Life at Jackson Square Is Owned From Pecos: The West Texas Landowner Inside Harris County's Nuisance Suit
Court records identify the landowner of the Meyerland complex at the center of Harris County's nuisance suit as the Pecos Housing Finance Corporation - a public corporation hundreds of miles away - while a mid-October foreclosure left another entity holding the buildings, and the owner denies the county's allegations.
The name on the land underneath Life at Jackson Square is not a Houston name. Court records identify the owner of the Meyerland property as the Pecos Housing Finance Corporation, a public corporation based in Pecos, in far West Texas, hundreds of miles from Brays Bayou, the Houston Patriot reported Wednesday in a follow-up to Harris County's intervention in the city's nuisance lawsuit over the complex. FOX 26 reports the county's petition describes a mid-October foreclosure that left an entity called FS CREIT Nob Hill LLC holding the buildings, while Pecos is believed to still own the land. The owner, according to KHOU, denies the allegations in the county's petition.
The ownership structure matters because of what rides on it. Under Chapter 394 of the Texas Local Government Code, property owned by a housing finance corporation has generally been exempt from local property taxes, and for years investors partnered with small-town housing finance corporations to take big-city complexes off the tax rolls. The filings reviewed by the Patriot put no dollar figure on this property's exemption, and the foreclosure muddies the picture - but the structure means a government corporation answerable to officials hundreds of miles away holds a stake in a Harris County complex whose policing, firefighting and code enforcement are paid for by Houston taxpayers. Back in January, when roughly 500 units at the complex lost heat ahead of a winter storm, Abbie Kamin - then a council member, now the county attorney bringing the intervention - told KPRC 2 that the Pecos corporation "now owns this as a tax shelter."
State law has already moved on arrangements like this one. House Bill 21, authored by Rep. Gary Gates of Fort Bend County and signed in May 2025, largely confines housing finance corporations to their own jurisdictions and ties exemptions to real affordability and audit requirements. According to a Baker Botts summary of the law cited by the Patriot, properties held by out-of-jurisdiction corporations must win local approval from the city or county by December 31, 2026, or lose the exemption on January 1, 2027 - which means Houston-area officials, not Pecos, will soon decide whether this arrangement keeps its tax break.
None of that decides the nuisance case itself, which this station reported Tuesday: the county asks a judge to declare the 1,300-unit complex at 5410 N. Braeswood Boulevard a common nuisance and either close it for a year or appoint a receiver, alleging 16 firearms, assault, robbery, arson and narcotics incidents between May 2023 and September 2026 and more than 800 police calls for service in a city filing - calls that do not themselves establish that a crime occurred, and allegations that have not been proven in court. Kamin said in her office's October 27 news release, "Nobody in Harris County should have to live like this, and nobody should be allowed to profit from it." She has also told FOX 26 she does not want families displaced with nowhere to go. If the Pecos exemption comes up for the local approval HB 21 requires before December 31, that vote and its public comment period will be where Houstonians weigh in on the ownership question directly.
