Live in Second Ward

The Second Ward is one of the four wards the 1840 charter drew, running east from Main Street and Congress Avenue along Buffalo Bayou. German immigrants made it their hub in the nineteenth century, and by the 1920s Mexican families were the majority; Our Lady of Guadalupe, Houston's first Mexican American Catholic church, held its first mass here in 1912. This guide covers the City's Second Ward super neighborhood, about 1,848 acres from Interstate 69 east past Lockwood Drive to the railroad beside Terminal Street, with Buffalo Bayou on the north and the tracks below Harrisburg Boulevard on the south. It is larger than the older neighborhood Wikipedia describes, which stops at Lockwood, and almost all of it lies inside the East End District, a management district that the appraisal district lists as a taxing unit.

Fewer people, more homes. The 2020 census counted 11,382 residents on the super neighborhood's blocks, against 13,471 on the same ground in 2010, while the number of homes rose from 5,120 to 5,394. The first townhouses in the ward's history went up in the 2000s. Owners lived in 41% of the 4,762 occupied homes, and 894 of those owners had no mortgage at all, which is what long tenure looks like. The other 2,803 homes were rented.

No historic district, and Houston has no zoning. None of the City's 23 historic districts touches the ward, so nothing requires a certificate of appropriateness before a bungalow comes down. What governs a lot is the deed restrictions recorded on it, which the City Attorney can enforce where they exist, and the City's Chapter 42 rules on how land is subdivided and where buildings sit. The City lists two civic clubs here and says nothing about which blocks carry restrictions, and this guide could not find out either. The honest assumption is that a narrow townhouse can go up beside any house here unless the deed on that block says otherwise.

The two ZIP codes disagree by a wide margin. The ward's residents split almost evenly between ZIP codes 77011 and 77003. Zillow put the typical home in 77011, which holds the reference point, at $188,598 in August 2026, down 6.5% on the year; in 77003, which also takes in EaDo and its newer townhouses, it was $348,420. On the eight taxing units' 2025 rates a homesteaded owner at the 77011 figure owes about $1,982 a year, because Houston ISD's $140,000 exemption takes most of the school tax off a cheaper house, and a landlord owes about $4,008; at the 77003 figure the homestead bill is about $4,704. The arithmetic is on the Houston page. The appraisal district lists the East End District at 0.15 per $100 and a residential entry at zero; the property's own record confirms which applies.

The bayou sets the flood map, and the freeway sets the western edge. FEMA's effective map puts 7.5% of the ward in the 1% annual chance flood zone, about half of that the regulatory floodway, all of it along Buffalo Bayou, and no census block's residents live inside it; 576 live in the 0.2% zone. The Flood Control District says flooding reaches past the mapped floodplain when rain overwhelms the streets. On the west, TxDOT's rebuild of the downtown freeways will lower Interstate 69 and run Interstate 45 beside it, so the western blocks face years of construction.