Houston, Then and Now
On Sept. 16, Zillow’s Housing Roadmap to 2016 tour stops in Houston, one of America’s fastest-growing cities and also — mostly — one of its most affordable. But despite its successes, Houston is not immune to the many challenges facing other rapidly growing American cities, including rising income inequality, emerging rental affordability concerns and ongoing efforts to diversify its economic base.
In advance of our visit, Zillow Research will be publishing a series of Houston-focused research briefs aimed at shedding light on some of the unique trends we’re observing in the area. All of our Houston research can be found here, and we encourage you to please join us on Sept. 16 if you can. If you can’t, please join in the conversation on social media with the hashtag #HousinginAmerica.
To understand where you’re going, it’s important to understand where you’ve been. And this is as true for cities as it is for people. Cities grow and evolve, wax and wane as industries rise and fall, residents move in and out and landscapes change. Over the course of a few decades, roughly one person’s lifetime, a city can undergo sometimes massive transformation.
Houston is one of those places. Between 1950 and today, the city has grown tremendously and its face has changed. Almost 80 percent white in 1950, less than half the population is white today. Like many cities in the mid-twentieth century, Houston was heavily dependent on blue-collar, manufacturing work, which employed roughly a quarter of its workforce in 1950. In the digital age, just 11 percent of Houstonians are still employed by manufacturers. Houstonians are more educated, and generally make more money at the median than they did in 1950, even as the share of Houstonians living in poverty or making a low income has risen.
The slides below illustrate not only how Houston has changed over the past 60+ years, but how its change has both mirrored and diverged from national trends and those of other large American cities. As the city continues to grow and evolve, understanding where it has come from will be critical in managing that growth going forward.
