Montrose Live

04/03/2026

Today’s Live Location - somewhere along the Mississippi River…

04/02/2026

What he said… “When you’re doing exactly what you want to do, it’s not tiring. You’ve been planting these seeds, and finally, you have a full garden in bloom; you’re like, ‘Oh, I just want to smell the flowers and play among the flowers all day.’ That’s what I’m doing. I’m playing among the flowers.” - Colman Domingo

Houston-Montrose, Texas ➡️ New Orleans-French Quarter, Louisiana

03/26/2026

03/24/2026

The four collectives that were coming to life at Montrose Live before everything was bulldozed prematurely came to me in a dream and persisted in subsequent visions. At the time, I didn’t fully understand why those exact words came to me. It took months, honestly years, of continuing with them, trusting them, even without fully knowing.

It wasn’t until now, having the space to slow down and really look deeper at what’s happening, that it all made sense.

Each collective represents something real that is being lost as these corporate developments buy up all the land.

Authenticated is about one-of-a-kind pieces, things only the person who made them could make. Real Good Real Goods is about real food, made with real ingredients by people who actually care about what they’re making. No Passport Needed is about preserving culture and sharing it, not separating or diluting it, but allowing people to experience it together. The Landfill is about sustainability, recognizing that we already have so much, and what one person no longer wants or needs can still have value for someone else.

And in the middle of all of it… music. Music was always the heartbeat, not just bringing people in, but supporting everything around it. Because music is powerful. It makes people feel alive. It brings people to life.

Corporate developments use that too. They bring in music to create energy, to draw people in. But you have to look at what that music is being used to support, and who it’s supporting. If you look deeper, you can see how it funnels to the people at the very top. It’s not a circulatory ecosystem dispersed within the community.

And what’s happening now is they’re extracting from these things. The words, the feeling, the appearance of it.

You see phrases like “capturing the soul of Montrose,” or a luxury apartment across the street saying “art is satisfying,” using the language of something real.

But it’s marketing.

It’s businesses with employees there for paychecks, trying to replicate something they didn’t build and can’t actually be.

They can borrow the words. They can try to copy the feeling. But they can’t create the essence, because the essence comes from people who are living it.

So it looks the same on the surface, but it’s not coming from the same place.

And when you really step back, these are the exact things being pushed out, replaced, replicated, stripped of what made them real in the first place.

As this next chapter unfolds for Montrose Live, we’re taking the time to go find and support the places that are still holding onto this. The real places. The ones preserving something much deeper than just the pocketbooks of a few.

Humanity

03/14/2026

In my last post I asked how Covenant House Texas and Skanska are related.

Reading the comments, I realized I need to explain the pattern more clearly.

Yes, some of my posts have been emotional. That was intentional. Sometimes that’s the only way to get people to pause long enough to look at what’s actually happening.

Many of the responses keep focusing on the wrong point. “You knew the space was temporary.” “That’s just how development works.”

Yes, I understood the space wasn’t permanent. That’s not the point. The point is the system operating around it.

Large real estate developers and large social service organizations like Covenant House often sit on opposite ends of the same system, but they are still connected by it.

Developers like Skanska make money by increasing land values and building projects that raise the cost of living in an area. As neighborhoods become more expensive, more people get pushed out or simply can’t keep up with the cost of existing there.

On the other side, organizations like Covenant House receive funding to help the people who fall through those cracks and can not afford housing.

So you end up with two sides of the same cycle. One side benefits from the economic pressures that push people out. The other side grows by serving the people who have been pushed out.

It’s similar to other industries where the same economic system profits on both ends. Think about how some companies profit from products that make people sick, while the healthcare system profits from treating the illness. Different sides of the problem, but still part of the same loop.

What I saw on that corner almost every day for over four years made that dynamic impossible to ignore.

When the new Covenant House building opened, hundreds more youth were brought into the area. During the day many of them were outside the building and had to go somewhere. What we started seeing wasn’t small issues. There were organized groups forming, gang activity, knives, and even assault rifles showing up on the property.

Some people say new developments will simply push that out with security.

But those youth don’t disappear. They still have to exist somewhere.

The last few months many of them came to Montrose Live because it was one of the few open spaces left on that corner. Now that space is gone.

