Urban Edge

Posts about where Houston and other Texas metros are ranked on lists of best and worst places for you-name-it routinely perform well on this blog. These lists range from happiest and safest cities to best cities for staycations, foodies and working from home. Today, we’re kicking off a new feature focused on rankings and Houston’s place on them. 

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.

Trees provide significant benefits that can be felt both now and in the future, from lowering temperatures, fighting flooding and slowing climate change. But not all Houstonians enjoy the valuable shade and other advantages trees offer in equal measures. A new interactive mapping tool makes it easier to see which neighborhoods are most in need of more trees.

If urban planners could proactively and precisely identify which buildings and civil structures are less resilient to flooding, not only could interventions be better targeted and more effective, but communities could become more engaged in the process. An interactive, geospatial artificial intelligence-driven platform could be the answer.

Houston has always had a reputation as a fast-growing, go-go, get-it-done kind of place. But that’s changing.

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. 

Economists studying the dramatic growth of new business activity found that the proportion of Black residents in a ZIP code had the greatest impact on the rate of increase and that business formation coincided with the stimulus payments.

As the school year ends, the relief is palpable. Let’s acknowledge what we went through during the pandemic. Many of us are feeling burnt out, but this is not the time to stop paying attention. Now is the moment to think big about the future of education.

The Texas Supreme Court has settled it: Houston's historic preservation ordinance is not a form of zoning, which is expressly banned in the city charter. The decision seems to clear the way for more local experimentation with urban design and development rules.

Just don’t call it zoning.

Central Houston President Bob Eury has been tracking COVID-19 case counts since the early days of the pandemic and has the spreadsheet to prove it. It was a ritual that he says helped him stay on top of the virus and how far off “normal” might be. But there may be one number he is tracking even more closely: how many of downtown’s estimated 168,000 workers are returning to the office. 

The city has eight months of ideal cycling weather each year and has taken some sizable steps in building out its bike infrastructure in the past decade. But is anyone outside of Houston paying attention?  

The inequality that exists across Houston neighborhoods has perhaps never been more evident than it has over the past year.