Browsing by Author "O'Connell, Heather"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Disparate City: Understanding Rising Levels of Concentrated Poverty and Affluence in Greater Houston
    (Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2016) O'Connell, Heather; Howell, Junia
    The poverty rate of Harris County, which surrounds Houston, rose from 10 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2014. That alone is a troubling trend, but equally concerning is the increasing tendency in the Houston area for that poverty to be highly concentrated. Economic segregation appears to be tightening its grip on Harris County and the area’s neighborhoods are increasingly economically polarized. There is a declining number of middle-class neighborhoods in the region, and Greater Houston is experiencing an increasingly stark division between the “haves” and “have nots.”
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    Houston's Opportunity: Reconnecting Disengaged Youth and Young Adults to Strengthen Houston's Economy
    (Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2016) Durand, Casey P.; Garcia, Adriana; Holeywell, Ryan; Johnson-Baker, Kimberly; O'Connell, Heather; Raker, Ethan; Wu, Jie
    Though the U.S. economy is gradually showing signs of rebounding, a group of young people known as Opportunity Youth and Young Adults (OYYA) continues to lag behind. Defined as young people ages 16 to 24 who neither work nor attend school, the OYYA population is growing both nationally and in the Houston area. This study aims to identify characteristics of the group and highlight the most successful practices to address its needs.
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    Streetlights in the City: Understanding the Distribution of Houston Streetlights
    (Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2017) O'Connell, Heather
    There are at least 173,724 streetlights in the city of Houston, or about 15 streetlights per mile of roadway in the average Houston neighborhood. But there is wide variation in streetlight density across those neighborhoods. This report offers several important findings. First, black and Hispanic neighborhoods have higher concentrations of streetlights than white neighborhoods. Second, mixed-income neighborhoods tend to have higher concentrations of streetlights than the city’s wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods. In the context of this discussion, we should consider the possibility that some areas of the city are overly lit in addition to being concerned about the places without enough lights. There may be a point at which having more lights actually becomes a negative. We need to get a better understanding of the lived consequences of the level of available lighting before making any further decisions regarding city streetlights.
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    The Shifting City: Houston's Unequal History of Racial Change
    (Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2016) O'Connell, Heather
    Houston is often referred to as the most racially diverse metro area in the country and a harbinger of the types of demographic shifts the nation is likely to face in the future. The area has undergone tremendous demographic shifts in recent decades, the most notable of which is the increase in the Hispanic population. In 2000, non-Hispanic whites made up 42 percent of Harris County’s population, and Hispanics made up 33 percent. A decade later, those proportions had almost exactly flipped. This report examines how the racial/ethnic composition of individual census tracts in Harris County has changed — or in some cases, has not — in the face of 30 years of demographic shifts across the region.
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    What Happens in the Shadows: Streetlights and How They Relate to Crime
    (Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2017) O'Connell, Heather
    After finding in a previous report, “Streetlights in the City: Understanding the Distribution of Houston Streetlights,” that the city of Houston’s more than 173,000 streetlights were not evenly distributed throughout the city, this next report answers the question: do places with more streetlights have lower crime rates? The findings complicate the common perception that more streetlights lead to fewer crimes. While there was some evidence that a particularly high density of streetlights can provide protective benefits, excluding those extremes provides a much muddier picture, suggesting that crime is a reflection of other neighborhood contexts. As such, cities should be cautious in expecting direct reductions in crime with the introduction of more streetlights.