Piney Point Village, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Piney Point Village began, how the bayou shapes it, and what a resident would recognize
More about this in Piney Point Village
Piney Point Village sits on the west side of Houston, in Harris County, one of the small cluster of cities known as the Memorial Villages. It's a compact, low-lying place, bordered on the south by Buffalo Bayou, and this page is a plain guide to it for anyone who wants the background before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Piney Point Village, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the city came from
Piney Point Village began in 1885 as a station on the Texas Western Railroad, settled by German farmers working the surrounding land. State highway maps from 1936 still placed the community near a sawmill. An attempt in the mid-1950s to fold the area into a single Spring Branch municipality failed, and Piney Point Village incorporated on its own in 1955 with an alderman form of government. Because it incorporated when it did, the City of Houston never annexed Piney Point Village's territory, even as Houston annexed the unincorporated land around it.
A dispute over city fees that made the news
Piney Point Village is home to the consul-general's residence for the Consulate-General of Japan in Houston, and for a decade ending in 1993 the consulate refused to pay the city's user fees, arguing they amounted to a tax on a diplomatic facility. The standoff ended after a U.S. State Department letter clarified that consulates must pay legitimate user fees even though they're exempt from taxes, and the consulate paid the city almost $12,000, including $4,500 in interest. It's a small, specific episode, but it's the kind of thing longtime residents still bring up.
The schools
The Kinkaid School, a private K-12 school, has sat on its 40-acre campus in Piney Point Village since 1957, and it's one of the best-known private schools in the Houston area. St. Francis Episcopal School runs its K-8 campus here as well, with its high school located in Houston proper. Most of the city, north of Buffalo Bayou, is zoned to the Spring Branch Independent School District, while the section south of the bayou is zoned to the Houston Independent School District.
The ground and the water
Piney Point Village sits at an elevation of just 72 feet, and Buffalo Bayou runs along its entire southern border. That geography drives real engineering work: the city funded an $8 million Soldiers Creek Drainage Project jointly with the Harris County Flood Control District and neighboring Hunters Creek Village, aimed at a much smaller waterway that starts up at Memorial City and threads through the area before reaching Piney Point Village near Blalock and Taylorcrest. Despite the flood history along the bayou, the city has held Tree City USA recognition for 14 consecutive years, a program that recognizes ongoing tree care and community engagement.
That's Piney Point Village: a nineteenth-century railroad stop turned into one of the wealthiest, most tightly kept small cities in Texas, still defined by the bayou along its southern edge.