THE OTHER
AMERICANS
tensions and tempers run high
in the queue. Heated words and
threats have been exchanged, he
says, and guns have been drawn. He
also notes that the water, a third of
which comes from an aquifer underfoot, with the rest being trucked
in from Laredo, is provided by the
county at a substantial loss. The
coin box generates about $30,000
a year, he says. The cost to pump
and truck water there, and otherwise maintain the facility, is more
than 10 times that.
Underserviced communities like
this are found all along the U.S.Mexico border, from New Mexico
and Arizona to California, but the
largest share of them is in Texas.
Some 400,000 Texans call these
colonias home. The vast majority—
including 85 percent of colonias
residents under 18—are American
citizens born in the United States.
Taking advantage of lax authority on unincorporated county land,
developers in the 1950s began creating ad hoc subdivisions outside
of city boundaries, often in agriculturally fallow or dangerously floodprone areas. “They divided the land
into small lots,” the Secretary of
State’s website explains, “put in
little or no infrastructure, then sold
them to low-income individuals
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
seeking affordable housing.”
What the site doesn’t say, poverty advocates argue, is that demand is and has long been high
among low-income buyers in part
due to a lack of affordable housing
inside border cities. And while the
Texas legislature has passed numerous zoning laws, beginning in
the 1990s, to curb the proliferation
of the colonias, the lack of housing
alternatives remains a problem.
Often enough, colonias residents
informally subdivide their own
small plots to make room for family and other new neighbors, who
plop down low-budget trailers or
begin stacking cinder blocks in
pursuit of a home.
Tangled networks of orange extension cords sometimes crisscross
these complexes, linking those who
don’t have power to those who do.
Just how all of these pockets
of need—or those in the Delta, or
those on tribal lands—can ultimately be turned around is a matter of great debate. Karl Stauber
believes that part of the problem is
that per capita government spending has traditionally favored metropolitan areas over rural areas.
Given the billions of dollars in
agricultural subsidies that arise
every five or so years from the Farm
Bill, that might seem a flawed assumption, but there’s some evidence to support it, including a