Houston is big. The region’s size and all it encompasses has become an in-joke among residents — “Houston is an hour away from Houston,” the old saying goes. The city is sprawling, populous, industrial and growing. The reasons for the sprawl, rapid population growth and the breadth of successful industries are many and complex. We …
Category Archives: Blog
Is Houston really that affordable?
Over the years, the greater Houston region has gained a reputation for affordability. Historically, Greater Houston is the rare major metro in which the cost of living is low and overall opportunity is high, especially relative to its size as the fifth largest metropolitan area and the fourth largest city in the nation. Our region’s …
A deep dive into domestic violence in Texas and across the Houston region
Texas has seen three times the number of family violence deaths since 2017 with rates of family violence increasing across all three counties Domestic violence, also known as domestic abuse or intimate partner violence (IPV), is a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an …
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Key insights from our Mental Health Data Dive + Workshop
Greater Houston Community Foundation hosted a program on July 20, 2022, to convene experts, researchers and practitioners around the increasingly severe mental health crisis affecting children and adolescents. The program began with a brief data presentation from Understanding Houston, to set the stage for the deeper dives from guest speakers that would follow. The convening …
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Houston is Hot
Residents of the three-county region are no strangers to Houston’s heat We all know that Houston is hot. How quickly is Houston getting hotter and why? And what — aside from making us sweat — are the implications of the region’s excessive heat? The rising heat foreshadows many distressing possibilities as it relates to climate …
Houston is Diverse
Why diversity and inclusion matter and what they truly mean in Greater Houston It’s no secret that Houston is diverse. The region was recognized for its multiculturalism long before it was reported to be the most racially/ethnically diverse place in the nation. We typically measure diversity in terms of race or ethnicity, but it is …
Houston is Resilient
Houston has certainly earned its reputation for resilience. Since 1980 the region has been hit by 26 natural disasters, including five hurricanes, five tropical storms, two wildfires, a dozen rain/flood events and a winter storm, to name a few. Nearly a third of these disasters have occurred since 2015, and yet the population continues to …
Houston is Vibrant
For some time, Greater Houston has been, to those who don’t live here, in the midst of an identity crisis. Even Anthony Bourdain, a man who made a career of ostensibly analyzing and broadcasting to the world the essence of every city into which he wandered, admitted to “entertaining lazy prejudices and assumptions” about the …
Houston is Changing
“This is the city where the American future is going to be worked out,” Stephen L. Klineberg, Ph.D., said of Houston in 2010. Klineberg, the founding director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, has been tracking the ways in which Houston has been changing since the 1980s through the Kinder Houston Area Survey. …
Guest Blog: Ending the inertia of student mobility in Houston
It matters that 60,000+ Houston-area students change schools each year. Here’s what we can do about it. Each school year in the Houston area, more than 60,000 children leave the school they were attending to enter another school. Given that more than 700,000 students are served by Houston-area schools1, the number of children moving may …
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