Disparate City: Understanding Rising Levels of Concentrated Poverty and Affluence in Greater Houston

The poverty rate of Harris County, which surrounds Houston, rose from 10 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2014. That alone is a troubling trend, but equally concerning is the increasing tendency in the Houston area for that poverty to be highly concentrated. This report examines the clustering of poverty and the uneven distribution of economic circumstances across Greater Houston.

It concludes that economic segregation is tightening its grip on Harris County and that the area’s neighborhoods are increasingly economically polarized. There is a declining number of middle-class neighborhoods in the region, and Greater Houston is experiencing an increasingly stark division between the “haves” and “have nots.”

This report is intended to complement the Kinder Institute’s spring 2016 study on the region’s changing racial/ethnic patterns, The Shifting City: Houston’s History of Unequal Racial Change.