A spike in crime in one of Houston’s suburbs has some residents longing for good old days before the city took over their neighborhoods.

It’s been a decade, but for some people in Kingwood, the day Houston took over their community still makes their blood boil.

Fred Bullough has lived there 31 years.

“We didn’t gain anything,” he said. “Even to this day we didn’t gain a thing.”

Instead he says annexation cost Kingwood. Like for water: The city took over its system, and bills tripled.

But worse, many say, was what happened when the city replaced the volunteers who once ran the fire and ambulance service.

That, they said, cost them lives.

In 2000, 911 dispatchers, apparently confused that Kingwood was now part of Houston, took 10 minutes to get a Houston ambulance to a soccer field where a man was having a heart attack.

He later died.

But that was seven years ago.

“It’s taken a long time, but they have gotten better,” Mike Sullivan said. He’s Kingwood’s newly elected member on Houston’s City Council.

He said emergency response times have greatly improved.

Resident Renee Hyland says a recent neighborhood emergency did bring a quick response.

“There was like a fire truck, ambulance, police car right there they were there,” Hyland said.

She likes living in Kingwood and so must a lot of people. Since annexation, its population has soared from around 40,000 to more than 60,000.

But with more people has come more crime.

“Property crime is on the increase in Kingwood,” Sullivan said.

Turns out some thieves also like the annexed Kingwood. They’ve been hitting some neighborhoods hard, stealing everything from laptops to lawnmowers. Is Kingwood becoming an easy target?

Houston police said some of the thieves they’ve recently caught are from Montgomery County, one from Tomball — outsiders hitting Kingwood possibly because they know patrols here aren’t what they used to be.

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"The Livable Forest"

It’s down sometimes to just two HPD cars on the streets, according to Sullivan.

“It’s an impossible task so in comparison to what we had before; it’s not as good,’ Sullivan said.

But HPD is responding. An eight-officer tactical team is now assigned to the Kingwood substation.

Its commander said they’re targeting high crime neighborhoods, doing surveillance and other investigative work patrol officers would never have time for.

They said it’s already dramatically cut the number of car break-ins.

Still, officers said their numbers working Kingwood have dropped by one-third in recent years.

So despite the addition of the tactical team, “it doesn’t make us whole at all,” Sullivan said.

It all leaves many here ambivalent.

“Kingwood is a very, very nice, attractive place to live,” Bullough said. “I love the trees.”

A great place to live, but some believe maybe not as great as it might have been had it stayed outside Houston’s city limits.

Since annexation took effect in Kingwood in 1997, the Texas Legislature has changed the law.

It won’t do anything for Kingwood, but the law passed last year makes it harder for Houston to annex communities in the future.