Survey: Residents optimistic about futures, less so about race relations
Houstonians are optimistic about their personal futures, but feel less positive about race relations in the city and want the government to intervene, according to a survey by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
Stephen Klineberg, founding director of the Kinder Institute, and Robert Bozick, a senior research fellow at Kinder, conducted the survey between January and March with the help of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. More than 1,050 adults completed the survey online and by phone.
“For the first time, Anglos and Hispanics were significantly more likely than African Americans to agree with the general statement that Blacks are still a long way from having the same chance in life as Whites,” Klineberg and Bozick wrote.
The racial justice movement in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd played a role in those responses.
The annual survey, now marking 40 years, showed Houston residents’ positive feelings about race relations, inequality and poverty declined after the death of Floyd, a man with Houston ties who died in Minneapolis police custody last May.
“Blacks were far more likely than Anglos or Hispanics to assert that people often seemed suspicious of them simply because of their race, that Blacks are frequently discriminated against in Houston, and that they are often unfairly stopped by the police,” the survey authors noted.
In the results, released Tuesday, 54 percent of people who answered the survey said the criminal justice system is biased against Black people — an increase from 32 percent in 2015.
Houstonians, particularly
white residents, were more likely to agree in this year’s survey that Black people are still a long way from having the same opportunities in their life as white people and were also more supportive of allowing children of undocumented immigrants to become U.S. citizens.
Klineberg said embracing diversity in Harris County could be key in creating a more successful metropolitan city.
The Houston area has gone through a remarkable demographic change since the oil boom in the 1960s and ’70s, during which the region was “biracial” — largely Black and white. But in 1982, when oil collapsed, the white population stopped growing and began to decline. The Black population, however, kept the same pace of growth, while the population of Latinos and Asians surged, he said.
‘Powerful picture’
The county’s diverse makeup — which the U.S. Census estimates is 42 percent Hispanic, 31 percent white, 19 percent Black and 8.5 percent Asian — is only expected to grow, Klineberg said.
“No city has been transformed so rapidly. This is the story of Houston. Houston is where America is going to be as the 21st century unfolds,” Klineberg said Tuesday, adding that Houston paints a “powerful picture” of the country’s future landscape.
“No force in the world is going to stop Houston from becoming more diverse,” he said.
An important lesson, however, is that those who are disproportionately living in poverty also will make up most of Houston in the future.
A majority of residents under the age of 20 — the future voters, workers and taxpayers of Houston— will be 51 percent Latino, 19 percent Black and 9 percent Asian, Klineberg said. And with 70 percent of young people in Houston being African American or Latino, he stressed the need to ensure that they have essential tools for success.
“If those folks are not prepared to succeed in the global knowledge economy of the 21st century, it is difficult to envision a prosperous future for Houston,” he said.
The region could be an example of how to best invest in education and support systems that enable young people to succeed. “If this city is going to flourish, it needs to grow much more unified, equitable and inclusive, multi-ethnic society,” Klineberg said.
Klineberg said the pandemic or health-related issues helped underline and lay bare inequalities, differences and vulnerabilities in the region.
Public health, which was seldom mentioned in previous surveys, was cited as the top issue in Houston this year.
And many respondents — including 58 percent of Black people, 66 percent of Hispanics, 41 percent Asian and 36 percent of white people surveyed — said they risked exposure to the COVID-19 virus to keep their jobs during the pandemic. Blacks and Hispanics were also more likely to know someone who was hospitalized or died as a result of being infected with the virus, according to the survey.
Mental health was also a major issue across all ethnic communities, with more than half of all respondents saying they felt more stress and experienced more emotional problems during the past year than a year ago.
Politics and money
A powerful reflection of the growing partisan divides was evident in the 2021 survey results.
“After the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election, the proportion of Houston Republicans who thought the country was headed for ‘better times’ dropped by a whopping 50 percentage points, from 69 percent before the election to just 19 percent by the time of the 2021 survey,” Klineberg and Bozick wrote. “Meanwhile, the proportion of Democrats who foresaw better times for the country grew from 38 percent last year to 58 percent in 2021.”
And the economy ranked high among the respondents. For the first time in the 40-year history of the survey, more than 25 percent said their financial situations were getting worse. More than a third of all survey respondents said they could not come up with $400 for an emergency expense, 25 percent indicated that they had no health insurance, and 28 percent had trouble paying for their housing.
Among other findings, the survey showed that Black and Hispanic communities experienced a greater loss of income and financial hardships than local Asian and white communities and had to receive more help from government programs, which Klineberg and Bozick cited as a testament to the inequalities communities face when attempting to access resources in the city.
More Houstonians also want more action from the government to help solve the country’s problems, with 58 percent saying that the government has a responsibility to help reduce the country’s inequalities and 80 percent noting that they believed most people are poor because of circumstances they can’t control.
Still, Klineberg and Bozick noted that Houstonians are optimistic about the future, with 57 percent of respondents stating that they were confident that things would improve for them in the next three to four years.
“The dire effects of the economic shutdown may well be lessening for many as businesses are re-opening and vaccination rates increase, area residents are feeling optimistic once again,” they said. But the pandemic has “also exacerbated the differential vulnerabilities and the deepening inequalities in the Houston region.”