Historic Tamina community’s $21 million water deal comes at another cost
URBAN EDGE : January 11, 2023
James Leveston has been fighting for more than 20 years to bring basic public services to the Montgomery County community of Tamina, where he’s lived for most of his life. Late last year, he went door to door asking his neighbors if they would support a deal with the nearby city of Shenandoah to provide water and sewer service. About 150 of the 190 affected households agreed, he said.
Greener Gulfton effort plants seeds for alleviating neighborhood's nature inequity
URBAN EDGE : November 16, 2022
In August of 2020, a heat mapping campaign identified Gulfton as the hottest neighborhood in Houston. The effort, co-led by The Nature Conservancy and the Houston Advanced Research Center, indicated that the southwest Houston neighborhood was 17 degrees warmer than the coolest neighborhood measured. A community-driven plan, “Greener Gulfton,” seeks to decrease the sweltering temperature, while adding an array of benefits to the immigrant-rich area that 45,000 residents call home.
Accountability, capacity building and collaboration key to a healthier Settegast
URBAN EDGE : October 25, 2022
Settegast’s estimated life expectancy of 65.7 years, more than 20 years lower than the highest expectancies in Clear Lake and River Oaks, makes it among the most vulnerable communities in our area. While residents of the historically Black neighborhood in northeast Houston have called out inequities over the course of several decades, those concerns have mostly gone unheeded. But there is hope that change is coming.
Stephen Klineberg: A retrospective
URBAN EDGE : May 3, 2022
Houston understands itself a little more clearly thanks to 40 years of insight from this Rice social psychologist turned urban visionary.
If remote work survives the pandemic in Houston, it could curb congestion
URBAN EDGE : July 30, 2021
What for some may be an anticipated return to “normal” is for others an anxiety-filled readjustment to pre-pandemic life. No matter which category you place yourself, there are some aspects of normalcy we’d all prefer to leave in 2019. Chief among them is the daily struggle to get where we need or want to go. Unfortunately, it’s not certain how long we have before traffic in Houston returns and exceeds levels we saw a couple of years ago.
Trees battle Houston’s brutal heat, but many poorer areas are left unshaded
URBAN EDGE : July 16, 2021
Trees provide significant benefits that can be felt both now and in the future, from lowering temperatures, fighting flooding and slowing climate change. But not all Houstonians enjoy the valuable shade and other advantages trees offer in equal measures. A new interactive mapping tool makes it easier to see which neighborhoods are most in need of more trees.
We need to talk about the Astrodome
URBAN EDGE : June 26, 2021
Former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett discusses the past, present and once-future plan for the Astrodome, which has stood empty for almost 20 years. Recently, efforts to remake the Dome have been renewed.