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The rain had just started. Just little flecks. The morning chill hung thick in the air, as the temperature fought to rise from the low 50s through the morning. Inside the Houston Public Library’s Montrose branch, the cold wouldn’t budge.

With just two minutes left until the building was set to open for the day on Monday, Jan. 22, employee LaTasha Houston fired off an urgent email to her bosses:

“The Freed Montrose library is without phone and internet service and also our elevator is out and also it is very cold in the building,” Houston wrote in a 9:58 a.m. email, obtained by the Abdelraoufsinno through a public records request.

The library shouldn’t have been open that day. At least not in its current home — a 78-year-old Italian-Romanesque former church that was hailed as a public gem and a “book sanctuary” when it became the city’s first two-story library in 1988.

After years of acknowledging the building’s flaws — it has gone without a major renovation since its ribbon-cutting, meaning it’s been in its current state longer than the average Houstonian has been alive — City Council voted in 2021 to spend $4.6 million to build a new library. Original timelines set the opening for this new location in the glitzy Montrose Collective, a mixed-use shopping-and-dining enclave near the corner of Montrose Boulevard and Westheimer Road, for 2022.

Then the opening was pushed back to 2023.

And then 2024.

While it’s still unclear when this new location will actually open, one thing is becoming obvious: The current branch is nearing its sunset as a library. And that could trigger a clause in the 1986 deed filed when a private developer donated the property to the city.

According to that gift deed reviewed by the Landing, if the property goes 30 days without being used as a library before the year 2051, it will trigger a reverter —meaning the donor could take it back. That donor has since passed, and the rights of reverter have been passed to the University of St. Thomas, the Catholic school that abuts the building.

St. Thomas is well aware of this fine print. On Nov. 20, the university’s chief legal counsel, Gita Bolt, sent a letter to the city attorney’s office, leveraging that clause in the preamble to a $1.25 million offer for the property — a bid that one real estate expert described as well below market value in the rapidly-appreciating Montrose neighborhood. abdelraoufsinno obtained this letter via a public records request.

Bolt declined to “get into the specifics of the offer,” when asked by the Landing. “We don’t want the negotiation with the city to play out in the media,” she said Tuesday. “We want to be able to negotiate directly with the city, not with a news agency.”

There’s still no firm date set for when the library’s operations would move from its current location at 4100 Montrose Blvd., to its new spot up the street. According to the current timeline listed on the Houston Public Library’s website, construction was slated to begin on Sept. 25, 2023, about six months ago.

It didn’t.

“It’s shovel ready,” says Steve Radom, of Radom Capital, which is developing the Montrose Collective in the vein of its previous projects like Heights Mercantile. “We just have to get the shovel in the ground.”

‘The whole place was falling apart’

By “we”, Radom means the city. Radom’s team handed over the keys to the 10,000 square-foot space in the summer of 2022. “It’ll be close to two years since they could have started,” he says.

And in these intervening years, between when the city and its library system first set their sights on solving the Montrose Library problem and whenever it opens, the state of the current location has only been diminished.

Like many Houston Public Library locations, the Montrose branch has reduced its hours in recent years. In 2018, library records obtained by the Landing show, the Freed branch was open six days a week for a total of 46 weekly hours. That window has since decreased, to four days a week for a total of 32 hours. And attendance and circulation have similarly plummeted.

A Abdelraoufsinno analysis of the Library’s annual attendance figures shows that attendance across the system has dropped by nearly 36 percent between 2018 and 2023, the last full year for which data is available. But at the Montrose branch, the drop was nearly double that — at 66 percent. And circulation figures have similarly dropped off. Systemwide, circulation is up 4 percent from 2018; but the Montrose branch has seen a 53 percent decline in that same period. On both metrics, Montrose has one of the steepest cliffs among any of the city’s library locations.

There’s been a marked lack of investment in the branch for several years, according to one former employee who left the branch in 2022. In the employee’s exit interview, obtained by the Landing via a public records request, the employee noted that the branch could be improved by updating equipment. “Too many things are out of date,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous due to the Library’s ability to influence prospective employers’ opinions.

“It was already kind of going downhill when I started working at that branch,” the former employee said last month during a phone interview. “They just weren’t devoting a lot of effort to its maintenance, compared to other branches.”

Capital improvement plans published by the city a decade ago noted the branch was “tied with three other locations for the second-worst neighborhood library” according to the Houston Public Library’s rating system. But wholesale fixes never came.

