Link Valley, Houston
Originally athletes, medical students,[1] airline employees, local people,[2] and young professionals lived there.
[2] As Greater Houston developed, newer and more luxurious apartment complexes further away from the city core opened.
[9] The development is 2 miles (3.2 km) west of the Reliant Astrodome and is about a 10-minute driving distance to Downtown Houston.
[4] The apartments had brick façades, colonial style pillars, hardwood floors, and balconies made of wrought iron.
[4] In the late 1980s, when Link Valley became a center for drug dealing, many of the apartments had no appliances, plumbing, and wiring.
[11] Gregory Curtis of Texas Monthly said that, after the police raid in 1989, the names of the apartments sounded like "cynical jokes".
"[4] Malcolm K. Sparrow, an author of Beyond 911: A New Era For Policing, said that Link Valley had "more in common with Beirut and Medellín than with the calm, landscaped residential neighborhoods that surround it.
[2] Sergeant J. W. Collins of the Houston Police Department Southwest Patrol Division said that the factor that aggravated the trade was the fact that Link Valley was in close proximity to the 610 Loop.
After the drug purchase, the customer would travel to the 610 Loop feeder roads via a side street, and quickly leave Link Valley.
Collins added that, while many White casual drug consumers would feel nervous entering a black neighborhood, where they would more easily stand out and attract attention of law enforcement and violent criminals, in Link Valley they could easily enter and leave the community, so they felt more confident in buying drugs there.
Police responding to reports of gunshots, drug deals and dead bodies entered Death Valley with guns drawn.
"[1] From January 1, 1988 until mid-December 1988, the Houston Police Department received 825 emergency calls, made hundreds of narcotic-related arrests.
[16] Members of civic clubs traced the owners of the apartments and demanded that they begin expelling the drug trade, or else they would face lawsuits.
[19] Residents of some neighborhoods north of the South Loop discussed proposals to raise money to buy and tear down apartment complexes.
[3] Sergeant J. W. Collins decided that denying the drug dealers usage of abandoned buildings, which were violating city codes and were not safe for human occupancy, would cause the criminal element to leave, so he proposed having them demolished.
The police department decided that it needed to scare away the customers and to remove the physical deterioration that housed the drug dealers.
[18] The Braeswood Place, Knollwood Village, Linkwood, Townhouse Manor, Westridge, Westwood, Willow Meadows, Woodshire and Woodside civic clubs all promoted the crackdown.
On January 28 of that year, 400 volunteers from surrounding subdivisions picked up trash and cut down weeds that had grown waist-high.
A trained crew wearing rubber clovers used eighteen dumpsters and two front loaders to clear the debris.
[4] The citizens cleared 250 cubic yards (190 m3) of trash, enough to fill ten semi-trailer sized garbage dumpsters.
In all of the surrounding neighborhoods, calls for "Part I" crimes, such as arson, assault, automobile theft, burglary, larceny, and murder had decreased.
[24] Collins, the head of the Beechnut Police Station's Tactical Response Team, stated that according to an HPD study of the crime statistics comparing those of January to May 1989 to January to May 1988, after the Link Valley complexes closed, Class 1 and Class 2 crime decreased in Westridge.
[24] In 1991 Dean E. Murphy of the Los Angeles Times said that "much of the area is still run down, but residents and police remain upbeat; they believe their partnership is working.
"[10] During that year Don Graff, the co-chairperson of the association, said that rampant drug crime had not occurred in the community since the cleanup.
[29] Any student zoned to Pershing may apply to Pin Oak Middle School's (of the city of Bellaire) regular program.
