Latest Posts
In the 2022 Houston Area Survey, residents reassess their prospects
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.
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Stephen Klineberg: A retrospective
Houston understands itself a little more clearly thanks to 40 years of insight from this Rice social psychologist turned urban visionary.
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Continuity and supporting a student’s home language are helping more kids become English-proficient
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.
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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.
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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.
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In cars, Texans are literally the worst, according to the rankings
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.
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Home appraisals have long been a source of racial disparity. A new federal effort could change that.
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.
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Ride-hailing is finding inroads to equity and sustainability, Uber’s global head of cities says
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.
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An economist’s case for urban density: It’s just math
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.
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Houston, Dallas led metro area growth in 2021 even as their urban cores lost population
Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth were again among the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country last year, according to new statistics released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
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