Waco leaders plan to inject $7 million into development projects along Elm Avenue with the aim of catalyzing a renaissance in the historically Black business district.
Whether that revival can benefit existing residents of East Waco remains a matter of debate.
The Waco City Council last week approved $6 million in tax district funds for East Village, a $37 million mixed-use development on city land at Taylor and Cherry Streets with 158 housing units, plus retail and public amenities.
Another $1 million in incentives would support a smaller condominium development nearby on Elm Avenue.
Council Member Andrea Barefield, who represents the area, said the housing and mixed-use complexes would bring people and economic vitality back to the heart of East Waco.
“Being from here, I want to see businesses thriving up and down Elm Avenue,” she said. “That’s what I want to see for my district.”
The larger East Village development would get incentives on the condition that 20% of its housing units remain “affordable” for a decade.
Despite those conditions, the project is resurfacing concerns about displacement in the North East Riverside neighborhood. Nearly 40% of its residents live in poverty, almost double the rate of Waco at large, according to 2024 census estimates. “Everything that’s glitter isn’t gold,” said neighborhood association president Jeanette Bell.
During last week’s council meeting, she asked city leaders to provide a clear definition of affordability and take steps to protect existing residents from displacement.
“We want development without displacement,” she said in a follow-up interview. “We don’t want our neighbors removed to another neighborhood or out on the outskirts somewhere. We want them to stay here.”
The same anxieties bubbled up in 2018 community meetings before the city’s Elm Avenue streetscape project, and again in 2022 during the city’s first attempt to realize a mixed-use redevelopment on the same city-owned properties.
What is affordable?
Manny Pereiras, East Village’s lead architect, surveyed the five-acre project site and saw a landscape of “missing teeth.”
“These are vacant properties we’re seeking to develop,” he told the council last week. “We’re not displacing anybody; we’re not tearing anything down.”
Placemaker Pro, the project’s developer, saw the vacant lots as an opportunity to meet the city’s needs for all housing types, as identified in the city’s 2022 housing study.
“We’re in a housing crisis,” Pereiras said.
East Village’s 158 housing units would include condominiums, duplexes, small single-family homes and studio apartments built over two phases, the first scheduled for early next year. The city incentives include $2 million to ensure that 20% of those units are affordable.
But it’s not clear that the units would be affordable for many in the surrounding neighborhood. The median income is $34,300 for a family of four in North East Riverside, which extends from East Waco Drive to Business 77.
The city’s development agreement uses the federal definition of area median income, which is $90,300, for a three-county area. Riverside’s poverty is lost in the averages.
Bell said definitions matter.
“You can’t measure this the same way you do in Waco because we’re lower income,” Bell said. “They’re going to have to measure this by neighborhood income.” Nearly 60% of residents in Riverside are rent burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent.
The percentage is 49% for Waco and 47% for McLennan County. Galen Price, Waco housing and community development director, said the city is still discussing affordability with the developer.
He said Waco Housing Authority may be able to offer assistance to those who cannot afford East Village’s affordable units. Another concern for Bell is the indirect effect of development on home prices, which can lead to higher household appraisals and drive up property taxes.
That risk appears theoretical for now. There is no obvious upward trend in Riverside’s home sale prices over the last five years despite a steady stream of home remodels and Elm Avenue improvements, according to Redfin real estate data.
Riverside will need new residents for Elm Avenue to flourish, including those with disposable income to shop. From 2013 to 2022, every neighborhood west of Interstate 35 through downtown Waco lost population, according to Prosper Waco, a city-backed nonprofit.
Council Member Barefield said East Waco and other parts of the city need mixed-use, mixed-income developments to thrive.
“I have no interest in warehousing poverty,” Barefield said.
“It’s an opportunity to grow our tax base, stimulate our job market and restore an opportunity to live, work and play in and around East Waco,” she said.
More than housing
The challenges facing the Elm Avenue corridor are larger than housing.
Elm Avenue was the gateway to Waco and a hub of commercial activity flanked by neighborhoods and Paul Quinn College, a historically Black school.
