Perspectives on a City in Transition
A Socialist's Appreciation
Stephen L. Klineberg

We moved here in 1972. I had come to teach at Rice University, after six years at Princeton. Peggy was a young wife and mother, planning to complete her law degree at the University of Houston. Our children were entering third and fourth grade in the newly established magnet program at the River Oaks Elementary School. None of us had any clear sense about Houston beyond its palpable “differentness” from home, which was somewhere between Boston and Philadelphia. All of us were surprised by how quickly we came to love this city and its people. For me especially, Houston turned out to be an endlessly fascinating sociological phenomenon.

During the 1970s, while most of the country was in a serious and prolonged recession, this city was booming. Almost one million people moved into the greater Houston area between 1970 and 1982. They were coming at a rate of more than 1,000 per week, adding an average of 230 cars and trucks every day to the streets and freeways of Harris County. Few were thinking about the long-term costs that such rapid, unfettered growth would inflict on the city’s physical features or on the quality of its air and water.

Houston was world-famous in those days for having imposed the fewest controls on development of any city in the Western world. This was a city built purely by developer decisions. Its strategies for economic growth depended on ineffective land-use controls, weak unions, cheap labor, low taxes, and minimal services. They included the unremitting pursuit of government initiatives to promote economic expansion, and the rejection of any program that seemed to interfere with private sector freedoms, that suggested social welfare, or that sought to address inner-city needs through housing assistance or urban development grants. Until the mid 1960s, the Houston Independent School District board even refused federal funds for school lunches, afraid of sapping self-reliance and creating a welfare state.
In March 1982, my students and I began the first of what has become an annual series of systematic scientific surveys of the attitudes and beliefs of Harris County residents. Two months after our first survey, the oil boom collapsed, and Houston found itself confronting three of the most important revolutions of our time—the emergence of the new high-tech, knowledge-based global economy, a rapid transformation in the population’s ethnic composition, and environmental challenges to our traditional conception of good business practice. The nineteen years of continuing surveys conducted since then have tracked America’s fourth largest city in the midst of fundamental redefinition.

The new economy. In the 1980s, as a result of advances in computers and robotics, intensifying worldwide competition, declining unionization, and changes in government policy, the well-paying blue collar jobs—as in this city’s thriving construction and oil-field manufacturing industries—rapidly disappeared. The new economy instead provided rich and expanding opportunities for those with high levels of trained intelligence, technical skills, and educational credentials. Workers without such skills were relegated to the plentiful low-wage service jobs that offer few chances for people to work their way out of poverty.

“Human capital” thus became the critical economic resource, and education the single most important determinant of a person’s ability to earn enough to support a family. In this new “hourglass economy,” poverty persists, even as the city gets richer; opportunities narrow for many while they expand for others; and the inequalities in income and wealth grow ever wider and deeper.

The new diversity. The year 1982 marked not only the end of the Oil Age in Houston, but also an acceleration of the city’s ethnic transformation. The rapid growth of this city’s population in the ’60s and ’70s was brought about largely by Anglos streaming into this booming region from other parts of the country. With the collapse of the oil economy, the Anglo population of Harris County effectively stabilized. Yet the region continued to grow by another 17 percent during the 1980s, showing a falloff in the proportion of Anglos, a stable black population, and surging growth among Hispanics and Asians. By 1997, Harris County’s population was 47 percent Anglo, 27 percent Hispanic, 19 percent African-American, and 6 percent Asian. The comparable figures for the city of Houston were 35 percent, 31 percent, 28 percent, and 6 percent.

This picture of ethnic transformation is even more dramatic when age is taken into account. Of all the respondents in our 2000 survey who were sixty or older, 78 percent were Anglos, 15 percent were African-Americans, and 6 percent were Hispanics. In contrast, among those eighteen to twenty-nine, 30 percent were Anglos, 39 percent were Hispanics, and 22 percent were blacks. The young people in Houston, who will comprise the work force of the twenty-first century, are disproportionately black and Hispanic. If Houston’s Hispanic and black communities are unprepared to succeed in the new economy, it is hard to envision a prosperous future for the city as a whole.

