Meyerland, Houston - A Local Area Guide
How Meyerland began, its place as the center of Houston's Jewish community, and its history with Brays Bayou
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Meyerland is a community in southwest Houston, sitting outside the 610 Loop and inside Beltway 8, immediately south of Bellaire. It's one of the older planned neighborhoods in this part of the city, and its history runs through a single family, a single bayou, and one of the most concentrated Jewish communities in Texas. This page is a plain guide to that place, written for anyone who wants to understand the neighborhood before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Meyerland, Houston page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
From rice fields to a subdivision
The land under Meyerland was rice fields before it was anything else. Joseph F. Meyer Sr. began acquiring it in sections starting around 1885, confident that Houston's city limits would eventually reach that far. He was right, but not in his own lifetime — after his death in 1933, the land passed to his three sons, and it took another twenty years before George Meyer decided to develop his share. In 1955, George Meyer turned 1,200 acres of the old rice fields into the Meyerland subdivision, with Vice President Richard Nixon on hand for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Meyerland became one of the first deed-restricted communities in the City of Houston, a status that shaped the uniform character of its original streets.
The center of Houston's Jewish community
Meyerland grew into the hub of Jewish life in Houston, home to the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center, Congregation Beth Israel, Congregation Beth Yeshurun and several smaller synagogues, alongside the large Meyerland Plaza shopping center. Generations of Houston's Jewish families have built their lives around this small stretch of southwest Houston, and the community has stayed remarkably stable — unlike many Houston neighborhoods that cycled through decline and later gentrification, Meyerland never really declined at all.
A neighborhood that keeps meeting Brays Bayou
Meyerland's defining challenge has been water. The neighborhood sits partially within the 100-year floodplain of Brays Bayou, and it has flooded more than once in recent memory. On Memorial Day, May 30, 2015, the bayou overtopped its banks and flooded homes across the neighborhood. Just over two years later, Hurricane Harvey inundated Meyerland again in 2017, an event so severe that roughly one in thirteen Jewish families in the neighborhood had a house flood, and images of the flooded community became part of the national coverage of the storm.
The response has been a series of large infrastructure projects. Project Brays, a $480 million effort led by the Harris County Flood Control District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is designed to remove 15,000 homes along 31 miles of Brays Bayou from the 100-year floodplain, including raising bridges on South Rice Avenue and Chimney Rock Road to let more water through. More recent work has followed, including a detention basin completed in 2024 and a 2025 land-swap agreement between Houston and Bellaire aimed at creating still more stormwater capacity.
A quiet stretch with one loud exception
Meyerland has largely avoided the boom-and-bust reputation of other Houston neighborhoods, but it wasn't always trouble-free. A string of more than twelve robberies hit Meyerland homes between April 23 and June 19, 1989, with the group responsible telling police afterward that they'd targeted the neighborhood because its houses held valuables and sat close to the 610 Loop for an easy escape. Area residents responded by hiring private patrols, and crime rates dropped.
Schools built inside the subdivision's first years
Meyerland's public schools went up almost as fast as the houses around them. Bellaire High School opened in 1955, the same year as the subdivision itself. Lovett Elementary followed in 1958, Johnston Junior High in 1959, Kolter Elementary in 1960, and Herod Elementary in 1961 — five schools opening within six years of the neighborhood's founding, a pace that matched the speed of the original build-out.
That is Meyerland: rice fields turned into one of Houston's first deed-restricted subdivisions, grown into the center of the city's Jewish community, and shaped as much by its long relationship with Brays Bayou as by anything George Meyer originally platted.