Outside the Lines With Rap Genius - OTL 59: Lance Scott Walker Excerpt #2 "The Disease of Midtown" lyrics

Lance Scott Walker: Midtown is a disease in Houston that has spread. It used to be this kind of cute little word because it was a sort of... Sort of a, I wanna say - not going to say a deserted area - but it was an area with a lot of warehouses. There were a lot of older houses, you know, some shotgun houses and there was one sort of area in Houston that really referred to "Midtown", but what we've seen in the past ten fifteen years is that older buildings are being wiped away, two and three story apartments are being built, big blocks, you know, not much different than what see here in New York, what we see in Brooklyn. Big, big blocks of apartment buildings coming in and just sweeping out entire blocks of history. So, that happens all over Houston. But you certainly notice it in the city center, which is the oldest part of town. Fourth Ward was an older black neighborhood, lots of shotgun houses, small houses that had been there forever, and there were some different laws that came around in the late 90's that made it a lot easier for people to build multi family homes, you know, to build up in Houston. So with the natural progression of baby boomers, children being out of the houses, then they have all these big houses out in the suburbs. "Hey, the kids are out of the house, I'm tired of this big house, I want to move back into the city center," and that's what happens. You know, you start to see all these patterns come around, and Fourth Ward was a victim of that. You drive around that neighborhood now and don't even recognize it. It's all steel condominiums where there used to be little houses, a couple streets there that are made out of old bricks. I don't even know if those are still there