Texas’s colonias: solution to housing crisis or moral blot on rich nation’s conscience?

EDINBURG, TEXAS—Manuela Sandiland lives near the end of a street appropriately named Friendly Drive. Residents greet each other warmly on morning walks past houses with American flags fluttering in the front yard. Neighbors look in on each other when someone doesn’t feel well. They fawn over each other’s pets – including an effervescent Chihuahua mix named Tiffany.

Ms. Sandiland, who lost her husband, a US Army veteran who served in the Korean War, 10 years ago, is surrounded by family. Her two sons live on either side of her. In the afternoons, she likes to meet her grandchildren as they get off the school bus and walk home. The community, she says, is “nice and quiet.”

Yet the enclave six miles outside Edinburg, Texas, is hardly a plush American suburb. The street in front of her home isn’t paved. There’s no drainage system. No streetlights. Most residents live in rusted trailers without heat, air conditioning, or internet services. Inside Sandiland’s trailer, the howling wind on this day is audible through the walls and her cheeks are pink from the cold. She is awakened some mornings by roosters crowing as they strut through her front yard.

Friendly Drive isn’t in an official town, or even a village. It’s in a colonia – an informal community of poor people, most of them immigrants, most of them legal, who live in basic houses and substandard conditions, often on the edge of prosperous cities…

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