Covid-19 and Cities

With hybrid work here to stay, downtown Houston is looking for office conversion candidates

With the rise of a hybrid and remote workforce as a result of COVID-19, developers are looking for ways to be less reliant on office leases to keep people downtown.

A look at Texas in 2021, the postpandemic year, in five charts

The American Community Survey, or ACS, helps track trends between official Census counts. Because it is a more wide-ranging survey than the official Census, it is able to capture an array of details about large populations. The release of some new 2021 data last month provides an opportunity to examine postpandemic shifts in population, housing, transportation and employment.

Winter Storm Uri showed how Harris County needs a tailored approach to disaster recovery

This week marks the first anniversary of an especially grim event in Texas’ history. Winter Storm Uri touched nearly every corner of the state with power outages that affected millions of people and led to at least 246 lives lost. Unofficial counts put the death toll at three times that number.

3 trends in urban planning that will shape how we live in the endemic-COVID era

It is now clear that the pandemic will not be behind us anytime soon. The pandemic variants and skepticism over the vaccine have made the potential for herd immunity (requiring a very high vaccination rate globally) difficult if not impossible to attain. This means that we are probably going to have to live with COVID for the foreseeable future and to adapt continuously to its impacts to our way of life.

Shaped but not shattered: How Houston’s Vietnamese-owned nail shops navigated the pandemic

The history of the contemporary nail salon industry as an entrepreneurial niche for Vietnamese women can be traced back to complex flows of migration, colonization, and humanitarian efforts. In 1975, following the Fall of Saigon, actress Tippi Hedren was tasked with assisting Vietnamese refugees who had resettled in the U.S. with vocational training, and made a trip to Camp Hope in Sacramento as part of her role as international relief coordinator. While countless businesses have been affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, nail salons were placed under especially intense scrutiny as their operations intersected with racialized concerns of public health and safety.