Alief, Kingwood and Clear Lake
Three places Houston annexed a long way from downtown, each in a school district of its own: Alief in the southwest, Kingwood in the north and Clear Lake beside NASA's Johnson Space Center.
Photograph: Downtown from Buffalo Bayou Park · Michael Barera · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source.jpg){kind=link}
Alief was platted as a farm town in 1895 and named for its first postmistress, Alief Ozella Magee; its school district dates from 1911, Houston began annexing it in 1977 and took in more pieces through the 1980s, and part of the community is still unincorporated. Clear Lake City was opened in 1963 by Friendswood Development, a company Humble Oil and Del E. Webb formed to build on the former West ranch beside the Manned Spacecraft Center, and Houston annexed it in 1977 over a campaign by its residents to stop it. Kingwood, begun in 1971 by Friendswood Development and King Ranch on 14,000 wooded acres beside the East Fork of the San Jacinto River, was annexed at 11:59 on the night of 31 December 1996 after two years of opposition, and the fight led the Legislature to change the state's annexation law in 1999. 3 guides are listed below.
None of the three is a Harris County and Houston ISD address, which is what the arithmetic on this site's calculators assumes. Alief is in Alief ISD, with a corner across the line in Fort Bend County. Kingwood is in Humble ISD, and its northern sections are in Montgomery County, with that county's own appraisal district and rates, and in New Caney ISD. Clear Lake is in Clear Creek ISD, and much of it also pays a property tax to the Clear Lake City Water Authority, which has supplied its water, sewer and drainage since 1963. So the bill for a house out here is worth working out from the appraisal district's list of the units that tax it rather than from a city rate, and a house inside a municipal utility district pays that district's tax as well.
3 communities, guide by guide
Alief
Subdivisions and apartment complexes west of the Beltway in the southwest, in their own school district, Alief ISD, rather than Houston ISD, with a corner across the line in Fort Bend County.
- 104,800
- Residents of the 590 census blocks inside the City's Alief super neighborhood, on about 9,060 acres, 2,103 of them in Fort Bend County, against 102,148 on the same ground in 2010, U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 census
- 43%
- Share of the 33,464 occupied homes on those blocks lived in by their owners: 14,284 owned and 19,180 rented, with 2,736 of the 36,200 homes vacant, U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 census
Clear Lake
The suburb built around NASA's Johnson Space Center as Clear Lake City from the 1960s and annexed by Houston in 1977, in Clear Creek ISD, with a water authority's tax on top of the City's across much of it.
- 59,677
- Residents of the 500 census blocks inside the City's Clear Lake super neighborhood, against 56,360 on the same ground in 2010, U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 census
- 59%
- Share of the 24,412 occupied homes on those blocks lived in by their owners; 10,093 were rented and 1,658 more stood vacant, U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 census
Kingwood
The wooded master-planned community about 23 miles northeast of City Hall that Houston annexed over its residents' objections in 1996, in Humble ISD, with its northern sections in Montgomery County.
- 65,045
- Residents of the 642 census blocks inside the City's Kingwood Area super neighborhood, 59,174 in Harris County and 5,871 in Montgomery County, against 59,669 on the same ground in 2010, U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 census
- 70%
- Share of the 24,392 occupied homes on those blocks lived in by their owners; 7,268 were rented and 2,093 more stood vacant, U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 census
Photographs: Alief ISD HQ by WhisperToMe, CC0, Wikimedia Commons.
