Housing Production & Infrastructure in the Colonias of Texas and Mexico: Towards a Cross Border Dialogue (proceedings), May 5-6, 1995

The inspiration for this conference and for the two-semester LBJ School Policy Research Project from which it derives began with a Governor's Task Force meeting on the Colonias held here in Austin some three years ago. Indeed, many here today were at that meeting which brought together a mixedconstituency group of academics, public officials, non-governmental organization representatives, religious and other leaders. My presence at that meeting was as one who then knew very little about Texa s "Colonias", but had studied and advised Mexican governments over twenty years on the parallel and much more widespread phenomenon of illegal urban growth and so-called irregular settlements in Mexico (also called colonias). Yet I was surp rised to discover that Texas appeared to be "rediscovering the wheel" in its response to the existence and expansion of its colonia problem. Many researchers and public officials -- invariably in good faith -- were seeking to understand the underl ying causes and nature of colonia growth. They were asking how public policy might respond to colonia land developers? How to effectively address land title ambiguities and insecurities? How to provide essential services of water, power, public transport, and social service infrastructure to low-income and lowdensity populations? How to engage with these settlement populations and with the community development organizations that had evolved within them?