This more or less wraps up the story.
The owners of Colony Ridge, a Houston-area developer accused of running a predatory lending scheme that deceived Latinos, agreed to a sweeping legal settlement that will require them to invest in law enforcement and infrastructure on their properties and tighten selling practices to address a range of accusations from Texas GOP leaders and conservative media.
Chief among the allegations was that Colony Ridge developers sold land to undocumented people, giving rise to a crime-ridden complex of subdivisions about 30 miles outside Houston allegedly being run by Mexican drug cartels.
The developers denied that their communities were unsafe, a contention backed by testimony from local officials when the Legislature held special hearings in 2023 in response to outrage and accounts from residents in the developments. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the developers soon after, accusing them of deceptive sales, marketing and lending practices in a suit that echoed claims lodged by the federal government in a separate case.
Under the settlement released Tuesday, Colony Ridge’s owners agreed to clamp down on the documentation it requires from buyers. Would-be purchasers will now have to present a Texas ID or driver’s license — which undocumented immigrants cannot obtain in Texas — or a passport or visa. The agreement did not specify that the passport has to be an American one.
The agreement resolves the state and federal lawsuits, which alleged the owners of Colony Ridge lured would-be Spanish-speaking homebuyers into seller-financed mortgages with high interests that they could not afford. By federal authorities’ estimate, roughly one in four Colony Ridge loans resulted in foreclosure. The company would then flip those properties to new unsuspecting customers eager to become homeowners, court filings allege.
The federal case, filed by the Biden administration’s Justice Department in late 2023, also accused Colony Ridge of misrepresenting facts such as guarantees of water, electricity and sewer hook-ups and whether properties had previously flooded.
See here for the previous update. Everyone involved in this suit is a bad actor – the story later quotes professional cockroach Michael Quinn Sullivan about how this was a political win for Ken Paxton because the settlement will stick it to “the illegals” – so it’s hard for me to say what if anything positive may have come out of it. I’d feel differently if I thought someone on the plaintiff’s end was actually representing the residents and past customers of Colony Ridge, but I don’t have any expectation that they were really considered. Sorry to be a bummer, but that’s where we are these days.