| The Center for Housing and Urban Development (CHUD), a division of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University, will use a COPC New Directions Grant to continue its 9-year outreach to colonias in southern Texas. Colonias are unincorporated, rural communities that dot the U.S. border with Mexico. Most lack water and sewers, contain self-built housing, and are challenged by low literacy rates, low incomes, high unemployment, and a high incidence of illness among their residents. The communities typically have no programs for young people or the elderly.
CHUD received its first COPC grant in 1994, followed by a COPC Institutionalization Grant in 1996. With these grants, and over $12 million in leveraged funds, the center has implemented a Colonias Program, which works to reduce colonia residents' relative isolation from programs and services that could improve their lives. Since 1994, CHUD has worked in 12 colonias to establish Community Resource Centers (CRC) where residents can access health, human services, education, workforce, youth, elderly, and community development programs. It also has established a promotoras corps through which colonia residents provide their neighbors with information about CRC programs and services.
CHUD will use its New Directions grant to work with the isolated colonias of El Cenizo and Rio Bravo near Laredo, Texas. It plans to establish a Field Research and Learning Center in El Cenizo to help residents identify, address, and solve community issues through research and outreach. A micro-enterprise program will encourage residents of both colonias to start and maintain small businesses. CHUD also will study the feasibility of using alternative building materials to make homes more affordable.
Like the other 1,400 Texas colonias, El Cenizo and Rio Bravo are overwhelmingly Hispanic, undereducated, and poor. Median household income in 1996 ($10,366 in El Cenizo and $11,448 in Rio Bravo) was only a third of the State median household income and approximately half the median income in Webb County. Only 24 percent of residents are high school graduates (compared with 72 percent statewide). In 1999, 80 percent of the homes in El Cenizo were categorized as substandard or dilapidated by Webb County, which estimated that it would take $20 million to bring all the houses up to code.
Texas A&M University has marshaled more than $350,000 in matching funds for the New Directions project. Partners include the university's Department of Construction Science, its Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Laredo Community College, the Laredo Development Foundation-Center for Small Business Development, the Laredo Webb Neighborhood Housing Services, the South Texas Workforce Development Board, and Webb County.
|
