Live in Third Ward

In 1872 Richard Allen, Richard Brock, Jack Yates and Elias Dibble paid $800 for ten acres so that Houston's freed people had somewhere to hold Juneteenth, and Emancipation Park, on what has been Emancipation Avenue since 2017, is still the center of the ward. The school board founded the colleges that became the University of Houston and Texas Southern in 1927, and the state put Texas Southern on its present site in 1947. This guide uses the City's Greater Third Ward super neighborhood: about 1,854 acres inside Interstate 45, Interstate 69 and State Highway 288, south to Blodgett Street and Wheeler Avenue. Residents draw the ward in other ways; this line is the City's.

A third of the people counted here live in dormitories. The 2020 census found 16,571 residents on the super neighborhood's blocks, and 5,404 of them were in college student housing. So the 24.6% rise from 13,295 in 2010 says more about the campuses than about the streets. Owners lived in 1,338 of the 4,888 occupied homes, 27%, and 1,243 more homes stood empty.

Houston has no zoning, and here the block decides. What gets built on a lot is governed by the deed restrictions recorded on its subdivision, where any survive, and by the City's rules on how land is divided. Owners on 14 blocks inside the boundary have used one of those rules, the special minimum lot size, which stops a lot being cut below a size that 70% of the lots around it already meet: 151 lots at minimums between 4,500 and 6,825 square feet, most approved from 2019 to 2021, and four more applications pending. On a block without one, a lot can be divided under the City's general subdivision rules. No City historic district reaches the ward, so no design review applies outside a handful of landmarks such as Emancipation Park. The Midtown redevelopment authority has bought land here and recorded restrictions keeping it for low-income housing.

No price index follows this boundary. Zillow's figure for ZIP code 77004, where 73% of the ward's residents live but which also reaches west across State Highway 288, was $349,729 in August 2026, down 5.0% on the year, against a Greater Houston median single-family sale of $330,000. On the 2025 rates a homestead at Zillow's figure owes the eight taxing units about $4,727 a year and a landlord about $7,433; the arithmetic is on the Houston page. The ward is inside the Greater Southeast Management District, whose notice to buyers gives an assessment of $0.1150 per $100, about $402 on that value; its base is commercial owners, so check whether a house's appraisal record lists it.

Little of the ward is in the mapped floodplain. FEMA's map puts 1.5% of the area in the 1% annual chance zone and no resident's block in it; the north drains to Buffalo Bayou and the south to Brays Bayou. Streets still flood outside the mapped floodplain when rain overwhelms the drains, so ask about the house itself. The Purple Line stops twice inside the boundary, H-E-B's MacGregor Market opened in 2019 south of the boundary on State Highway 288 as the area's first new full-service grocery in 20 years, and TxDOT has been rebuilding Interstate 69 on the northwest edge since 2025.

Worth knowing before you commit

Look up the block before the house

Fourteen blocks have a minimum lot size; find out whether yours is one

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• Search the address on the City's special minimum lot size map, and read the subdivision's recorded deed restrictions
• Pull the appraisal district's record for the units that tax the address, including the Greater Southeast Management District
• Check the exact address on Houston ISD's locator: the ward splits between Blackshear and Lockhart elementaries

How Third Ward got here

• 1870The census finds 29% of Houston's African American residents living in the Third Ward; by 1910 it holds the largest share of any ward, 32%.
• 1872Richard Allen, Richard Brock, Jack Yates and Elias Dibble, members of Antioch Missionary Baptist and Trinity Methodist Episcopal churches, buy ten acres for $800 to celebrate the end of slavery. The ground is used for Juneteenth and becomes Emancipation Park.
• 1918Two years after receiving it as a donation, the City makes Emancipation Park a municipal park. From 1922, when the City segregates its parks, to 1940 it is the only City park open to Black Houstonians.
• 1926Yates Colored High School opens on 8 February at 2610 Elgin with 17 teachers and 600 students, the second school for African Americans in Houston.
• 1927On 7 March the Houston school board founds Houston Junior College, later the University of Houston, and Houston Colored Junior College, which first holds evening classes at Yates.
• 1947The Legislature passes Senate Bill 140 on 3 March, creating Texas State University for Negroes on the colored college's base, on land beside the University of Houston donated by Hugh Roy Cullen.
• 1958Yates High School moves in September to the Sampson Street site where it stands, at 3650 Alabama Street, and its old building becomes Ryan Junior High.
• 1993The artist Rick Lowe and six others found Project Row Houses in a row of shotgun houses in the northern Third Ward; the site now covers five blocks and 39 structures.
• 2007The City designates Emancipation Park a protected landmark; the Houston Negro Hospital building and its school of nursing, nearby on Elgin and Ennis streets, are City landmarks too.
• 2008The first special minimum lot size block inside the boundary is approved, at 6,825 square feet across 11 lots. The City's layer now shows 14 approved blocks there, nine of them made effective between 2019 and 2021.
• 2015The METRORail Purple Line opens on 23 May along Scott Street and Wheeler Avenue, with the Elgin/Third Ward and TSU/UH Athletics District stations inside the boundary.
• 2017Dowling Street, named for a Confederate officer, becomes Emancipation Avenue by a unanimous Council vote in January; Emancipation Park reopens after $33.6 million of work; and the City picks the Third Ward as a pilot of its Complete Communities program.
• 2019H-E-B opens its 90,000-square-foot MacGregor Market on 18 December at North MacGregor Way and State Highway 288, just outside the boundary, the first full-service grocery to open in the area in 20 years.
• 2020The census counts 16,571 residents on the super neighborhood's blocks, a third of them in student housing, against 13,295 on the same ground in 2010.
• 2025TxDOT begins rebuilding Interstate 69 from State Highway 288 to Interstate 45 in January, the boundary's whole northwestern edge, as Segment 3B-2 of its downtown highway project.
• 2026Yates is rated A (93) and Blackshear Elementary C (77); Emancipation Park's renovated cultural center opens to neighbors for National Night Out on 6 October.

What the map does not show: the Juneteenth date. The park was bought for it and the celebration returned in 2017, but the conservancy's event page could not be read, so no 2027 date is confirmed.

Elsewhere in Houston, not Third Ward

The free option is the park itself: its fields, courts and basketball pavilion, and the City's summer water fitness classes at its pool.