The City and The City?
Mayors of Houston, Texas since 1991
[note: Houston mayoral elections are non-partisan. Candidates are listed based on their publicly stated partisan affiliations where possible.]
1992-1994: State Representative
Sylvester Turner (Dem)
'91 def. fmr. METRO Chairman Bob Lanier (Dem), Mayor Kathy Whitmire (Dem)
1994-1996: Investment Banker
Ken Bentsen (Dem)
'93 def. Mayor Sylvester Turner (Dem), fmr. Sheriff Jack Heard (GOP), Radio Host Ray Hill (Ind)
1996-1997: Harris County Sheriff
Chuck Rosenthal (GOP)
'95 def. City Councilwoman Sheila Jackson Lee (FDP), Mayor Ken Bentsen (Dem)
1997-1998: Mayor Pro Tem
Martha Wong (GOP)
1998-2003: fmr. Mayor
Sylvester Turner (Dem-FDP)
'97 def. fmr. State Representative Ed Emmett (GOP), Radio Host Dan Patrick (Ref)
'99 def. CEO Kenneth Lay (Ind), County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia (Dem)
2003-2007: City Attorney
Ben Hall (Dem)
'03 def. State Representative Rick Noriega (Dem), City Councilman Chris Bell (Dem)
2007-2009: fmr. Mayor
Sylvester Turner (Dem)
'07 def. State Representative Sue Lovell (Dem), County Commissioner Carol Alvarado (Dem), Mayor Ben Hall (FDP)
2009-2009: Mayor Pro Tem
Ben Reyes (Dem)
2009-2011: Deputy Mayor Pro Tem
Jessica Farrar (Dem)
2011-2015: City Councilman
Ed Gonzalez (Dem)
'11 def. fmr. U.S. Representative Craig Washington (Dem), State Representative Carrin Patman (Dem)
2015-2019: Attorney
Tony Buzbee (Ind)
'15 def. Rapper Brad Jordan (Ind), Mayor Ed Gonzalez (Dem)
2019-: fmr. Secretary of Transportation
Sylvester Turner (Dem)
'19 def. State Senator Armando Walle (Dem), Mayor Tony Buzbee (Ind)
The modern history of Houston and the career of Sylvester Turner are inextricably intertwined. To many residents of the City of Houston, Turner is regarded as a folk hero like Huey Long, Juan Perón, or Jesse Jackson: the man they couldn't keep down, who never stopped fighting for Houston in general and its poorer Black and Hispanic residents in specific. To many of the people who live just outside its borders, though - in Bellaire and Westheimer and Montrose and Clear Lake - Turner was an unrepentant class-war demagogue who mortgaged Houston's peace and future for his own ambitions. The truth is, as always, more complicated.
Turner's first rise came amidst discontent with five-term incumbent Kathy Whitmire. As Houston's economy twisted in the grip of the oil glut and crime rose sharply, State Representative Sylvester Turner rose in the polls among moderate Anglos who saw Whitmire as an ivory-tower liberal and Bob Lanier as a corrupt oligarch, then swung Black voters behind him once it looked like he could win. The runoff saw that racial coalition almost fall apart - KTRK Eyewitness News, Houston's local yellow journalists, ran a story that accused Turner of scheming to help his roommate's client fake his death for the insurance money. The story briefly set race relations in Houston into sharp relief, as Anglo Houstonians turned against Turner and Black Houstonians saw the candidate they saw as theirs smeared by powerful Anglos - but the story began to fall apart almost immediately, and more to the point was traced back from KTRK to the controversial Clyde Wilson, Lanier's friend and a private investigator known for his cavalier attitude to legalities. Embarrassed Anglos stayed home or voted for Turner - not all of them, by any means, but enough.
But though Lanier had no formal power, he - and the Anglo good ol' boys scattered throughout the commanding heights of Houston business, administration, and news - still had a lot of informal ability to gum up the works. "Turner versus the Deep State" is far too deeply enmeshed in Houston's political heritage and narrative to judge properly, but it is undeniable that he faced a lot of hostility - negotiations with existing businesses went south, the transportation agencies on the state and local level Lanier had once headed stopped working with the city, previously uncontroversial Council motions got gummed up, and the city bureaucracy leaked like a sieve. Meanwhile, many of the liberals who had supported Turner found his willingness to stand by the police through controversy and his refusal (which some thought motivated by rumors that his former "roommate" was something more) to allow the city to expand spousal benefits to domestic partners beyond the pale.
