I've recently become interested in learning more about Houston, TX and this is one of the books I bought on the topic. The author, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rice University with degrees from Haverford College, the University of Paris and Harvard University, ran a survey for about 35 years about the attitudes of Houstonians and residents of the Houston metropolitan region on various topics as the founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. A central theme in his book is that what is happening in Houston right now foreshadows what will happen in the United States in a few years because Houston is much more diverse than other big cities.
I have to say, the parts where he enumerates statistics were the least interesting for me, and the parts where he shares actual stories and quotes from Houstonians were page-turners. Having gone through quite a few volumes of turgid prose written by academics who thought they could write for the general public, this book is better than average, and it turns out from the title (not cover) page and the acknowledgements that this is due to one Amy Hertz, who helped write the book. (When I found out about her, I thought it was wrong not to include her name on the cover page via a simple "with Amy Hertz", as for the title page. That does not shed Stephen Klineberg in a good light to have relegated her to the insides of the book. Having read the pages where he spouts off the statistics, I am very convinced that she played a critical role in making the book interesting for the general public.)
So what do I like about this book? First, I like Texas, and I like books that focus on parts of the United States that aren't on either coast. Also, I like cities with top universities: Rice University in Houston, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Northwestern University outside Chicago. The elites of the nation are no longer educated solely in Massachusetts and California, and Texas is fascinating because of the large number of Democrats and Republicans thrown together for better or for worse. Houston also has a thriving economy that isn't limited to oil and gas but also included health care and more. After going through Hurricane Harvey, it also has more stories of resilience than many. And then simply I always love learning more about my adopted state of Texas.
So this is why I picked up the book, but here are a couple of passages that caught my attention and made me like the book even more, once I started reading it. I really got into the book at Chapter 6, "The moral core of a paradoxical city," because of its emphasis on Hurricane Harvey. Then Chapter 7 "The black/white divide" was another home run, especially the story where an African American police sergeant shared the story of his son (in his early twenties) moving to a new neighborhood and getting pulled over for no obvious violation. "His hands were shaking so badly he couldn't get out his license and registration" (p.145) and because he had some obvious PTSD symptoms from the encounter, his dad "brought him to the local precinct of his son's new neighborhood and introduced him around." The young man knew all the cops in his dad's neighborhood but none of them in the area he had just moved in. "He was so scared that he asked his dad to go with him to his new local precinct and introduce him around."
I also loved the story of Derrick Ngo, who was admitted to Harvard after being homeless thanks to his stint at the Energy Institute High School, and the insights of developer Stan Marek and BakerRipley then-CEO Angela Blanchard.
Some quotes from the book:
- "Houston is one of the most vibrant, rapidly growing metropolitan areas in America, with a vigorous entrepreneurial economy, thriving primarily because of the tremendous energy, vitality and commitment to hard work on the part of immigrants who have been pouring into this city from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean." (p.192)
- "We found out that teachers were going too easy on the kids, giving them lower than grade-level textbooks." (p.266) The pressure of going too easy on students is something I can relate to.
- A May 2015 article in the Houston Chronicle "described the "Texas myth" as a place that "relished the death penalty, that's obsessed with guns, that's anti-education, anti-science, anti-immigrant, and anti-environment." But the author's surveys "show clearly that the general public has been expressing more progressive views over the years, and as in the state's other major cities (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso), area residents are now more firmly affiliated with the Democratic Party." (p.268)
- "[Houston] is low, flat, and full of bayous; it rains a lot, and we will always flood. Solving for flooding is the window, because it will take us into the densification we need, building upward instead of out over the floodplains and in the flood zones." (p.278)
- "Cities need to form partnerships with their "city accelerators", organizations with the cutting-edge knowledge and critical resources that come out of the nation's most prestigious universities, think tanks, and philanthropic organizations." (p.280)
- "Still, I worry about the city's mounting problems, especially the burgeoning gap in access to quality education; the growing pockets of concentrated poverty, homelessness, and despair; the persistence of environmental racism; the region's increasing vulnerability to flooding; its position as a hub for human trafficking." (p.282)
- "In The New Localism, Brookings Institution fellows Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak posit that the best opportunities for shaping the future of America will come from its major cities." (p.283)
- "Houston's economic future will depend on its ability to harness the new energy technologies, to become the third coast (along with Boston and San Francisco) for the life sciences, supported by the world's largest conglomeration of medical institutions, and to develop a full-fledged entrepreneurial ecosystem, stimulating new ideas and new wealth in the high-tech sectors of today's economy." (p.284)
Rating: four stars out of five.
Comments