Here’s where rent relief is helping Harris County residents at risk of eviction
The new CDC moratorium on evictions will expire on Oct. 3, but renters who are in jeopardy of losing their homes — and landlords who are owed money — can still apply for federally funded assistance.
If remote work survives the pandemic in Houston, it could curb congestion
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.
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.
As we worked to corral COVID-19, traffic deaths spun out of control
There were 3,896 traffic deaths in Texas last year, 273 more than in 2019. That 7.5% increase followed year-over-year decreases in motor vehicle fatalities from 2017–19, and is the biggest jump since 2012. Traffic fatalities in Harris County went up by almost 19% last year. That’s despite the fact that we were driving far less, or so it seemed.
Houston had an overcrowding problem at precisely the wrong time: during a pandemic
COVID-19 killed Black and Brown people at a far higher rate than white or Asian people, and in this year’s State of Housing report, we suggest home overcrowding and labor conditions played a role.
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