Urban Edge

Stories, perspectives and insights from the Kinder Institute

Community Bridges work demonstrates the need for nonprofits to be responsive, accessible despite disparities

With 25 years of service, the Girls Empowerment Network's focus on listening and being responsive to its clients drove home a key lesson: For any nonprofit to be effective, it needs to continually make its services accessible to people.

Understanding the unvaccinated: A look at hesitancy as well as access

The Delta variant has led to COVID-19’s fourth wave—a surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. More than any other factor, what's driving this is the number of unvaccinated people—who either by choice or by design are not getting shots. Because vaccine hesitancy and access varies across states and cities, local solutions might be key to closing the gap.

Here’s where rent relief is helping Harris County residents at risk of eviction

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.

After rushing to provide virtual instruction and social supports, school districts can take stock of lessons learned

The shift to 100% online instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 meant school districts around the country needed to quickly develop plans for how to implement distance learning and serve student needs. The Houston Education Research Consortium analyzed the plans of 45 school districts from 15 states for insights into the collective response to the pandemic.

For Harris County renters, the path to homeownership is becoming harder to see

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.

Houston’s historic Black neighborhoods see significant demographic shifts as they confront gentrification

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.

How Houston plans to plant 4.6 million new trees by 2030

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.

Who owns the single-family rentals and what do we know about them?

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.

If remote work survives the pandemic in Houston, it could curb congestion

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.

Disaster preparedness takes more than an infographic

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