By the 1970s many of the original Fourth Ward residents left to go to other communities. Crime and the prevalence of crack cocaine became issues affecting the community. Starting in the 1970s the City of Houston wanted to demolish Allen Parkway Village while residents fought to have the entire structure remain. Plans to replace the Fourth Ward with condominiums and a park date to that decade. John Nova Lomax of the "Houston Press" said that the Fourth Ward had been "embattled" due to its proximity to Downtown Houston and that "Developers have long seen the area's brick streets and ramshackle, century-old shotgun shacks as an inexcusable, poverty-stricken, drug- and crime-infested blot on the landscape of otherwise prosperous Westside, Inner Loop Houston."