Houston is still reckoning with the biggest lessons from Hurricane Harvey
When it hit five years ago this week, Hurricane Harvey was an unprecedented disaster: 68 people dead, 200,000 homes damaged or destroyed, a half-million cars wiped out, $125 billion in damage.
To grow Houston’s prosperity, it must become a better place — for everyone
As the name of my new book of essays suggests, I have always believed that place and prosperity are deeply intertwined. A city or town probably won’t be prosperous unless it has lots of place amenities – things that draw people to the location like parks, good schools, restaurants and stores, cultural institutions, walkable neighborhoods. And a city or town probably can’t afford all those amenities unless it is prosperous.
Houston, Dallas led metro area growth in 2021 even as their urban cores lost population
Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth were again among the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country last year, according to new statistics released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Remembering Pat Oxford, a trusted adviser to governors, presidents—and urban researchers
When you move to a city you know nothing about in your late 50s and your job is to make sure your organization has a big impact on making that city better, you desperately need tour guides. I had many when I first arrived in Houston in 2014, but none helped me more than Pat Oxford, a longtime Kinder Institute Advisory Board member, who passed away Feb. 13 at the age of 79.
At first glance, Houston taxpayers seem to pay more into county coffers than it receives in services
Do property taxpayers inside the City of Houston subsidize Harris County services? It’s a question that comes up a lot, given the fact that city residents—like their counterparts in the county—pay separate property taxes to the county, but the county provides many services only to the unincorporated areas.
Houston public health could benefit from a more collaborative governance structure
When COVID-19 struck in early 2020, public health experts in Houston swung into action. But, unlike in other major Texas cities, two different agencies swung into action: the City of Houston Health Department and the Harris County Public Health Department. Although they worked well together in a crisis, the pandemic gave new currency to the question of how public services are delivered in the Houston area.
Amid all the high-profile constitutional amendments in this year’s Texas election (no COVID restrictions for religious services, property tax breaks for families of veterans and the disabled), one seemingly nerdy amendment stood out as important for urban and suburban areas such as unincorporated Harris County. That was Proposition 2, which allows counties to issue tax-increment bonds for transportation and other infrastructure.
Texas cities are as sprawling as ever. But they’re also more dense.
The popular perception is that Texas’s metropolitan areas are sprawling all over the place because the state has so much land. The truth of the matter is a little more complicated, however. Yes, all the metros in Texas are sprawling – but they’re densifying as well. And when you “net it out,” the density is winning over the sprawl in the big metros – while the sprawl is winning over the density in the smaller ones.
Here at the Kinder Institute, we do a lot of research on housing—especially in Houston but also in some of the other big Texas metro areas. And all of our research says that Texas is gradually losing its affordability advantage: Home prices are rising faster than incomes, making housing less affordable each year. This is obviously true in Austin, where home prices are skyrocketing, but it’s also true in Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth as well.
Houston and Harris County’s long reign of growth may have come to an end
Houston has always had a reputation as a fast-growing, go-go, get-it-done kind of place. But that’s changing.
Triumph of the Triangle: How Texas can hold onto its urban economic powerhouse
In 1966, a lawyer named Herb Kelleher met one of his clients, a pilot and investment banker named Rollin King, for a drink in a San Antonio hotel bar. Both were entrepreneurs looking for new opportunities, and they discussed starting an airline to serve an in-state. The legend is that King drew a triangle on a cocktail napkin, showing how the new airline would connect the major markets in Texas.
Pandemic POV: I got back on the bus this week — and it was fine
A longtime public transit rider describes what it was like to use Metro again for the first time in more than a year.
6 post-pandemic predictions about how cities will be different going forward
As access to the COVID-19 vaccination becomes increasingly widespread, it seems possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But what’s next for cities? Here are six ways cities will be different — from Zoomburbs and public transit to the fate of retail and housing — in the years to come.
It seems like all of California is moving to Texas. Is that true?
In the past, the influx of Californians to Texas has fluctuated from year to year. However, since 2018, the West Coast migration has remained high. Why is that? (Hint: It’s not oil prices.)
Now that failing infrastructure has our attention, it needs our investment
There’s no question the United States is living off past investments in infrastructure without building the new infrastructure we need — or even upgrading the old infrastructure we have. It’s time to invest heavily in quasi-public infrastructure and ramp up effective public oversight of that infrastructure so it will work for us in emergency situations.
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