Urban Edge

Stories, perspectives and insights from the Kinder Institute

More Houston neighborhoods became majority-renter over the past decade

The share of renter households in the U.S. has doubled in the past 50 years—a trend that is reshaping how housing is built and distributed across cities and communities. In recent years, Houston has seen considerable growth in renters in a few concentrated areas.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner emphasizes funding for infrastructure, public education

Several hours after rescinding a nearly 40-hour boil water notice, Mayor Sylvester Turner had a timely example for why he thinks there is a clear need for infrastructure investment in Houston and throughout Texas.

'The New Red Book' is a call to appreciate Houston as a bastion of Black heritage

A new book serves as a long overdue field guide to Black history in Houston, one that hearkens back to a century-old catalog of the city’s African American community. In “The New Red Book,” author Lindsay Gary takes readers to 50 sites, telling the stories about these important spaces and the people whose legacies remain relevant today.

Greener Gulfton effort plants seeds for alleviating neighborhood's nature inequity

In August of 2020, a heat mapping campaign identified Gulfton as the hottest neighborhood in Houston. The effort, co-led by The Nature Conservancy and the Houston Advanced Research Center, indicated that the southwest Houston neighborhood was 17 degrees warmer than the coolest neighborhood measured. A community-driven plan, “Greener Gulfton,” seeks to decrease the sweltering temperature, while adding an array of benefits to the immigrant-rich area that 45,000 residents call home.

Lone scarred state: Texas must contend with outsized death toll from COVID-19 and anti-vaccine attitudes

The United States of America leads all high-income nations in COVID-19 deaths, even though as a nation it had the greatest access to antiviral vaccines and therapeutics. To understand this disconnect, we can look to the COVID-19 deaths and disability in the state of Texas. Because of COVID-19, Texas is enduring one of the greatest human tragedies in its 186-year history. It did not have to be this way.

New trove of federal data clearly shows a growing racial gap in home appraisals

The government just released millions of records on residential appraisals. A pair of researchers who focus on racial inequity in housing analyzed the data. Here’s what they found.

With hybrid work here to stay, downtown Houston is looking for office conversion candidates

With the rise of a hybrid and remote workforce as a result of COVID-19, developers are looking for ways to be less reliant on office leases to keep people downtown.

Accountability, capacity building and collaboration key to a healthier Settegast

Settegast’s estimated life expectancy of 65.7 years, more than 20 years lower than the highest expectancies in Clear Lake and River Oaks, makes it among the most vulnerable communities in our area. While residents of the historically Black neighborhood in northeast Houston have called out inequities over the course of several decades, those concerns have mostly gone unheeded. But there is hope that change is coming.

To achieve Vision Zero, Houston must shift the way it thinks about transportation at every level

Vision Zero has been changing traffic safety culture internationally since the 1990s, but in Houston, it did not begin until the 2010s. A traffic safety culture shift is happening among city leaders and within departments. However, transforming communitywide beliefs here will require meaningful engagement, clear strategies and sustained political will for the long road ahead.

The first project in Buffalo Bayou Park's eastward plan is its most urgent: Build more housing

It’s really quite a lovely park, with features that check all the standard boxes: a playground, a gazebo with a big table, a soccer field, restrooms and water fountains, a paved trail that winds through the property, and lots of plain old green space. On a recent weekday afternoon, though, a visit to Tony Marron Park on Houston’s East End revealed a few glitches.

Thanks to Justice40, Port Houston investments will bring long overdue relief to Pleasantville

My wife and I couldn’t believe it. When we retired and moved back home to Houston’s historically Black Pleasantville, just east of downtown, we smelled the unmistakable odor of the petrochemical plants and saw the close-knit community where we’d grown up surrounded by noisy freeways. The apartments where friends of mine lived had been replaced by warehouses swarming with old diesel trucks.

A look at Texas in 2021, the postpandemic year, in five charts

The American Community Survey, or ACS, helps track trends between official Census counts. Because it is a more wide-ranging survey than the official Census, it is able to capture an array of details about large populations. The release of some new 2021 data last month provides an opportunity to examine postpandemic shifts in population, housing, transportation and employment.

Is Houston really better off without zoning? One planner makes the case in ‘Arbitrary Lines’

A new book, “Arbitrary Lines,” argues that a century of zoning has hardened racial and class segregation in cities across the U.S. and worsened the effects of inequality by making it almost impossible to build anything but single-family homes in some cities. Author and planner M. Nolan Gray says there is a better way: Just look at Houston. 

What happens after foreclosures rip through a neighborhood? A look at two Harris County cases

The 2022 State of Housing in Harris County and Houston analyzed foreclosures countywide from 2005 to 2020. But what happens to a neighborhood after a foreclosure crisis?

Federal report calls out civil rights inequities in Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath

In the wake of two historically devastating storms in 2017, financial aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development contributed to an increase in wealth inequality.