Earlier in March, as the COVID-19 public health crisis was starting to unfold in the United States, we released our study of twenty years of evictions in Houston in Harris County. This study examined some of the basic metrics in eviction court records, such as the number of cases filed, the number of judgments in…
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It takes a lot of guts to take a good thing, and try to make it better. Back in 2017, El Paso was already on the right track to ending homelessness. They had a nearly complete list of everyone experiencing homelessness in the community. They had partners in the community who reported information, but it…
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The 2018 midterms were historic for the country, and for Harris County especially, with the highest recorded voter turnout for a midterm election. It even surpassed turnout numbers for two out of the last three Presidential elections. Any surge in voter turnout is typically the result of coordinated and sustained grassroots engagement. One of the…
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We recently did a webinar with Jamey Caruthers, senior staff attorney at Children At Risk, about how to use data to fight human trafficking. Human trafficking is a huge problem in Texas, especially in Houston, and Children At Risk is leading the charge in helping to write and pass laws that increase penalties for perpetrators while…
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Around the country, there are calls to reform our election process. Activists want to ensure that the outcomes of elections properly reflect the will of the people. Because elections are administered at the local level, this results in experiments in radical democracy in likely and unlikely places. Ranked choice voting is one of those experiments…
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Counting people is vital to our democracy. Every ten years, the US government has a constitutional obligation to conduct a census that counts everyone living in the United States. This count determines how many Congressional representatives each state receives, the levels of Federal funding for state and local governments and federal programs, and serves as…
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Here are some interesting recent stories about maps and data in the Houston area. I hope to make this a monthly roundup post covering areas of public interest, like crime, transportation, real estate, and population health. If you have a good project to share, please let me know! Houston Bike Share Crowdsourcing New Locations The Houston…
Read More This is the second edition of Houston maps and data. This month, we saw Mayor Turner’s first major initiative take the form of an interdepartmental task force and a new website. Potholes in Houston will never be the same again. Here’s the scoop, along with a few other interesting stories about Houston told through maps…
Read More Each month, we round up all the interesting stories told with data that help us understand the Houston region. Houston Public Housing Debate Rages A proposed public housing project at the edge of a fancy Houston neighborhood is causing confusion about the effects of public housing. This article drops some serious data (and a little bit of shaming) to…
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Last year, we helped the City of Houston launch a cost-savings crowdsourcing program called Bright Ideas. I was reading through some of the responses, and I got curious about terminologies, priorities, and the general language used by City of Houston employees. So on April 9, 2016, I grabbed a database dump of the Bright Ideas…
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