Report says Houston’s poorest areas worse
Many of Houston’s poor neighborhoods have only become poorer in the last 40 years despite strong, if not record, economic expansions over much of those four decades, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data.
Houston has the second largest number of census tracts in the country in which the poverty rate rose above 30 percent in 2018 from less than 20 percent in 1980, according to a report by the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank. Only Detroit had more neighborhoods that saw such a broad increase in poverty rates.
In Houston, 80 census tracts out of 115 included in the analysis were defined as “newly poor” in that poverty in 2018 was significantly higher compared to 1980, and 31 had deepening or persistent poverty, meaning the tract either had a high poverty rate over the entire period or an already high poverty rate that became worse.
Nationally, nearly 40 percent of neighborhoods had a poverty rate less than 20 percent in 1980 and saw the poverty rate surpass 30 percent by 2018, according to the analysis.
“This was the decade of recordsetting national growth, but it delivered very little for people who needed economic growth the most,” said Kenan Fikri, director of research and policy development for the Economic Innovation Group and an author of the report. “Growth without any intentionality is not efficient to turn around poor neighborhoods.”
The spread of poverty documented by the report came despite an economic boom during most of the 1980s, a record 10-year expansion that stretched through most of the 1990s into the new century, and the latest record expansion that began in 2009 and nearly reached 11 years before it was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic this year.
Economic Innovation Group’s research is in line with a report Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research published in
2016 that found that poverty in Houston is highly concentrated
and that wealthy areas increasingly have fewer and fewer low- to middle- class residents.
Houston is unusual among major U.S. cities in that it has pockets of poverty that are sometimes located right next to wealthier neighborhoods, such as Gulfton, which had a poverty rate of 41 percent in 2018, next to Bellaire, which had a poverty rate of 1.8 percent in 2018. In other cities, poverty tends to spread from historically poor neighborhoods to nearby areas rather than leapfrogging wealthy areas.
William Fulton, the director of Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said that trend is due to many factors, but one of the most prominent is when the city’s affordable apartments were built and where they are located.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Fulton said, many apartment complexes were built for the city’s middle class, who worked downtown or on the east side. But in the decades that followed, much of Houston’s upperand middle-class jobs moved to the west side.
In the areas they left behind — north Houston, and east Houston outside the Loop, for example — lowwage earners now find affordable housing near their work, such as the industrial jobs on the east side.
“The jobs migrated to the west,” Fulton said. “(The housing) was built for the upper middle class oil and gas workers whose jobs moved to the Energy Corridor and the Galleria, and the north became less desirable.”
Fikri, of the Economic Innovation Group, said that the economic fallout from the coronavirus — which a separate analysis from Rice University showed is hitting poor neighborhoods harder with job losses — will likely amplify the trend of more “newly poor” neighborhoods, since high unemployment resulting from business shutdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus will likely erode workers’ ability to bargain for higher wages.
“These communities are vulnerable in that the work is in jobs with low bargaining power and low wages in neighborhoods with already high vacancy rates,” Fikri said. “None of that is going to get better over the next few months or even years.”