Houston Housing Authority CEO David Northern is leading a walking tour of the construction site at 800 Middle Street. He speaks bluntly, his points as polished as the black dress shoes he is wearing to tromp through the worksite. 

Looking westward from the property where the housing authority’s newest development, a 398-unit apartment complex called The Pointe At Bayou Bend, is inching upward, Northern can see a swath of high-end townhomes that have been erected in recent years. It’s a sea of three-and four-story stucco, but to Northern it looks likes “sinister forces” hellbent against his project. 

One of those townhomes belongs to Tony Padua, a longtime real estate investor, who lives with his family in a four-bedroom-four-and-a-half bath home a couple blocks west of 800 Middle. Padua’s townhome was appraised earlier this year at $810,000 by the Harris Central Appraisal District. 

Padua, who moved to the neighborhood in 2017, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the housing authority’s efforts to construct a massive affordable-housing complex close to a problematic 5-acre parcel of land currently under investigation by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. 

In recent weeks, concerns about environmental contamination and the Houston Housing Authority’s handling of the project have picked up steam, prompting Houston Mayor John Whitmire to request the housing authority halt the planned August move-in date until the TCEQ’s concerns – which include four open violations – have been fully rectified. 

Padua, for years, has been blowing the whistle on the environmental issues at the site, which include the exposure of toxic ash dumped on the parcel between his home and the housing authority’s apartment complex, when the city’s municipal trash incinerator ran nearby in the early 20th century. He has emailed videos to state regulators of construction workers allegedly handling uncovered ash, and has hired an environmental lawyer to investigate the property. 

Padua also owns land on nearby Jensen Street, along with longtime friend and fellow developer Alan Atkinson, another vocal opponent of the affordable housing complex. Housing authority leaders cite Padua and Atkinson’s Jensen Street land, which has the potential to be sold for eight-figure deals, as proof the pair has a significant financial interest in preventing the construction of low-income housing, an action developers often contend deflates nearby property values.

Padua calls that a mischaracterization, insisting his concerns center around the health and safety of housing authority residents who could potentially be harmed by living near the contaminated ash. Though in an interview, he brushed off any safety hazards the “toxic soil” could present to his family, which includes young children. 

“I have an almost 3-year-old and a 4-year-old, and I’ve seen them with dirt in their mouth,” Padua says. That dirt, he notes, was in front of his house, where he says there are no environmental concerns. 

“If right next to my house, I had all this contamination that could potentially go in my house, and my kids could pick it up and put it in their mouth, like they did, I would be very concerned,” he says “And then you multiply that by 400 families. That’s, to me, that’s pretty alarming.”

Padua’s home sits about 500 feet from a hotly contested 5.1-acre tract of land at the center of four violations alleged by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that have delayed the housing authority’s project by more than two years.

In an August 2023 email to elected officials, including then-Mayor Sylvester Turner, and the late U.S. Rep Sheila Jackson Lee, Northern referred to Padua and Atkinson as “sinister forces at play, attempting to exploit vulnerable populations for personal gain.”

In 2019, Atkinson sued the city, the housing authority and Turner to try to force the city to disclose which properties it was purchasing for the construction of the complex. The judge granted a temporary restraining order. In 2020, Atkinson unsuccessfully sued again; a judge decided Atkinson lacked standing to bring the legal action. 

More recently, Atkinson has become a mainstay at housing authority board meetings, where he often speaks out against the project during the meetings’ public comment portion. The pair also are among a group of 800 Middle neighbors who have helped fund a media campaign by former investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino, highlighting issues at the property. 

Atkinson has been involved with East End real estate since the 1990s. At one point, he even owned some of the contentious, contaminated property, before selling the land to another developer.

“I had this vision: Bayou frontage should be something higher quality – bigger footprint developers,” Atkinson says.

He wasn’t concerned then, he says, about the property’s future; the developer to whom he sold the land “was going to do whatever they wanted to do with the property and it’s not my position to say, ‘You should do this and you should do this’ with it.” 

Now, he argues, the stakes have changed. 

“To put 500 kids — 400 families — in Phase 1, where the kids will be roaming around all day, they’re going to be tracking the dirt,” he says. “All the environmentalists will say, they’re going to be tracking through lead, it gets on the bottom of their feet, and they’ll track it into the house.” 

Northern doesn’t buy it. In a June interview he blamed the increased scrutiny on the project at 800 Middle, in large part, on the noise Padua and Atkinson have created. And that noise, he said, is classic NIMBYism a.k.a. “Not In My Backyard.”

“Those developers over there, they don’t want us to be there. They’re developing high-end property.” 

Others, like District F Councilmember Tiffany Thomas, who chairs the council’s housing and affordability committee, also cast doubt on the true spirit of the developers’ dissension. Though the project is not in her district, she notes the lack of outcry over possible contamination at new, half-million-dollar homes going up equally close to the former ash dump. 

“People don’t want to be labeled ‘I don’t want those people in my neighborhood’,” Thomas says. “What it’s sounding like now is, the streets, the traffic, there are no grocery stores. So, then why are you spending $600,000 to live in a neighborhood with no grocery store?” 

Atkinson and Padua — who insist their concerns are not NIMBY-driven — also have expressed concern that the influx of residents will increase neighborhood traffic and crime.

In a March 2023 email to the office of then-City Councilmember Karla Cisneros, who represented the 800 Middle area, Padua wrote, “The Housing Authority knows that their properties are magnets for crime and are still forcing about 800 low income families into one megaproject.” 

After three decades working in public housing, Northern says he is no stranger to this kind of rhetoric.

“People don’t come out and say, ‘We don’t want you in our backyard.’ They say, ‘We want affordable housing, but not right here,’” Northern says. “They say, ‘It’ll mess up traffic,’ … or  ‘It’s going to increase police or ambulance activity.’ And those are the keywords.”

To Thomas, “two things are true at once,” referring to concerns about the environment and the protests. Houston, she says, needs to be more environmentally responsible and the site needs to be cleaned before residents move in. That standard, though, must apply to everyone, she says. 

“Why aren’t the same questions (about the contamination) being extended to developers two blocks away,” Thomas asks. “But when it comes to those making 60 percent AMI, a family of four on $60,000, when it comes to them, when it comes to a single mother, when it comes to anything around a voucher, then they’re skeptical.” 

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