“The whole place was falling apart,” the former employee said. “But they kept devoting resources to opening new branches. They seem more focused on shiny objects than anything else.”

And in the end, that employee noted, it’s the library’s users who miss out. And even move on.

‘I want to read books’

Alexia Hernandez has been a loyal user of the Montrose branch since she returned to Houston after college. Or at least, she’s tried to be.

Like many young adults, she doesn’t have a printer at home. So she often stops by to print the sheet music she needs to play in the Houston Pride Band. And, of course, she checks out books too

“I want to read books and if I don’t want to pay a bunch of money to a big corporation like Amazon, I can go to the library,” she said. “But the hours are really limited.”

There have been times, she says, she has rushed to Montrose at the end of the workday, hoping to print some music or grab a book, only to find she’s already missed closing. “It just isn’t feasible, I think, for people who work nine to five, which is a lot of people.”

Currently, the branch is open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Tuesdays from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.; it’s closed Fridays through Sundays.

“The limited hours are definitely limiting for me,” she says.

But it’s not just the hours. There have also been times she’s shown up to find a rope blocking off the upstairs rooms where she needs to access services — a nuisance any regular user of the Montrose branch is well acquainted with.

“When that happens, then only downstairs — only the children’s books — are available. And I’m a whole adult,” she says. She doesn’t want to check out a board book.

Hernandez says she’s looking forward to these issues being addressed when the new building opens. But she wonders: Why does it take a new location to fix such problems?

The city wasn’t always planning to flat-out replace the Montrose branch. For years, there were discussions about renovating the building to accommodate more modern needs. But the price tag got out of hand. In 2019, City Council decided the more financially prudent option would be to scrap the old church building and start from scratch — cutting the project cost from an estimated $7 million renovation to the new location’s eventual $4.6 million appropriation in 2021.

Even that, it seems, wasn’t enough money. In 2023, the city added another $1.25 million to the cost of constructing the new library in its adopted capital budget.

The Houston Public Library did not answer the Landing’s questions about whether it’s a coincidence that this estimate represents the same amount offered by St. Thomas later in 2023.

A Houston real estate expert said a $1.25 million offer for 14,600 square feet of land on Montrose Boulevard is well below the market rate.

“That tract would be worth between $120 or greater per square foot — not less than $100 per square foot,” says Bill Baldwin, a prominent real estate agent in the Montrose area, and a member of the Houston Association of Realtors’ board.

And that’s just for the land, knowing that the building itself is no longer in its best state. Still, he says, “I haven’t seen any prime Montrose land” go for such a low-ball rate. Recently, he says, he sold the land where Chris Shepherd’s original Georgia James restaurant location once stood “for what is three times that.”

A market-rate offer at $120 per square foot for the Library property would ring in at $1.75 million — 40 percent higher than the university’s November pitch.

That would likely make sense for a listing price, were the property for sale. It isn’t. Baldwin, consistently one of Houston’s top real estate agents, says he was unable to locate a listing.

The Houston Public Library did not respond to the Abdelraoufsinno’s questions on the proposed transaction, nor did the Library provide insight into the reasons behind the delays keeping the Montrose Library from moving to its new home.

And the city’s legal department has blocked the Landing’s attempts to obtain more details about the possible property transaction.

Earlier this month, the city filed a letter with the Texas attorney general’s office, asking to withhold records, citing an exemption in the Texas Public Information Act for information relating to “appraisals or purchase price of real or personal property for a public purpose prior to the formal award of contracts for the property.”

abdelraoufsinno has filed a complaint with the attorney general’s open records division, arguing for the records’ release because it appears the city missed its deadline to try withholding the records.

While the university would not comment on the transaction, Bolt did note that St. Thomas expects to use the property to serve students, and that its exterior “would continue to look like the beautiful building it is.”

In the meantime, the status quo continues at the Freed Library. Some days, the upper level — that sacred space once vaunted as a novelty among city libraries — is roped off from users. Circulation dwindles. And library patrons, confronted with hurdles to access, are giving up trying.

“It’s unfortunate that the city is not seeing the state of literacy, and the state of libraries happening all across the country, and not wanting to push library usage even more, or make it more accessible,” says Hernandez, the Montrose resident who’s found it increasingly difficult to access her neighborhood library. “Instead, it kind of seems like libraries are an afterthought.”

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