Much will depend on the degree to which the new immigrants and their children have real opportunities to assimilate into the mainstream of society and whether or not low-income families in general can rise into the middle class. This is an economy that requires higher levels than ever before of language fluency, technical skills, and educational credentials. Without sustained and determined intervention to improve education, family support systems, and other public services, our community will inexorably divide into two increasingly impermeable classes: one made up primarily of privileged whites, and the other of impoverished minorities.

The new environment. The twenty-first century will also force us to rethink the nature of Houston’s urban form and the politics that have shaped it. “Houstonitis” has become a dreaded urban disease: the growth of a vast, sprawling, low-density metropolis composed of separate, often “gated,” communities. Area residents of similar backgrounds generally live together in relative isolation, preoccupied with their own concerns and rarely developing a clear sense of shared responsibility for the region as a whole.

Meanwhile, Houston’s urban sprawl and free-enterprise philosophy have contributed to an environmental crisis that can no longer be ignored. We know that this city will not succeed in the new century if it remains committed to unfettered individualism, continuing to insist on the right to act in whatever ways will maximize short-term personal profit with little thought to the public consequences. Endowed with less physical beauty and fewer natural amenities than many urban areas, Houston is already experiencing difficulty as it competes with other cities to attract the most innovative companies and the most talented individuals. How many of them will choose to come here if this city retains its newly acquired status as the smog capital of America?

These are daunting challenges. Success in this new century will require us to pay far more attention to the collective needs and public spaces of our community than we have been called upon to do before in this famously laissez faire, business-oriented city of ours. However, I feel better about the possibilities today than I did just a few years ago. The most recent findings from the Houston surveys seem to me to offer grounds for cautious optimism

With the continuing economic expansion, area residents have become decidedly more cheerful about economic conditions and more confident about the future. Perhaps in part because of the good economy, the proportion of survey respondents who rejected lower taxes and called instead for more spending to improve education and public services grew consistently and significantly from 1997 to 2000, after diminishing steadily during the middle years of the decade.

Area residents are much less fearful of crime than in the early and mid 1990s, and broader quality-of-life concerns—about traffic, education, children, health care, air quality, and urban amenities—are moving into the forefront of public consciousness. No longer preoccupied with economic insecurity or personal safety, area residents may be more prepared to address the city’s longer-term challenges.

The data suggest that growing proportions of area residents are coming to recognize and appreciate Houston’s flourishing diversity. Survey respondents have been expressing increasingly positive attitudes toward their newly multicultural surroundings. In recent years, they have been more supportive of immigration in general and have been giving ever higher ratings to relations among ethnic groups in the Houston area.

The surveys also reveal a steady increase in favorable attitudes toward downtown development and mass transit, as well as growing support for efforts to reduce pollution. The proportion of area residents, for example, who said they were in favor of “requiring emissions tests on all vehicles in Houston” grew from 38 percent in 1995, to 56 percent in 1997, to 70 percent in 1999. In the 2000 survey, well over half (56 percent) of area residents said they were “very concerned” about the effects of air pollution on their family’s health; 64 percent were in favor of more stringent emissions tests; 51 percent agreed to the lowering of all speed limits in Houston to fifty-five miles per hour; and 36 percent would even accept a “no-drive” day once a week.

Area residents, it appears, are coming to understand that economic success in the new century will require a different set of strategies and a new way of thinking. If it turns out that this community is unable to impose the difficult restrictions required to bring Houston into compliance with federal clean air standards, that defeat will have less to do with any presumed resistance on the part of the population at large than with the failure of the city’s leadership.

Are the attitude changes that the surveys record simply the temporary reflection of a recently improved economy? Or do they portend something more profound and more promising? Surely, if this community is to respond effectively to the striking economic, ethnic, and environmental challenges of our time, it will require a more sweeping, sustained, and enlightened effort from all of us than we have even begun to imagine.

But there is indeed reason to hope. By working together with courage and foresight, we might yet find a way to fashion a path into the twenty-first century that will enable our city to become even more vibrant, more unified, and more successful than in all of its remarkable history. I think I’ll stick around to see what happens.

Copyright©2000 Stephen L. Klineberg