Urban Edge

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.

As housing prices rise, housing affordability is a growing concern for many families, especially for renters. The affordability gap varies by neighborhood, with most inner-city areas far beyond the reach of the median-income renter. 

Four predominantly Black neighborhoods in Houston have been experiencing gentrification in recent years. Data captured by U.S. Census surveys shows these communities are becoming proportionally more Hispanic and more educated, housing prices are accelerating, and residents there are more likely to rent and face cost burdens than others in Harris County. 

Trees can cool our cities and make them more resilient. Here’s a look at what is being done to grow and protect the urban forest in the Houston area.  

A lot of the rent houses owned by real estate investment trusts — or REITs — are located in unincorporated parts of Harris County and municipal utility districts (MUDs) that have been hit hardest by foreclosures and flooding. Many of them are connected to local and national homebuilders. 

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. 

Helping our most vulnerable neighbors weather the toughest storms requires hard work and commitment before, during and after crises strike. 

By the end of 2020, Houston had potentially tens of thousands of fewer residents, data from the U.S. Postal Service suggests. Like other cities, it experienced a surge in migration as people began leaving urban areas amid the pandemic lockdowns. That shift is also continuing to take place well into 2021.

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.