South Houston, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Dumont became South Houston, survived the 1915 hurricane, and grew into a tightly packed community
More about this in South Houston
South Houston is a small, tightly built city southeast of downtown Houston, wedged between the City of Houston and the City of Pasadena and covering barely three square miles. This page is a plain guide to the town, written for anyone who wants to understand the place before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the South Houston, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town came from
C.S. Woods of the Western Land Company founded the settlement in 1907 under the name Dumont. A post office followed in 1910, and in 1913 the town incorporated as the City of South Houston. Because that incorporation predated Houston's own expansion into the area, South Houston stayed its own city even as Houston annexed the unincorporated land around it. Early on, the town's economy ran on shipping produce — including strawberries, figs and vegetables from local truck farms — along the Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad tracks.
A young town tested by a storm
Just two years after incorporating, South Houston was hit hard: the hurricane of 1915 destroyed many of the town's young local industries. The setback didn't end the town. As the Houston Ship Channel developed in the years that followed, manufacturing moved further inland, and South Houston picked up factories that built everything from railroad equipment to candy, toys and even an early airplane.
Steady growth into a working-class city
South Houston's population climbed steadily through the mid-20th century: 7,523 residents by 1960, 11,782 by 1980, and 14,207 by 1990. That's not the sudden, single-wave growth of a modern master-planned suburb — it's decades of consistent, incremental building in a city that never had much room to grow outward, since it covers only about 3.0 square miles of land, all of it built out between the City of Houston and the City of Pasadena.
A few things residents remember
Local legend has it that elephants belonging to a former South Houston mayor and circus owner, George Christy, helped with the construction of Spencer Highway — a detail that's stuck around in the town's local lore for generations. On the more everyday side, the Lewis Food Town grocery chain is headquartered in South Houston, and in 2006 H-E-B opened a "Mi Tienda" store there, a format the chain built specifically around the city's largely Hispanic community; by 2007, every employee at the store spoke Spanish.
The people and the houses
South Houston's population has held remarkably steady in recent decades, standing at 16,153 at the 2020 census, essentially unchanged from 16,983 in 2010. Much of the housing dates to around the same era: the median house or condo in South Houston was built in 1970, with an estimated median value of $206,478 in 2024, up sharply from $47,400 in 2000. Nearly half of South Houston households rent rather than own, a higher share than the statewide average.
That is South Houston: a small railroad-and-farming town that survived an early hurricane, grew steadily rather than in a single boom, and still packs a close-knit, mostly Hispanic community into just three square miles between two much larger cities.