Through the mid 20th-century, the thoroughfare’s importance was sidelined by the construction of Highway 77, then Waco Drive and finally I-35 in 1972.
White flight from East Waco in the school desegregation era further crimped business demand. Paul Quinn College, which Barefield described as an anchor of Waco’s Black middle class, departed for Dallas in 1990.
Businesses were left marooned in old buildings on a vestigial road. A few hung on, but most buildings were vacated or razed.
In this century, public and private investment has gradually returned, including Rapoport Academy and the Waco Multipurpose Community Center at the old Quinn campus, a new fire station, East Waco Library upgrades, a bank, a brewery, hotels and several restaurants. Since 2020, the city has spent more than $20 million replacing water, sewer, street and sidewalk infrastructure and Bridge Street Plaza.
The newest proposed development would build on that previous work.
And by taking the corridor’s revival seriously, Placemaker Pro has won a coalition of supporters.
The developer plans to build an 8,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza linking Cherry Street to Elm Avenue in its first phase. Rent-subsidized retail spaces will flank each side of the promenade, allowing business owners to cut their teeth before graduating into one of Elm Avenue’s empty storefronts.
“There is such a high difficulty to open your business,” Pereiras, the lead architect, told Waco council members. “These businesses will rotate and keep feeding the avenue to enhance the community.”
An outdoor micro-cinema is planned for the far end of the plaza as well. “We wanted to create a new spot, a place where people can gather,” Pereiras said. “We call that the heart of our project.”
Steven Mann, the development firm’s partner, has built houses in East Waco and pitched a proposal for the city’s planned ballpark district in downtown Waco.
Rachel Pate, vice president at the Cen-Tex African American Chamber of Commerce, has been a critic of the city’s approach to redevelopment in the past. She said this project is different. In January, Pate sat in on the city’s interviews with prospective developers as they competed for a contract and outlined their vision for the corridor.
“What stood out about their proposal was that they were offering different options and also mixed-use development, but also something that would bring in the existing residents,” Pate said.
She said Placemaker built consensus with the African American chamber, spoke with residents and partnered with Cultural Arts of Waco, an East Waco-based nonprofit, to guide neighborhood programming in the development.
“It wasn’t just the development, it was the approach of bringing community into it as much as possible,” Pate said.
Bell claims nobody affiliated with the development has ever spoken with the North East Riverside Neighborhood Association. City officials said there will be future opportunities for public input.
“I embrace change”
It’s unlikely anyone in the neighborhood will feel the impact of the development more than Aniceto Charles Jr. His Taylor Street restaurant, Tru Jamaica, will be enveloped by road, utility and construction work on three of its four sides.
Charles welcomes the project. Right now, the city-owned lots are only activated by the occasional resident trudging through the wild grass.
“If something’s been sitting for so long and it’s nothing, I think it’s better to have something than nothing,” Charles said.
He’s looking forward to sidewalks, safer streets and sharing the street with new businesses.
“More neighbors means more customers. I’m happy to see families have places to live, some affordable, even though I think it’s only for 10 years,” Charles said.
His one request is that disruptions to utilities, for example, are communicated beforehand.
Miles Adanandus offered his thoughts last week as he tamed Dennis Hall’s mustache at the Jockey Club, a barbershop on Elm Avenue with more than a century of ups and downs.
The shop’s original location on the downtown Square survived the 1953 tornado but not the city’s Urban Renewal plan that followed it.
“I embrace change,” Adanandus said. “I’ve been in East Waco for 55 years. … I welcome it all.”
Most of that change manifested as disappearance, such as the departure of grocery stores and pharmacies from the neighborhood, he said. The last 10 years brought “change for the better.”
Hall and Adanandus appreciated the improvements to the Elm Avenue streetscape and the TFNB bank branch. It became East Waco’s first new bank in more than a century when it opened in 2020.
The concept of retail incubators at East Village excited them too.
“That sounds like an incredible way to get things going again. Help the community build up,” Hall said from the barber chair. Both hoped it was just the beginning.
