Urban Edge

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. 

With 2020 Census data in hand, Houston is moving forward with city council redistricting. The first proposed map was unveiled last week ahead of a public comment phase. For the most part, not much changes in terms of actual boundaries, but the underlying demographics of Houston’s population shifted considerably in the past 10 years.

It's time to move beyond research that identifies problems to research that identifies solutions.

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. 

The past two years have been a heady time for real estate, and as we emerge from the pandemic’s fog of uncertainty, the 2022 State of Housing report details an increasingly stressed situation in Harris County and Houston. Median prices now exceed $300,000 and are approaching $350,000, slipping out of reach for residents earning the median household income. Meanwhile, much of the already limited affordable rental housing stock is becoming increasingly vulnerable.

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. 

Climate change is propelling more extreme weather events, including more precipitation and flooding, which means the need for more strategies such as buyouts has never been more urgent. As a concept, buyouts are fairly straightforward: the government buys up properties to remove them out of harm’s way, reducing the risk of loss of life, the need for future flood repairs, insurance payouts and other costs. 

If you built a political platform based on what most Houstonians would agree with, what would it look like? We have one version of a “Houston agenda”, thanks to the 2022 Kinder Houston Area Survey. While divisions persist, big shares of Houstonians across party lines agree on several big issues.

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.