Montrose Live, at its core, was meant to get closer to the root issue of why places like Covenant House are needed in the first place. People need low barrier opportunities to do what they love while contributing something meaningful to the community.

Because when the only system left is profit-driven machines focused on maximizing returns, the number of people who fall outside that system only grows.

I’ve accepted that I may end up being the scapegoat in this situation. Despite the sacrifice I’ve had to endure, if that’s what it takes for people to see the larger pattern, then so be it.

Montrose deserves to understand what’s happening around it before it’s too late.

03/12/2026

I wrote this piece recently about the Covenant House, shortly after I shared it we got kicked out and everything destroyed. I can’t help but think it’s related. Skanska (developer and land owner) included in my original lease that I had to work with the Covenant House, not sure what that meant to be honest and I should have clarified. Does anyone know how or if the two are related?

Compassion Without Accountability: What I’ve Witnessed About the Covenant House Corporate Frame and the Cost Paid by Communities

I didn’t create Montrose Live to become a spillover zone for unmanaged trauma, street conflict, and institutional neglect. I created it to be a place of creativity, growth, and community, a place where people could come together and feel inspired. But over time, I’ve had to confront a reality I can no longer ignore.

The young adults coming from Covenant House are not just struggling. They are being left unsupervised, unsupported, and pushed into public spaces to process pain that should never be dumped onto neighborhoods to carry. At Montrose Live, I have watched them gather to smoke, drink, fight, damage property, and in some cases, steal from the very small businesses we are trying to help build. Just recently, shoes were stolen from The Landfill Collective. I chased the boy across the street and yelled for him to take them off so I could return them to their rightful owner. This is not about a single moment. It is a pattern. It is a system. And it has consequences.

It has become harder and harder to invite families, artists, musicians, and community members into the space because the atmosphere feels unstable. People sense the volatility. They don’t know what version of the environment they are walking into. And when we reach out for help, the response is always the same. The police arrive too late and say there is nothing they can do. Covenant House insists the behavior is outside their responsibility once the kids leave the building. Meanwhile, the damage, emotional, financial, and environmental, is absorbed by us. By the small businesses. By the creatives. By the people actually trying to build something positive that may actually solve the root issue the Covenant House is needed in the first place.

What is even more unsettling is how untouchable Covenant House seems to be in these situations. When incidents involve others in the area, action happens. When they involve Covenant House youth, accountability disappears, as if there is an invisible protection field shielded by donor money and institutional status.

At one point, a homeless man even handed me a handwritten contract. It thanked me for “making Montrose Live for the homeless and underprivileged youth,” laid out a schedule of when they would “clean the area,” and declared itself a binding agreement through March 1st. I didn’t sign it. I didn’t agree to it. I looked at it as a mirror, a reflection of a narrative that has been placed onto us without consent. Because the truth is simple. The space wouldn’t need to be cleaned if it wasn’t being trashed in the first place.

Yet corporations continue to write checks. Reports are published. Funders celebrate impact statistics. Charity narratives are polished and repeated, while the reality unfolding outside the doors is erased from the story. What I see is not empowerment. It is abandonment disguised as compassion, a system where Covenant House receives investment and recognition while the burden of that system is offloaded into the surrounding community.

If you are a corporation funding Covenant House, I believe you should be responsible for understanding the outcomes you are investing in, not just the brochure version. Ask why these young adults are left unsupervised for hours at a time. Ask why community spaces are expected to absorb the behavioral fallout. Ask why the organizations receiving millions in funding are rarely the ones cleaning up the mess, socially, structurally, or physically.

This is not a story about problem kids. This is a story about an institutional frame that benefits from their suffering while outsourcing the responsibility for it. I want something better for these young people. I want real trauma support, meaningful structure, mentorship, dignity, and care, not a model where they are left to unravel in public spaces while corporations collect philanthropy credit.

But unless Covenant House, and the companies underwriting its image, are willing to confront the real-world impact of their model, communities like ours will continue to pay the price. And I am no longer willing to stay silent about that cost.

03/11/2026

We’re taking offers for the Montrose Live Heart ❤️

No, we’re not selling our soul.
Just the actual heart sculpture that hung above the stage.

If you came to Montrose Live, you probably saw it glowing at night. A big heart sculpture with string lights wrapped around it. Simple idea. But it ended up meaning a lot more than we expected.

