Every Monday morning, Judge Israel Garcia, Jr., who serves as Harris County Justice of the Peace for Precinct 5, stares down a punishing docket of eviction, debt collection, and traffic cases for the week. His courtroom has a line out the door of parents and children, desperate to resolve a dispute with their landlord or…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
In the November 2019 election, voters in Harris County, Texas could vote at any polling location, not just the polling place assigned to their precinct. This change was designed to make it easier for more people to participate in the electoral process. In order to promote the program, the Harris County Clerk brought in our friends…
Read More
Last week, we released a new study, Serving Veterans After Hurricane Harvey, with our partners at Combined Arms examining the impact of Hurricane Harvey on the Gulf Coast veteran population. Texas is home to nearly 1.5 million veterans and many felt the direct impact of the storm. Yet, two years later, we still needed to answer…
Read More
Census 2020 is critically important for determining how much money state and local governments receive from the federal government. That is a major reason why states and cities around the country have been worried about the citizenship question and the lack of census funding, which threaten an accurate count. For every person missed, states end…
Read More
Last year, the City of Houston passed an ordinance that regulated certain types of housing for people on parole. This ordinance includes regulations to promote safety, but it also includes a distance requirement that effectively prohibits new housing. Houston already lacks enough housing for people on parole, and this distance requirement only compounds the problem.…
Read More
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…
Read More
Update: February 20, 2017 Beginning March 1, 2017 marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in Harris County. The DA estimates this will save $25 million a year. Congratulations to DA Kim Ogg, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, and everyone involved in this swift policy change. Back in February 2016, Texas Lyceum published the results of a survey that…
Read More