Live in Rice Military

Rice Military takes its name from two things that were here first: the Rice family's farmland and Camp Logan, the army camp whose construction began just outside the city on 24 July 1917. Its main gate stood where the roundabout at Washington Avenue and Westcott Street is now, and after the war the Hogg brothers bought the grounds and turned more than 1,000 acres over to the City as Memorial Park. Memorial Elementary opened at the camp's edge in 1926, replacing a school that had met in one of its Red Cross buildings. This guide takes the neighborhood as the Rice Military Civic Club's area on the City's civic club map: about 290 acres between Washington Avenue and Memorial Drive, from Westcott Street to Shepherd Drive. The club filed that line and the City does not say it checks it.

Almost nothing on the public record limits what a lot here can become. Houston has no zoning, and none of the tools the City does offer reaches inside this line: no historic district, no landmark, no special minimum lot size block and no special minimum building line. What applies is Chapter 42, the subdivision ordinance, which since 1998 has let a lot inside the 610 Loop be as small as 3,500 square feet by right and let a subdivision average 1,400 square feet with open space or under performance standards; before that, a townhouse needed 2,500. The census shows what followed. The blocks inside the line held 2,400 homes in 2010 and 3,868 in 2020, and residents went from 4,093 to 6,144. A 2019 newspaper column by a local agent described three- and four-story townhouses replacing the bungalows and cited the Houston Association of Realtors for a median build year of 2000. This guide could not open the civic club's own site and does not know whether recorded deed restrictions survive on any of its blocks, so the lot's title is where to find out.

The sources disagree on the camp and on the edge. Houston ISD says more than 25,000 soldiers lived in tents on the grounds between 1917 and 1919; the Memorial Park Conservancy says 70,000 trained there. The Handbook of Texas records that on 23 August 1917 trouble between local police and Black soldiers quartered at the camp ended in the Houston riot; in November 2023 the Army set aside the convictions of 110 of those soldiers, 19 of whom had been executed. The civic club's map puts the southern line on Memorial Drive, while the column puts it on Buffalo Bayou, just south across the road. And the Rice family behind the name is attested here only by that column; this guide found no primary source for it.

A young, adult neighborhood with owners in half the homes. In 2020 owners lived in 1,781 of the 3,298 occupied homes, 54%, 570 homes stood empty and only 667 residents, 11%, were under 18. No price index follows the club's line. Zillow's figure for ZIP code 77007, which covers all of it and holds 42,908 people, was $492,785 in August 2026, down 3.9% on the year; the Greater Houston MLS median, a regional figure, was $330,000. On the 2025 rates a homestead at Zillow's figure owes the eight taxing units about $7,163 a year and the same house without the exemption about $10,473; the arithmetic is on the Houston page. No utility district or management district overlaps the area, so the eight units are the whole bill.

Buffalo Bayou is on the southern edge, and the map is small. FEMA's effective map puts 2.7% of the area in the 1% annual chance zone and 1.7% in the 0.2% zone, along the Memorial Drive side above the bayou that drains it, and none of the 2020 residents lived on a block inside either. The Flood Control District warns that streets flood outside the mapped floodplain when rain overwhelms the drainage, as they did in Hurricane Harvey in 2017. There is no rail: the nearest METRORail stop, McGowen on the Red Line, is 4.7 km away in a straight line. Route 85 runs along Washington Avenue, Route 20 along Memorial Drive and Route 27 up Shepherd.