The first project in Buffalo Bayou Park's eastward plan is its most urgent: Build more housing
URBAN EDGE : October 14, 2022
It’s really quite a lovely park, with features that check all the standard boxes: a playground, a gazebo with a big table, a soccer field, restrooms and water fountains, a paved trail that winds through the property, and lots of plain old green space. On a recent weekday afternoon, though, a visit to Tony Marron Park on Houston’s East End revealed a few glitches.
Thanks to Justice40, Port Houston investments will bring long overdue relief to Pleasantville
URBAN EDGE : October 12, 2022
My wife and I couldn’t believe it. When we retired and moved back home to Houston’s historically Black Pleasantville, just east of downtown, we smelled the unmistakable odor of the petrochemical plants and saw the close-knit community where we’d grown up surrounded by noisy freeways. The apartments where friends of mine lived had been replaced by warehouses swarming with old diesel trucks.
While we fix our flood infrastructure, let’s also improve mental health care and strengthen communities
URBAN EDGE : September 12, 2022
Natural disasters are increasingly common each year, affecting infrastructure and contributing to economic, social, health, and psychological hardships. When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, it quickly amassed $125 billion in damages, displacing over a million people and their homes. Along with the economic toll of a disaster event, mental health concerns carry a cost that is difficult to measure.
Borderlands without borders: How poetry can dismantle the walls between planners and communities
URBAN EDGE : July 22, 2022
As a method of community planning, and as an impetus for creative placemaking (and placekeeping), poetry can help anyone–not just writers–think about how they are situated within their local communities and urban spaces. By writing poetry, any member of the public—in particular, those who are historically underrepresented—can turn conceptions into things that can be discussed and implemented. Since poetry has dislodged itself from patrician control and has found fertile ground in the digital landscape, it can be easily shared within local contexts and beyond.
To grow Houston’s prosperity, it must become a better place — for everyone
URBAN EDGE : June 27, 2022
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.
It is time to recognize the Rio Grande Valley as a rising borderland metropolis
URBAN EDGE : June 15, 2022
The Rio Grande Valley (RGV), or el Valle del Rio Bravo as it is known in Mexico, is often considered a far-flung collection of small-town border communities. As such, it remains largely unknown to the rest of the U.S., except when cited as one of the poorest areas in the country alongside Middle Appalachia or the Lower Mississippi Delta.
In cars, Texans are literally the worst, according to the rankings
URBAN EDGE : April 4, 2022
About every quarter, the Urban Edge takes a break from its usual in-depth research-focused topics to assess the latest rankings of cities and states—some silly, some serious—and what they might tell us about Houston and Texas and their standing in the world of urban life. Today, we have to start with the bad news, where Texas is literally the worst.
Ride-hailing is finding inroads to equity and sustainability, Uber’s global head of cities says
URBAN EDGE : March 30, 2022
Uber saw its ridership decline sharply amid the pandemic, but it was saved by an expansion of its delivery service. Its future, however, is tied to growing its ride-hailing service as it confronts reduced transit use overall and as it charts a path to electrifying its fleet by 2030. Uber’s global head of cities and transportation policy, Shin-pei Tsay, said the company is focused on pragmatic wins that it can scale across thousands of cities rather than wait on a transportation utopia to arrive.
An economist’s case for urban density: It’s just math
URBAN EDGE : March 28, 2022
Conversation about land use and building in cities often turns to questions of aesthetics or personal preferences. You find impassioned advocates of various kinds of architecture or lifestyle.
Urbanism arrives on TikTok: ‘Cities can be built differently, and people are noticing’
URBAN EDGE : March 9, 2022
A small but active community of people is bringing the conversation about cities, urban design, transportation, and equity to TikTok. These would-be influencers have captured impressive audiences—hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views, engagements and comments. They could be key to boosting awareness of urban problems and provoking dialogue and change—if only there weren't a million other videos begging for attention at the same time.
Student homelessness is pervasive and hard to track. COVID-19 made things worse.
URBAN EDGE : March 4, 2022
Before the pandemic hit in March 2020, Faith—a single mother with two children, one in third grade and one in fifth grade—worked at a sports stadium in Houston. Her focus at the time was “paying for a room and trying to pay for child care,” she stated during an interview. But after the pandemic began, the stadium canceled games and Faith found herself out of work. Not long afterward, she and her children were evicted.