Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland and Tina Knowles cut the ribbon on Tuesday, October 13, at the Knowles-Rowland House in Midtown Houston, a building with 31 permanent supportive apartments for people who have experienced chronic homelessness. Sixteen of the units are built for residents with mobility or sensory impairments. Beyoncé’s daughters, Blue Ivy and Rumi Carter, appeared with her at the ceremony.
The address carries the duo’s earliest charity work. In 1999, money from Destiny’s Child’s first single helped pay for the Knowles-Rowland Center for Youth, a gym and community space on the campus of St. John’s Downtown Church, where both families worshipped. Hurricane Harvey damaged it in 2017, a fire hit it in 2021, and for a time afterward the shell was used for storage. The redevelopment turns that youth center into housing.
Beyoncé kept her remarks close to the church itself. She thanked pastors Rudy and Juanita Rasmus, who founded the Bread of Life charity in 1992, and said: “This church is our foundation. I was baptized right here.” Rudy Rasmus also officiated her wedding to Jay-Z in April 2008. Local officials in the audience included Mayor John Whitmire, county commissioner Rodney Ellis and Congressman Christian Menefee.
What “permanent supportive housing” means here
For readers outside the US, the term has a precise federal meaning. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development counts someone as chronically homeless if they have been homeless continuously for at least a year, or at least four times in three years adding up to 12 months or more. Permanent supportive housing, as Bread of Life uses the term, means a permanent home with services on the same site, so the problems behind a person’s homelessness are treated alongside the housing itself.
At the Knowles-Rowland House those services come from Temenos Community Development Corporation, which has run this kind of housing since 2009. Residents get a case manager plus counseling for mental health and addiction, training in everyday life skills and help with nutrition, and the apartments carry federally subsidized rental assistance. The building is owned through Knowles-Rowland House, LP, a partnership in which Bread of Life is the general partner and Temenos the limited partner.
Who paid for it
The public money is the clearest part. In July 2023, Harris County Commissioners Court approved $7.2 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, the federal pandemic recovery package. Bread of Life now puts the total cost at $8.4 million, below the $10.5 million estimate it gave when Beyoncé made a surprise visit to the project’s kickoff in September 2023. The working is simple: $8.4 million divided by 31 apartments comes to about $271,000 per unit, and the county grant alone covers roughly $232,000 of that, or about 86 percent.
What none of the organizers have said is whether Beyoncé, Rowland or the BeyGOOD foundation put money into the rebuild. At the 2023 kickoff, a Bread of Life spokesperson said she could not say whether Beyoncé was contributing. The names on the door honor the original center rather than confirming a new gift.
A Houston pattern, not a one-off
The family’s ties to this charity are long and documented. By 2014, Beyoncé and her relatives had given more than $7 million to Bread of Life, according to BeyGOOD’s history. After Harvey in 2017, BeyGOOD worked with the charity to find families temporary housing and donated $75,000 worth of mattresses. In 2020, Tina Knowles, who chairs the foundation, pushed the #IDidMyPart drive that gave about 1,000 free COVID-19 tests in Houston. Fifteen years before that, after Hurricane Katrina, she co-founded the Survivor Foundation with Beyoncé, Rowland and others to provide transitional housing for evacuees.
The Houston opening is a different kind of giving from Beyoncé’s most recent headline: last month she marked her 45th birthday with a $2 million gift to the Studio Museum in Harlem. That was a cultural donation in New York. This one is brick-and-mortar welfare in the neighborhood where she grew up.
Bread of Life also used the ceremony to announce the Rudy and Juanita Rasmus Food Distribution Center. Its next food and supply giveaway, open to Houston households, runs from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturday, October 17, at Gray and Crawford streets.
Further reading
Image: Asterio Tecson, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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