In 1993, every ambitious Houston politician saw themselves as Texas' next Senator in 1994, and wanted to back the son of the incumbent in the hopes that would get them onto a shortlist for his endorsement. It worked; Ken Bentsen became Mayor, and an ambitious State Senator named John Whitmire had the honor of losing to Joe Barton a year later. But Bentsen could not overcome the crime or economic problems either, and as Black and liberal Democrats peeled off (the former briefly forming the Freedom Democratic Party) and moderates reacted against President Brown, Harris County Sheriff Chuck Rosenthal made his way into office. Rosenthal's unremarkable tenure is remembered mostly for its ignominious end as Rosenthal sought treatment for a prescription drug addiction; Wong is remembered mostly for making Houston the largest city to have an Asian-American Mayor until San Francisco's 2015 election of Fiona Ma.
In 1997 it was Turner's turn to benefit from scandal, as he climbed out of scandal made almost holy by having been struck down and coming back anyway. Ed Emmett's conflict-of-interest deals with developers weren't all that bad, all told, by Houston standards - but what mattered more was that they highlighted his ties to Bob Lanier and undermined his image as a clean moderate from outside the establishment. Emmett's failures prompted a period of peace of a sort - as members of the new administration passed around copies of
The Accommodation and war stories of Turner's last term, the local establishment came to the conclusion that open war against Turner had hurt them about as badly as him. "We'll give him enough rope to hang himself," one administrator said, before immediately stating that that statement was off the record. The gamble - that local hero of the charity scene Ken Lay would be able to beat Turner if Turner were given enough room to govern as he saw fit - failed, with an economic recovery amid the Iran War and booming oil prices dovetailing with residual suspicions of sabotage letting many Houstonians look past Turner's minor issues and Ken Lay's image as a fundamentally empty suit.
From then on, the organized anti-Turner forces switched tactics. With a charter amendment ensuring he would be term-limited and not up for election for another four years, the Texas Legislature decided to "triage", passing urban secession ordinances that allowed neighborhoods to unilaterally secede from the city by petition. The rich Anglo neighborhoods of the suburbs and West Houston's "arrow" all broke off by the end of 1999; by the end, Houston had seen two hundred thousand residents leave without moving, and its tax receipts had dropped by more than 20%. Nevertheless, frantic predictions of a "death spiral" as worsening conditions prompted more neighborhoods to leave and turned Houston into a "Southern Detroit" were unfounded - oil prices remained high, and Turner's communitarian attention to the needs of poor neighborhoods extended into an zealous focus on attracting jobs, even as the Second and Third Wards saw worries of gentrification.
Turner's third administration was unexpected. Ben Hall had been, if anything, a liberal force as City Attorney, and the 2003 election had been far more about location than ideology. But he was, or saw himself as having had been, made an offer he couldn't refuse by Governor Stockman, and turned virulently against LGBT rights in exchange for a stay of execution for Houston Independent School District. Though more than a few Houstonians, especially the pastors of its most conservative churches, applauded the move, Hall's orders to enforce state laws banning sodomy and block equal rights ordinances prompted Montrose, the last really affluent neighborhood in the city and the center of its gay community, to secede. More importantly for Hall, though, it also prompted business to leave and Sylvester Turner to return.
With Turner's term cut short by a federal appointment by President Kennedy, Houston politics went in some odd directions. Ben Reyes, the longtime future first Hispanic mayor of Houston, melted down in scandal; Jessica Farrar fought City Council over a series of sarcastic "message" resolutions and gained an undeserved reputation for frivolity. Ed Gonzalez, backed by the Houston Police Department, overtook Craig Washington after a bizarre scandal involving the former Congressman shooting at local teenagers, but he himself was embroiled in scandals about interfering with collective bargaining and, more shockingly, covering up police murders after a raid on the wrong address. Tony Buzbee played his work as attorney for the victims into a mayoral bid, then drank his way through a mayoral term best described as a series of strange scandals and gaffes with no real legacy.
Now, 32 years after Sylvester Turner's first term as Mayor, the "adult in the room" is considering retirement. His legacy is written all over Houston - the end of one political establishment and the beginning of a new one, a city torn apart by conservative forces but relatively free to write its own fate, new roads and buses from Acres Homes to Denver Harbor to Sharpstown. There are other legacies, of course - more visible racial and class tensions, corruption, deals with the devil to preserve 'autonomy', and a deeply politicized administration. Turner is well-loved by many Houstonians, and hated with a burning passion by others within and without the city limits. More neutral observers might literally die if you put a gun to their head and asked whether he had been a good or bad mayor - it's that hard to imagine Houston without him bestriding it like a colossus...