Sex buyers at Houston's infamous Track will now face felonies. Experts weigh in on how it will work.

For decades, drivers have trawled the Bissonnet Track, an otherwise unremarkable circuit between two highways, in search of anonymous sex. For nearly as long, police have staged undercover decoys in the southwest Houston neighborhood, booking one suspect after another for soliciting prostitution. Yet day and night customers return to the Track to proposition young strangers in tight, skimpy clothes. Officials hope a landmark Texas law effective this week will curb the activity many residents and business owners view a nuisance and advocates see as exploitation. The measure passed without objection amid a tumultuous legislative session in Austin, and it is the first in the country to make it felony, punishable by significant jail time, to pay for sex. The law also requires “no trespassing” signs be posted at residential treatment facilities to prevent would-be traffickers from preying on children in the foster system.

More explicit signage that appeared last month along the Bissonnet Track area drew accolades from city and county leaders who are hopeful that the felony law will deter johns cruising for a hookup. The last comprehensive effort to suppress street prostitution on the Track — street parlance for an area used to peddle sex — fizzled out in court. The state and county sought to establish a no-prostitution zone at the behest of the local development district in 2018. The nuisance suit would have leveled civil penalties on johns, pimps and sellers. Anti-trafficking groups said the lawsuit wrongly targeted victims. The ACLU said the proposed injunction was too broad, punishing several dozen named defendants for conduct such as loitering at a bus stop or using their cell phones inside the zone. That 2018 legal effort has stalled in court and the new Harris County Attorney recently removed 36 alleged sellers from the case. Lawmakers said the new policy targeting johns is market-driven. They say clamping down on demand will have a chilling effect and ultimately diminish the supply of sex workers. “If we drive down the demand there won’t be a need for those women to be down there on those corners, because nobody would come and take them up on their offers,” said Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, author of the bipartisan bill. Thompson said she also hopes the law would “put the pimps out of business.” “We hope that the law has a chilling effect on low frequency and high frequency buyers and signals a cultural shift in that the pervasive attitude is that it is OK to buy sex,” said Minal Patel Davis, of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Office of Human Trafficking and Domestic Violence. “It’s a felony now - this means it can show up on employment records.”