NEW NEIGHBORS
HOUSING, EDUCATION ARE KEY FOR DIVERSE CITY
Houston is ‘America on fast forward.’ By 2050, the city will be about 60 percent Hispanic, 15 percent white, 15 percent black and 10 percent Asian.
From a mostly white southern city devastated by the 1980s oil bust, Houston has transformed into a thriving international metropolis that in 2050 is projected to look more like El Paso, a predominantly Hispanic city on the Mexican border. An El Paso, that is, with Texas-sized shares of white, black and Asian residents.
It’s the face of America’s future — a stunning turnaround for a one-horse oil town built on a swamp by two New York City real estate promoters. Now the city is the bellwether for the nation as it navigates the challenges of its changing demographics years ahead of the rest of the country.
“We are in the midst of an epic transition. The United States throughout all of its history has been an amalgam of European nationalities but now it’s rapidly becoming a microcosm of the world,” said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor and founding director of its Kinder Institute for Urban Research. “That can be exhilarating and tremendous or it can tear us apart and become a major liability.”
At the forefront of the nation’s metamorphosis is Houston, with projections of America in 2050 looking somewhat like Harris County in 2010 and showing similar patterns. The white population in both will decline by as much as 23 percent, and the Hispanic population is set to increase by 14 percent nationally and 22 percent in the county.
By then, Houston will be 60 percent Hispanic, 15 percent white, 15 percent black and 10 percent Asian, according to projections by the Texas Demographic Center and Rice University’s Hobby Center for The Study of Texas.
“Houston is really America on fast forward,” said Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, where he focuses on global urbanization. “The country is obviously moving in this direction but places like Houston are getting there first. It’s going to affect everything. It’s going to affect the economy, the education system at all levels, the politics. It already is.”
For the last 15 years, Texas has led the country in both the number of people added to its population and its pace of growth. Between 2000 and 2015, the state gained 6.6 million residents compared to the far larger runner-up of California, which added 5.3 million people during that time.
The metropolitan region of Houston-The WoodlandsSugar Land increased by almost 736,500 people in the last five years alone, more than any other in the nation and a growth of 12 percent. Assuming that rate continues until 2020, the area could have a population of 7.4 million. And if the migration from abroad and other states keeps at the same pace as during the last decade, the metro region could see a population of 14.4 million by 2050, more than double that of 2010, according to state projections.
The ripple effects of the 2015 oil crisis, however, means growth has slowed dramatically. The region had been creating a record average of 90,000 jobs a year since 2010, but that will now taper over the next several years, said Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research for the Greater Houston Partnership, an economic development organization.
That means migration is more likely to be at half of the boom-and-bust cycle of the last decade. When factoring that pace, the metro region is expected to have about 10.3 million residents by 2050, 5.4 million whom are Hispanic.
Migration is only half of the story. In the last five years, 18 percent of Harris County’s net population gain was from elsewhere in Texas and the country and 30 percent from abroad. More than half, on the other hand, came from natural increase, or the rate of births minus deaths, according to the U.S. Census. Most of those are Hispanic babies, reflecting the growing trend in the rest of the country. Though the fertility rates of Latinas are on the decline, they still make up most of the nation’s young child-bearing population.
Between 1990 and 2010, the share of the U.S. population made up of people of color went from 24 percent to 36 percent, and that is expected to grow to 44.5 percent by 2030, said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution and author of “Diversity Explosion.”
This is occurring as baby boomers are aging out of the workforce at record rates, with the working-age population in the United States expected to see a net loss of 15 million whites between 2010 and 2030.
Today, more than half of all Harris County residents younger than age 20 are Latinos. Whites only make up the majority of the demographic in the 65 or older age group.
“There’s a decline in nonHispanic white children,” said Steve Murdock, a former Census Bureau director who heads Rice’s Hobby Center. “Whether you look nationally or at the state or Houston, minority population growth is primarily the source of growth for the total population.”
Klineberg of Rice’s Kinder Institute said little can deter the furious march toward a predominantly Hispanic county with a diverse share of other ethnic and racial groups.
“The big point is that those numbers are probably baked in. This is a done deal,” he said. “What isn’t a done deal is how much these Latinos are prepared for leadership positions and making sure this diversity becomes a tremendous asset.”
Houston’s transformation began after the 1982 oil bust, one of the country’s worst regional recessions, when one out of every seven jobs disappeared, Klineberg said, spurring a collapse in housing prices. As white oil workers moved elsewhere, Latino immigrants streamed in for blue-collar jobs. After the city’s economy began to diversify with the expanding of the oil sector into petrochemicals and other related industries and the building of the Texas Medical Center, Overallskilled tech workers from Africa and Asia arrived.
Jobs lured them here, but what has helped keep them is the area’s cheap housing prices, said Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in southern California.
“When housing prices are reasonable there’s much more flexibility to absorb demographic changes,” he said. “As long as Houston can manage to grow its economy and keep its housing costs relatively low, this increased diversity will still turn out to be reasonably good.”
Sluggish economic growth and rising house prices, on the other hand, could land Houston in the same problems experienced by southern California, which is very diverse but has one of the nation’s highest rates of income inequality and low home ownership.
Angela Blanchard, president and CEO of Neighborhood Centers, Inc., which serves more than half a million people across Texas, said Houston has always drawn diverse migration because the city is built on the idea that anyone can come here and make it.
“People come to Houston with this idea that if they work hard they can get ahead. It’s been a promise we can deliver upon that unites everyone, from a Cajun girl from Beaumont like me or someone from Bangalore,” she said. “We’re not a backward-looking city ... we look to our future. So many of us came from somewhere else.”
Houston’s housing policies and access to housing has meant that people from different backgrounds aren’t driven into isolated neighborhoods as happens in some big cities.
“People move in and out of neighborhoods,” Blanchard said.
She said diversity is important for cities because it helps them to participate fully in an increasingly globalized economy. Children in Houston schools speak Arabic and Urdu at home, for example, and Spanish and English at school.
“These will be global leaders,” she said.
But Murdock from Rice’s Hobby Center said city and state leaders need to invest more in improving educational opportunities for all children.
Just 10 percent of Hispanics in Houston who are 25 or older have a bachelor’s degree compared to 18 percent of blacks and 53 percent of whites. The median household income for whites in the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown area in 2010 was about $72,500 compared to just $41,000 for Hispanics and $39,600 for blacks.
“Education pays for everybody,” Murdock said.
Without such investments, state demographer Lloyd Potter said the county, state and region could see increased rates of poverty and inequality.
“That potentially will be in our future if we don’t make progress towards advancing educational attainment especially among young Latinos,” he said. “When you look at 2050 and see what the labor force looks like, that’s one of the more concerning things.”
As Houston grows and its demographics change, there will also be a transformation of its geographic layout, said Jankowski of the Greater Houston Partnership. Employment centers will migrate to the suburbs as people of all backgrounds move further out for affordable housing. Think more of The Woodlands, the Energy Corridor, and suburban business centers like Fort Bend County.
The city will also continue to move away from its energy dependence and become a global trading center, he said. Key to that, however, is its diversity.
“It helps fuel creativity, whether you’re standing in front of an easel or sitting on a bench in a lab,” he said.