Maybe that’s why I enjoy living in Houston, TX now. Houston is easily the size of Chicago and growing (still listed as #4 because of tighter city limits). Yes there is lower cost of living, housing, gas prices, no state income tax, incredible job market, etc (summer heat/humidity sucks), but drivers don’t take crap from anyone as they speed around the many beltways (3) and 8 lane highways across the city and surroundings. And many, if not most are driving large full size trucks, or large full size SUV’s and will run you off the road if you try pulling stunts in traffic (zig zagging/cutting in front with no turn signal, etc). They majority carry guns with them too, so good luck trying to attempt car road rage, or flipping the finger too long. 🤣🤣
Yep. Houston’s ethnic and cultural transformation, which is more dramatic than that of any other U.S. city in the past century. Stephen L. Klineberg, a sociologist and co-director of the Kinder Institute, has closely charted the demographic changes in Harris County, which covers nearly all of the Houston area and then some, since 1982. “Houston was then an overwhelmingly Anglo city,” he told me. But then the eight-decade-long Texas oil boom fizzled and the city lost 100,000 jobs, mostly among Anglo oil workers, and was plunged into an economic depression that would completely change its population patterns. “In 1980, Anglos made up 63 percent of the population,” Klineberg says. “Now they’re less than 33 percent.” Hispanics in Harris County today constitute 41 percent, he adds, African-Americans 18.4 percent, and Asians and other races 7.8 percent. “The change is even more extreme if you look at the population under 30,” Klineberg says, “where 78 percent are now non-Anglos.”
In the 1960s, New York and L.A. were already vast metropolises, but Houston was a humble outpost of around one million. Since then, aided by the ubiquity of automobiles and air-conditioning, its population has leapt by an average of 20 percent every decade, surging to over four million inhabitants in Harris County and six million within the Greater Houston Metropolitan Area. Much of this growth would alter the area’s ethnic makeup as well, because it took place after 1965, when the nation ended its long-running immigration policy favoring white Western Europeans, and new arrivals were as likely to come from Korea or Congo as Italy and Ireland. In that sense, Houston is the vanguard, Klineberg says: “Houston is 25 years ahead of the rest of the country. Soon all of America will look like this city. There is no force in the world that can stop the United States becoming more Latino, more African-American, more Middle Eastern and Asian. It’s inevitable!”
There are, however, some arguably ominous trends. Perhaps the most disturbing is that, according to the Pew Research Center, Houston is the most income-segregated of the ten largest U.S. metropolitan areas, with the greatest percentage of rich people living among the rich and the third-greatest percentage of poor people among the poor. And the new waves of immigrants are split between highly skilled college graduates (especially Asians), who effortlessly join the upper echelons of Houston, and poorly educated manual laborers (especially Latinos), who trim the lawns and wash restaurant dishes. “The great danger for the future of America is not an ethnic divide but class divide,” Klineberg warns. “And Houston is on the front line, where the gulf between rich and poor is widest. We have the Texas Medical Center, the finest medical facility in the world, but we also have the highest percentage of kids without health care. The inequality is so clear here.” All these forces add urgency to how Houston tackles its problems. “This is where America’s future is going to be worked out.”
If nothing else, the Kinder Institute’s reports underscore how little the country really knows about Houston. Is it, as most New Yorkers and Californians assume, a cultural wasteland? “The only time this city hits the news is when we get a hurricane!” complains James Harithas, director of the Station Museum of Contemporary Art. “People have no idea.” Its image in the outside world is stuck in the 1970s, of a Darwinian frontier city where business interests rule, taxation and regulation are minimal, public services are thin and the automobile is worshiped. “This was boomtown America,” says Klineberg of the giddy oil years. “While the rest of the country was in recession, we were seen as wealthy, arrogant rednecks, with bumper stickers that read, ‘Drive 70 and freeze a Yankee.’” Today, he adds, “Houston has become integrated into the U.S. and global economies, but we still like to think we’re an independent country. We contribute to the image!”
In movies, Houston has served as a metaphor for all that is wrong with urban American life. In the 1983 comedy
Local Hero, Burt Lancaster plays an oil CEO who sits in a glass tower plotting environmental devastation, and Houston has been the scene for a disconcerting number of dystopian science fiction movies.
A first-time visitor can still be bewildered by Houston’s sprawl: The population density is less than half that of Los Angeles. It’s the only major U.S. city with no formal zoning code—hence the chaotic and often disheveled urban landscape. Skyscrapers sprout between high schools, strip joints, restaurants and parking lots, all tied into the knots of endless concrete highways. And yet Houston has a thriving art scene, with a startling choice of museums and galleries, and its 17-block theater district claims to have the largest concentration of seats outside of Broadway. Last summer,
Forbes declared Houston “the coolest city in America,” based on indices such as the number of cultural venues, the amount of designated green space, and, of course, ethnic diversity. It didn’t hurt that the Houston area has largely brushed off the recent recession, reporting 3.8 percent (non-farm) job growth in 2012, or that the city’s median age is only 32.1, compared with 37.2 for the United States as a whole in 2010.
