The elections are over, but things are just getting started in Texas. The 86th Texas Legislature convenes in the beginning of 2019, and newly-elected House and Senate members are already filing legislation. Two years ago, we built a map of bills filed for the 85th session. This year, you’ll notice the maps got an upgrade.…
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The “blue wave” of the 2018 midterm elections crashed into Harris County last Tuesday with unprecedented voter turnout for a non-presidential election year. Countywide, voter turnout was up from 34% in 2014 to 52%, according to unofficial counts. That’s more than 520,000 additional ballots than in 2014. Yet, despite high turnout, nine polling locations failed…
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Last week, I published an article outlining what the City of Houston can do to promote broadband competition. I was responding to a group of citizens who came to Houston’s city council public comment session and asked our elected officials to do something about net neutrality. While the City of Houston can’t do much about…
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A few weeks ago, I attended a civic club meeting where we talked about minimum lot size restrictions. Many of my neighbors were concerned about townhouse developments in the neighborhood, and the City of Houston Planning Department was on hand to teach us how to apply for minimum lot size protection. Minimum lot size restrictions…
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Last year, we partnered with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition to develop the first version of the TCJC Dashboard. Since then, we’ve been working behind the scenes to push the limits of what we can learn from these data. Thanks to generous funding from Microsoft, we developed a new version of the dashboard and a…
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UPDATE July 1, 2019: The Houston Chronicle reports that the City of Houston and AirBnb have a new agreement to automatically collect occupancy taxes from AirBnb hosts. This post is a collaboration between Xin Tan, Lara Haase, and Jeff Reichman. On the surface, the hotel occupancy tax (HOT) is an unlikely hero in the battle…
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