Urban Edge

Houstonians are looking slightly less optimistic than they normally do, and the economy is their main concern—more than crime, pandemics, traffic, flooding, and other recent plagues. In fact, optimism is at its lowest level in the history of the Kinder Houston Area Survey, driven largely by the rising cost of living. This cloudy outlook also comes with a dose of clarity about the lingering effects of racism and even stronger agreement on the need to support public education.

Houston understands itself a little more clearly thanks to 40 years of insight from this Rice social psychologist turned urban visionary.

Increasingly, Houston-area students learning English in public school are taking longer to become proficient, which is holding them back from mastering other subjects and moving forward in their educational journey. In a new report, we identified a few factors that might be contributing to this trend—as well as factors that could lead to better outcomes.

Schools are enrolling now for next year across Houston and the state of Texas, with officials in many districts still hoping to bring their headcounts back up to prepandemic levels, particularly prekindergarten, which has 25,000 fewer students than it did in 2019-20.

Racial inequities have long plagued the U.S. housing market. Yet only recently has the federal government moved to address one aspect of the real estate industry that continues to exacerbate the racial wealth gap in housing: appraisals.

In the 1930s, motordom learned to depict an unachievable future utopia that is forever just over the next horizon, apparently always close enough to attract extravagant private and public investment, but somehow never actually achieved.

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. 

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. 

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.

More Houston homeowners are embracing solar, but the city is only scratching the surface of its potential. 

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. 

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.

City officials, home builders and affordable housing developers gathered in northeast Houston this week to celebrate a new model for mixed-income housing.

Earlier this month, Communities In Schools of Houston, a non-profit organization that has served the Houston community for over four decades, received an unprecedented financial gift.

When you move to a city you know nothing about in your late 50s and your job is to make sure your organization has a big impact on making that city better, you desperately need tour guides. I had many when I first arrived in Houston in 2014, but none helped me more than Pat Oxford, a longtime Kinder Institute Advisory Board member, who passed away Feb. 13 at the age of 79.