Houston is no stranger to industrial operations, and along with many industrial facilities come a wealth of dangerous pollutants. Carcinogenic byproducts leak from Houston’s many petrochemical facilities and toxic dust clouds the air near concrete batch plants. The health effects of these pollutants burden Houstonians unequally. Time and again, heavily polluting facilities are disproportionately placed…
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Sprinkles or M&Ms? One scoop or two? Cup or cone? These are tough questions, and even though we’ve got global problems on our minds these days, dessert is still important. Good ice cream can make the world a little more manageable. Here in Houston, we’re lucky to have ice cream weather year-round, and we’ve got…
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The Houston housing market is hot. Inventory is low and demand is high. From March 2021 to March 2022, the average price of a single family home went up an astonishing 19.3%. With rising market prices comes an increase in tax assessed values. Property tax protest season is here, and you have until May 15…
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How much of sprawling diverse Houston can you fit in two days? With enough iced lattes and Topo Chico, quite a lot. After two years of remote work and nearly doubling in size, it was time for our team to get together at our home base of Houston, Texas. In late March, our out-of-town team…
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The Chevron Marathon is this weekend, bringing 27,000 runners from around the world to Houston. Each runner carries with them unique reasons that keep them moving through busy weeks and bad weather. Some common motivators are improving cardiovascular health, getting to know your city, socializing with a running community, and the satisfaction of setting and…
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For the past two years, the city of Galveston, Texas has been my home. Located about an hour southeast of Houston, Galveston is an island community that has the perfect blend of beachtown kitsch and rich historical character. It’s also been a great place to ride out the pandemic – I even took up surfing!…
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Health care providers and social service nonprofits have a hard time working together. Doctors often do not know about social service programs that might benefit their patients, and nonprofits find it difficult to keep health care providers up to date about their services. When they try to work together, communicating about a patient’s health history…
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In Texas, every criminal conviction has collateral consequences. For example, if you’re convicted of a felony, you lose your right to vote during incarceration, probation, or parole. Texas has over 1,400 collateral consequences. You can explore them for yourself at the National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction database. But these consequences aren’t just for…
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The CDC eviction moratorium was supposed to prevent evictions. When the CDC first announced the moratorium in September 2020, a CNN headline shouted Evictions Are Halted, noting that it “covered most renters across the US.” The moratorium lasted almost eleven months. During that time, we found 3,289 cases where the policy delayed or prevented an…
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Since August 2020, thousands of unemployed Texans have received an extra $300 per week in unemployment from the Federal government. In fact, when Governor Greg Abbott ended this program in Texas in June 2021, there were 197,679 people who lost this benefit. Governor Abbott’s logic was to help “unemployed Texans connect with the more than…
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