“We need to reinvent ourselves and improve our image,” says Cressandra Thibodeaux, executive director of 14 Pews, a cinema and gallery in a renovated church, which was set to host the H-Town Multicultural Film Festival, celebrating Houston’s diversity, in June. “You hear about how Pittsburgh and Detroit are going through a renaissance, with new immigrant cultures and artists changing the city. But people don’t know about how Houston is being transformed. It’s still got the old cowboy hat image, a hot, ugly city, where you just go to work.”
To thwart this stereotype, the first place to visit is the Rothko Chapel. A Modernist masterpiece of religious art, it lies in a verdant oasis of museums, gardens and outdoor sculptures created in the 1960s by two philanthropists flush with oil money, John and Dominique de Menil. (The superb Menil Collection Museum, designed by Renzo Piano, has been a pilgrimage site for international art lovers since it opened in 1987.) The nondenominational chapel is the most serene corner of this leafy precinct: Mark Rothko created 14 rich black, maroon and plum-colored paintings for the octagonal space (designed in part by Philip Johnson), which has meditation cushions for visitors to contemplate the art in silence. On a bench are more than two dozen texts from world religions, including the King James Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, and Hindu and Buddhist works. The chapel is a clue that Houston is perhaps a more tolerant and open-minded place than it is given credit for.
Another clue is that Houston is the largest U.S. city to have an openly lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, a Democrat, who has pressed President Obama to act on gay marriage, which is banned in Texas.
Clearly, a lot more is happening in Houston—nicknamed The Big Heart after the city and its people aided Hurricane Katrina victims—than concrete freeways. So I sought out four people for anecdotal evidence of the city’s unexpected new life.
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Only two miles east of the manicured Museum District lies the Third Ward, for decades one of the city’s poorest African-American neighborhoods—and the site of Houston’s most ambitious creative project, the brainchild of artist Rick Lowe.
In 1993, Lowe and others began renovating a block of derelict shotgun shacks into gallery spaces, creating Project Row Houses. He was inspired by the idea of “social sculpture,” pioneered by the artists Joseph Beuys and John Biggers, who argued that any way we shape the world around us is a form of art, including urban renovation. Today, seven formerly abandoned houses, some of which had been used for drugs and prostitution, are exhibition spaces for resident artists, who participate in community life. Another row of salvaged houses, sporting neat lawns and gleaming white paint, is occupied by single mothers. Their success has brought life back to the neighborhood, and has been a springboard for renovations across the Third Ward. Abandoned venues have been given practical functions and turned into social hubs. An old speakeasy has been reborn as a laundromat. The Eldorado Ballroom, where B.B. King, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington played, has been rescued from dereliction and once again stages music events. “From the 1940s to the ’60s, the Third Ward was known as Little Harlem,” says Project Row Houses’ public art curator, Ryan Dennis. “There was a tailor’s shop in this building for musicians. The Temptations flew to Houston just to get their suits cut here.”
When I arrived to talk with Lowe, I found him playing dominoes with a trio of older artists at an outside table in the sunshine. After he’d finished—the game is a community ritual, he explained, which he never interrupts—we took a walk through the galleries, which contained sculptures made from antique doors, video installations of men recounting their romantic lives and a studio where the performance artist Autumn Knight was rehearsing for her show, Roach Dance. Lowe, who is tall and lean and was raised in rural Alabama, first came to the city on a road trip in 1984, he said. “Houston is a good place for an artist to stretch dollars. The rents are low, there are lots of wide open spaces, there’s cheap Mexican food.” Undaunted by the economic depression of the ’80s (“When you’re poor, everywhere is depressed!”), he found the city’s independent creative spirit addictive. “I thought I’d stay for a couple of years. It’s 28 now.”
The genesis of Project Row Houses dates back to 1992, Lowe recalls, when he was volunteering at a community center in the Third Ward and saw city officials being given a bus tour of Houston’s dangerous places. “They stopped right in front of this row of buildings and were told that this was the very worst spot in Houston.” The next year, he decided to salvage the same blighted stretch. For Lowe, the city’s lack of regulation and zoning encourages artists as well as businesses to carry out plans that might seem impossible elsewhere. “This is a private initiative city,” he says. “If you have an idea and you want to do it, Houston is one of the best places in America to be, because nobody is going to put anything in your way.” Project Row Houses soon became involved in erecting new housing in nearby streets, funded by donations from the city, philanthropists and corporations, including Ikea. (“Just because it’s low income doesn’t mean that it has to look bad,” says Dennis.) So far, five blocks of the Third Ward have been renovated, with plans to help improve another 80 in the area, and Lowe has been invited to advise on urban renewal projects from Philadelphia to Opa-locka, Florida, to Seoul, South Korea. The art critic of the
New York Times recently wrote that Project Row Houses “may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country.”
