4 Comment

• Need-a-Patio May 5, 2015 at 10:04 am

  Brett’s patio design on his website is awesome but he seems too busy to get in touch for smaller projects. Is this the case? I can understand he probably really busy since no one else does his style of work. Has anyone had any luck? Who else is town can build a steel patio frame with a wood roof and fan and make it look cool?
• TheNiche May 5, 2015 at 10:28 am

  Re: Income Mobility. I was looking at that NY Times article yesterday and then went over to the website for the organization that published the data. They have a metric called “Absolute Upward Mobility” which is much much more meaningful than what is presented in the Times. It adjusts for factors such as local costs of living, and that is really important since household income is being divided into quartiles at the national level. Obviously, somebody can be very poor in some places on the median national income and quite well off in other places.

  When you do that and you look at MSAs, then Houston actually performs really well by comparison with other large cities. When you rank it that way, the top cities list in descending order is Salt Lake City, San Jose, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington D.C, Houston, Riverside, Denver, Portland OR, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Austin, Miami, Las Vegas… and so on.

  In the Houston MSA, a child born to the 25% percentile of families by income would be expected to rise into the the 42.9th percentile as an adult. To put that in perspective, the top big city is Salt Lake City clocks in at 45.8. San Antonio, DFW, and Austin are 41.1, 40.9, and 40.0.

  The bottom of the list is mostly populated by the deep south, Appalachia, and parts of the rust belt. The very worst cities were Memphis (33.7), Charlotte (35.6), Atlanta (36.1), and Indianapolis (37.2). Actually, as a region (both urban and rural) Texas did well. Our border cities did exceptionally well. West Texas ranks well at the present time, probably for all the reasons that you’d expect. And there were some other pleasant surprises in there. Another thing, there’s not a single city in Texas ranked lower than Waco or Texarkana (both 39.1), but there are 103 other cities behind Waco on a list of 380 cities.

  One of the more controversial findings (and they specifically acknowledge this on their website) was that a child that grows up in a place with any significant black population (regardless of the racial composition of their own family) is far worse off than a child that did not.
• ShadyHeightster May 5, 2015 at 12:42 pm

  @Need-a-Patio, try contacting McDugald-Steele. I’m sure they can come up with something you like, the biggest limitation would be your budget.
• Downtowner May 5, 2015 at 2:05 pm

  @Need-a-Patio: http://benkoush.com/