Excerpts

In ‘A Good Reputation,’ Houston’s Northside offers diverging views on neighborhood change

In an April 2014 Houstonia Magazine article, “Where to Live Now: The 25 Hottest Neighborhoods of 2014,” the authors claimed that gentrification had “leapt beyond the Heights and into Lindale Park and Brooke Smith,” which meant that “Northside Village” was the “the next play for urban pioneers.”

After Hurricane Harvey, flood insurance created windfalls and fault lines for the middle class

Friendswood, a close-knit suburb southeast of Houston that routinely makes lists for being the “best place to raise a family,” also serves as a case study for how flaws in the federal approach to flood insurance and disaster recovery aid resulted in fractured outcomes even among similarly situated middle-class neighbors after Hurricane Harvey.

Why technofuturism can’t deliver on its promises of a transportation utopia

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.

‘In Too Deep’ explores intersection of mothering, class, community—and disastrous, repetitive flooding in Houston

A new book, “In Too Deep” tells the story of Bayou Oaks, and its repetitive flooding, from the perspective of 36 mothers who are raising young children there. It follows the families across the course of more than a year, starting right after Hurricane Harvey flooded their homes, and tracking them across the recovery year and beyond as they work to restore their community for the third time in three years. 

San Antonio still reckons with lessons from deadly 1921 floods

A new book revisits a flood that devastated San Antonio a century ago that claimed hundreds of lives and reshaped the city. It also led to the construction San Antonio’s first modern flood infrastructure and the development of the nation’s earliest environmental justice movements as Hispanic people confronted deadly disparities in housing and flood control.