The COVID-19 crisis forced many companies to quickly transition to work from home. Now, as the economy continues to open up, businesses have to decide if they’ll go back to the onsite world of the old normal or continue with the remote-work model of the new normal. Employees of companies that choose the latter will have more options for where they live and office, including the Urban Hotel, the Suburban Workshop and the Exurban Metropolis.
Research related to Houston’s problems with ‘newly poor’ neighborhoods, housing affordability, auto loan debt, transportation and COVID-19 all point to one overarching issue: Inequality.
Stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of COVID-19 resulted in Houstonians driving a lot less. But Houston hasn’t stopped being an industrial city during the pandemic, which shows why reducing all air pollution is key to protecting public health.
For years, Houston has been touted as one of the nation’s most affordable major metropolitan areas. But it’s now facing a decreasing supply of affordable housing.
To effectively address the affordability crisis in Houston, local decision-makers and individuals must consider the combined costs of housing and transportation and their impact on overall affordability.
While local decision-makers and individuals tend to view housing and transportation separately, effectively addressing affordability for Houstonians means considering housing and transportation expenses together.
To better understand the affordability crisis in Houston, LINK Houston and Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research teamed up to explore where affordable housing and high-quality, affordable transportation overlap in the city.
Through workshops, community feedback and an interactive data walk, a Houston Community Data Connections team empowered Third Ward community members and other stakeholders to use data from a multi-phase comprehensive needs assessment to pursue priorities in the neighborhood.
In the past several months, the density of urban areas has been demonized by more than a few because of the COVID-19 crisis. While understandable, it’s not completely accurate when it comes to the current pandemic, which has ravaged New York but hasn’t affected other very dense cities like Hong Kong and Singapore in the same way. In Houston, the city’s light touch when it comes to land-use regulations and its relative affordability are leading to greater density. That trend is likely to continue when the pandemic ends.
Long known as a place where everything except the cost of living is big, the state seems to be losing its edge in the area of home prices — especially in its large metros. Continuing in that direction could lead to trouble down the road.
Many families in the Houston region live in homes with flood damage, of which they may or may not be aware. These residents may face high levels of mold exposure that can lead to lung damage that puts them at a greater risk of severe complications should they become infected with the novel coronavirus.
Editor’s note: This is the first of two posts exploring the long-term effects the COVID-19 crisis will have on the American city. Once we get through this, cities as we know them will be changed forever.
Thursday, in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Texas Supreme Court halted eviction proceedings until April 19. This is the right call. With an average of 600 evictions per week in Harris County, suspending evictions will prevent thousands of people from losing their homes over the next month.
Why are there so few studies charting displacement and cultural decline in non-gentrifying neighborhoods? According to this commentary, the implicit assumption in most gentrification research is that if a neighborhood doesn’t change, it stays the same. And that displacement by decline is much more common and more harmful than displacement due to gentrification.
Effective efforts at the neighborhood level can be sustained and amplified by plugging into broader citywide efforts in ways that better align long-term goals and influence implementation plans at both levels.
Research from Rice University sociologists shows urban areas and predominantly white neighborhoods that are at risk of flooding in cities benefit the most from FEMA’s voluntary buyout program.
