Third Ward TX (2007)

The left-for-dead Third Ward neighborhood in Houston's inner-city stirs to new life when a group of African-American artists found Project Row Houses. A step ahead of city demolition crews, they clean up around a row of condemned shotgun houses and do a "Drive-by" exhibit. Eventually, they purchase 22 houses on two blocks for a song. Then they do something really unusual. They ask the community what it needs-and listen to the answers. Third Ward TX explores how this tidy little row of born-again houses, glowing in the Texas sun, has become home to cutting-edge public art and a home-grown challenge to traditional notions of community development. By 2006, big development moves in, threatening to destroy the very qualities that make the neighborhood so vital. The bold and creative response of Project Row Houses is a gambit that just might work.