That heart had a life.

Early on people messed with it. Wires cut. Power banks stolen. Lights missing. The usual “someone can’t let a nice thing exist” behavior.

So every time it got messed with, we rebuilt it.

And every time we rebuilt it, we made it brighter and moved it higher. Eventually it ended up on top of the stage container where it could shine over the whole place.

Honestly, it ended up being a pretty good metaphor for Montrose Live itself.

Then that chapter got destroyed and shut down overnight. The space, the setup, the resources, gone.

But the idea behind it didn’t disappear with the land.

So we’re doing what people do when the ground gets pulled out from under them: adapting. Montrose Live is going on the road while the legalities iron out… playing music, making art, and telling the story of what happened here and from the messages we have received is happening everywhere.

Also, the “realists” in the comment section made one point that’s hard to argue with: if you want to protect something like this long-term and build infastructure, you have to own the land. Trying to build heart-driven things on top of someone else’s soulless profit machine only works… until it doesn’t.

So that’s part of the long game now.

Proceeds from the heart will help start the road journey and eventually go toward land that can be held in a community trust to buy the land so the same thing can’t happen again.

One practical detail: the heart is still mounted on top of the container, so we’ll need to borrow a ladder to get it down. 😄

If it speaks to you, reach out. ❤️‍🔥

03/10/2026

I want to give a huge shoutout to Greg at Universal Fence 281-678-7344 - [email protected].

After learning about what the landlord developer and the parking company did, Greg has made the choice not to do business with them, and that says a lot about his character as this was a profitable opportunity for him.

I also want you to know, when we’ve had fences in the past, Greg was absolutely phenomenal, helpful, kind, and genuinely caring. That level of service is rare these days.

If you need a fence, please, please reach out to Greg. And even if you don’t need one yourself, share his info with anyone you know who does. Supporting people like him is so important!

03/10/2026

The narrative being told right now by Skanska and the parking company is that Montrose Live was the problem on this corner.

But here’s what actually happened.

Last week, everything we built was suddenly destroyed and removed from the property, including structures, materials, and resources that took years of work and personal sacrifice to create. In a single moment, the ability for us to rebuild or move was taken away.

The truth is, we were never the problem.

Since around November, there has been a major increase in disturbances on this block connected to the area around Covenant House. Their new Montrose campus opened in May 2025 and expanded the number of youth they serve. Their mission is important. But something shifted late in the year, and the surrounding businesses and neighbors were left dealing with situations almost nightly, including theft, vandalism, harassment, and constant disturbances.

We didn’t ignore it.

I was in regular communication with Covenant House management asking for help addressing what was happening around their property. Police were called many times. Nearby businesses like Circle K even have security and still struggle with the same issues.

The reality is that this was never something that could be solved alone. Montrose Live was a community project putting all of our resources into serving the community.

The lot itself is managed by a parking company and owned by Skanska, the entities that collect revenue from the land and normally would be responsible for security and property management. Covenant House is sponsored by corporate organizations, and the developers and corporations that fund projects like this ultimately benefit from these systems. I asked multiple times for help with security and never received it.

Despite that, when Montrose Live was active, our vendors, artists, musicians, and neighbors were often the ones watching the block, de-escalating situations, and trying to keep the space safe, not just for ourselves but for the entire area.

Recently, a police officer told me that this address had been discussed in meetings where HPD recommended that the landlord address the ongoing issues at the location.

But instead of investing in security or addressing the root problems affecting the block, the decision that was made was to remove the one place that actually had people present and paying attention.

In other words, the community space became the scapegoat.

Montrose Live didn’t create the problems on this corner. If anything, it showed what happens when real people try to build something meaningful in a system where the people who control the land and resources often avoid responsibility.

If you care about keeping real community spaces alive in Montrose, comment below with your ideas on what can be done. Call the property owners, the parking company, and your local representatives. Hold the corporations, the developers, and sponsors accountable to the people who actually live and work here, not just the ones who collect the revenue.

I have a vision for what this space could be, a place that strengthens community at the root level, supports real connection, and creates opportunities for people to thrive. But a corporation isn’t going to do it. They’re focused on profit, not people. The change we need has to come from us, together.