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The walls came tumbling down at the dangerously dilapidated Hilton Town Apartments.

Story and photo by John Perry

A backhoe clawed into an abandoned, rat-infested, two-story apartment complex in the Spring Branch East Super Neighborhood.

After a 15-year battle, HPD’s Neighborhood Protection Corps was demolishing 23 neighborhood-blighting buildings.

“This place is a hazard to the community,” said Gabriel Mussio, a Building Services environmental manger. “What looks like a simple demolition is also asbestos abatement.”

Environmental contractors, protected by respirators and contamination suits, sprayed pressurized water into the collapsing 33-year-old structure to dampen and contain the roiling dust.

“At this stage, safety is the big concern,” Mussio said.

Because older buildings can contain cancer-causing asbestos fibers, Mussio said, workers must follow the national emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants.

“When the buildings are as structurally unsound as these are, the best thing to do is wet the material, knock it down, place the debris in dumpsters, and dispose of it as regulated asbestos material,” Mussio said.

Because the owner wouldn’t fix or demolish the 25-acre Hilton Town Apartment complex at 2201 Wirt Road, the city slapped a lien on it for the cost of the work. Abatement costs are expected to be $380,275 with asbestos monitoring costing another $48,800.

“Abandoned property like this can become a crime nexus,” said senior HPD officer Joseph Pennington as the first building crashed down.

Trained to deal with neighborhood nuisance issues as part of the differential response team in HPD’s 8400 Long Point storefront office, Pennington said he has a close working relationship with the community.

“This can become a crack haven with drug activity breeding more criminal activity and spilling into the neighborhood,” Pennington said. “It goes back to the broken windows’ theory.”

That theory argued that if a window was broken and left unrepaired, people concluded no one cared. More windows would be broken; graffiti would appear, and more crimes would soon erupt into a crime epidemic.

“Neighborhood deterioration can start with just one property creating blight issues. It creates a domino effect,” Pennington said. “That’s why the Neighborhood Protection Corps is important.”

The NPC seeks to improve the quality of life by clearing open or abandoned buildings, weeded lots, junked vehicles, graffiti and other nuisances.

Why’d it take so long to attack these eyesores?

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