Alief, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Alief began as Dairy, grew through annexation, and became one of Houston's most diverse communities
More about this in Alief
Alief sits in southwest Harris County, mostly inside the Houston city limits, in the stretch bounded by Westheimer to the north, the Sam Houston Tollway to the east, the Fort Bend County line to the west, and Interstate 69/U.S. Highway 59 to the south. It's one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the Houston region, and its story is really the story of a small farm town that a fast-growing city eventually caught up to and absorbed. For the full record, the Alief, Houston page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
A town called Dairy
Alief started under a different name. In 1894, surveyors working for landowner Francis Meston laid out the townsite and Harris County recognized it as "Dairy, Texas." The following year, the community's first postmistress, Alief Ozelda Magee, opened its first post office. The postal service called the office "Alief," after her, to avoid confusing its mail with the similarly named town of Daisy, Texas — and the name stuck. In 1917, the town formally became "Alief, Texas," the same year its school district took the same name.
Flood, rice, and a town that came back
The young settlement's early years were hard. The Flood of 1899 and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 wrecked the local church and destroyed the cotton and corn crops most families depended on, and 24 of the town's 30 families left. The six who stayed took a chance on a different crop: rice, which turned out to suit Alief's flood-prone land far better than what had been grown there before. The gamble worked well enough that most of the families who had left came back within a few years, and rice, along with dairy and vegetable farming, carried the local economy for decades afterward.
How the city grew around Alief
For most of the twentieth century, Alief stayed a small farm community — its population was still only in the low hundreds by the early 1940s. That changed fast starting in the 1970s, when Houston's westward growth reached the area and new housing went up on what had been pastureland. The City of Houston voted to annex the Alief-Fondren area on November 23, 1977, and kept annexing pieces of the community through the 1980s. Almost all of Alief's housing dates from that same growth period: 40% of it was built in the 1970s alone, and another 29% in the 1980s. The area's population, counted as a super neighborhood by the city, grew from 41,820 residents in 2000 to 119,598 by 2017. One landmark from that era, Andrau Airpark, had operated in Alief since 1946; it closed in 1998 and gave way to the Royal Oaks Country Club and its subdivision.
One of Houston's most diverse communities
As Alief grew, it became known as one of the most ethnically diverse parts of Houston, home to large Hispanic, Black, Asian and immigrant communities and a school district where students have been recorded speaking dozens of different languages. That diversity deepened further in 2005, when Alief took in more Hurricane Katrina evacuees than any other part of the city, with more than 3,000 evacuee students enrolling in Alief ISD schools that year alone. Community life still reflects that mix today, from the annual Lunar New Year Festival along Bellaire Boulevard to the International Parade held each September.
Living with water
Alief's flood risk never really went away. An estimated 11,456 homes in the community flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, one of the highest totals of any Houston-area neighborhood by raw count. It's not a new problem — Alief's residents formed the Harris County Flood Control District here back in 1909, decades before the subdivisions that cover the area today were ever built, because the land had always been prone to standing water.
That is Alief: a small rice-and-dairy farm town that Houston's growth turned into one of its largest and most diverse communities, built mostly in one long stretch from the 1970s through the 1980s, on land that has always needed careful attention to water. </content>