page_title: Gulfton, Houston
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Gulfton, Houston / Geography
caption_attribution_description: English: Napoleon Square Apartments - 6001 Gulfton Dr, Houston, Texas 77081Español: Napoleon Square Apartments ("Apartamentos Napoleon Square") - 6001 Gulfton Dr, Houston, Texas 77081
context_page_description: Gulfton is a community in Southwest Houston, Texas, United States that includes a 3.2 sq mi group of apartment complexes that primarily house refugee and immigrant populations. It is located between the 610 Loop and Beltway 8, west of the City of Bellaire, southeast of Interstate 69/U.S. Highway 59, and north of Bellaire Boulevard.
  In the 1960s and 1970s Gulfton experienced rapid development, with new apartment complexes built for young individuals from the Northeast and Midwest United States. They came to work in the oil industry during the 1970s oil boom.
  In the 1980s, as the economy declined, existing tenants left, resulting in a significant drop in occupancy rates in the apartment complexes and forcing many complexes into bankruptcy and foreclosure. Owners marketed the empty units to newly arrived immigrants and Gulfton became a predominantly immigrant community. Beginning in the 1980s Gulfton's crime rate increased and schools were increasingly overwhelmed with excess students. "Houstonians" nicknamed the community the "Gulfton Ghetto."
context_section_description: Gulfton is located in Southwest Houston outside the 610 Loop.  Gulfton is about 10 mi (16.1 km) southwest of Downtown Houston and approximately 2 mi (3.2 km) west of Bellaire. Susan Rogers of the Rice Design Alliance describes Gulfton is an example of an "inner ring" area of Greater Houston which is located between downtown and the suburbs. Rogers states that the "outwardly conventional landscapes" of "inner ring" areas are "neither urban nor suburban, but a conglomeration of both, a hybrid condition mixed from one part global city, one part garden suburb, and one part disinvestment."
  Gulfton includes about 90 apartment complexes with more than 15,000 units. Lori Rodriguez of the Houston Chronicle said that Gulfton, "with its rows of down-at-the-heels apartments that still bear jaunty names from their swinging-singles days, makes an incongruous gateway for the newest waves of immigrants and their many children." Roberto Suro of The Washington Post described Gulfton as a "tightly packed warren." Some of the apartment complexes are over one block long. In the 1970s one of the apartment complexes contained seventeen swimming pools, seventeen hot tubs, seventeen laundry rooms, and two club houses. Gulfton also contains strip malls and office blocks. The complexes generally contain features catering to single adults and lack features appreciated by families, due to the initial market targeted in the 1970s. As of 2005, Gulfton has more than one hundred semi-private swimming pools but many of them have been filled in and are no longer usable. Some apartments in Gulfton have businesses located in ground floor units. Several area tract houses are occupied by beauty salons, small stores, and tire repair shops. Rogers contends that the mixed-use adaptation, "has occurred spontaneously from the bottom up, indicative of the entrepreneurial spirit of residents and their need to adapt existing space for new uses." A 2000s City of Houston report on Study Area 8, which includes Gulfton and surrounding areas, states that Gulfton's "large apartment complexes dominate the area's landscape." John Nova Lomax of the Houston Press described Gulfton as "uglier" than a group of apartment complexes along Broadway Street in eastern Houston.
  The size of the city blocks in Gulfton differs significantly from that of Downtown Houston in that sixteen downtown city blocks will fit into one Gulfton block. Few sidewalks exist in Gulfton. In 1999 Houston City Council District F representative Ray Discroll said "[Gulfton residents] don't have sidewalks, let alone sidewalks that are only two and a half feet wide. There are pregnant women walking down the sides of the roads." In 2005 the Houston-Galveston Area Council identified Gulfton as one of the most hazardous communities for pedestrians. Dug Begley of the Chronicle wrote in 2019 that "pedestrians and cyclists, [sic] navigate streets designed for cars that can leave residents facing wide intersections with fast, unimpeded right turns and signal timing that forces younger, elderly and disabled travelers to hustle, as hundreds of cars pass by." That year the organization Together for Safer Roads planned to fund a study on Hillcroft Road, discussing ways of making pedestrians there safer, with $150,000; it plans to work with the municipal government.
  One complex, Napoleon Square, was built in 1971 for $22 million; the 1,884 unit complex, owned by real estate figure Harold Farb, included a $400,000 disco and many swimming pools. In 1977 it had a main swimming pool, twelve other swimming pools, and a club called "Bonaparte's Retreat." Within a 1-mile (1.6 km) radius of the main entrance to Napoleon Square, 5,000 apartment units in at least twelve apartment facilities, about forty swimming pools, about or more than twenty-four  bars and nightclubs, and about twelve tennis courts. A subsidiary of Western Capital purchased the complex in March 1985. As of 1999, about 1,500 families reside in the complex, and most of them originated from Mexico, Central America, and South America. As of 2003 many families at Napol
caption: Napoleon Square, one of Gulfton's apartment complexes, once had a club, a disco, and multiple swimming pools
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA", "Image Make": "OLYMPUS IMAGING CORP.", "Image Model": "FE100,X710", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "314", "Image YResolution": "314", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "1.2", "Image DateTime": "2030:01:20 05:04:34", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "840", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 51, 48, 48, 0, 0, 37, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "3556", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4419", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "9/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Creative", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2030:01:20 05:04:34", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2030:01:20 05:04:34", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "-3/10", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "317/100", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "137/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2272", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1704", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "3432", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Manual Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Landscape", "EXIF GainControl": "Low gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal"}