houston and how the architectural significance is diminishing significantly. According to the Chronicle:

Posting the videos was an act of "creative desperation" after activists waited almost a year for city officials to help them create land-use regulations through the neighborhood's Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, or TIRZ, said Larissa Lindsay, president of the Old Sixth Ward Neighborhood Association.

"We keep having hurdles to jump, yet even when we met them, it was never enough," Lindsay wrote in an e-mail. "I thought that having our history and voices on the Internet was one more way of talking about our neighborhood, along with documenting our history."

The urgency for preservation is not met with much support from developers and real estate folks such as local realtor and head of the Sixth Ward Property Owners Association Janice Jamail-Garvis. The SWPO states that "it supports preservation but fears that restrictions on development would cause builders to shun the neighborhood and allow blight to creep in." The sixth ward, however, has had its fair share of blight which continues with the construction of new and larger homes. Proposed land use ordinances have some up in arms because they would technically be zoning. Old Sixth Ward is also the city's thirteenth Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, where only one other zone, St. George Place, has enacted zoning.

Watch the YouTube videos:

• Old Sixth Ward Volume 1


• Volume 2


• Volume 3


• Volume 4

Photo: Flickr user WesternGulf