De Soto Street (also known as DeSoto, but here we'll use it as "De Soto" for consistency) has a rather rough reputation, and on the section of the street west of White Oak Bayou has three housing complexes where there used to be five. Most of the apartments around this area have changed names at least once, and this article covers two of the demolished apartments of De Soto, plus a third on Holly View Drive. At 5353 De Soto was Oakbrook Apartments. These were built in 1980 and abandoned by city decree in December 2008 but they weren't demolished until July 2016, almost a decade later. Nearby at 5626 De Soto Street was Candlelight Trails Condominiums, built in 1979. In 2007, the city evicted these condominiums due to "substandard living conditions" but they weren't demolished until late 2008. Nothing has replaced them, and it remains an empty lot with blank outlines where the buildings used to be.

A little bit to the north is the site of Gables of Inwood at 5600 Holly View. These opened as the 165-unit Chatelaine Apartments in spring 1980. Despite being yet another adults-only complex, Chatelaine Apartments was another of the apartments in the Houston suburbs that fell upon hard times in the late 1980s, by 1991 it was advertising gimmicks to get people in the door and by the mid-1990s had the name of Gray Gables. By 2008, the Gables Of Inwood, as it was known was in bad condition. It had received 246 code violations over the past two years with an abandoned fire-damaged building that was neither demolished or repaired. The city shut it down later that year but it wasn't until early 2011 when the apartments were finally knocked down.

This article has been spun off from "Other Houston Roads - Outer Loop" and expanded.