6 Comment

• Memebag January 9, 2018 at 9:17 am

  Re Watertight Starbucks:
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  That’s cool, but if the water topped the 2′ 8″ barrier it would have sat there in its watertight tub until someone emptied it. Instead of being watertight, I think the better solution will be to tolerate water. Use materials that aren’t damaged when submerged. Let the water in, then let the water out.
• Angostura January 9, 2018 at 10:38 am

  A couple things the Vox piece doesn’t address.
  First, people can and do select where they live based on schools. The difference between putting money toward private school and putting it toward a mortgage payment comes to about $150,000 worth of house per kid, so houses zoned to the best schools get bid up. To the extent there are racial disparities in income, those disparities will manifest themselves in school attendance maps as well. Adjusting the maps is a static solution to a dynamic problem (i.e. new families will buy based on the new districts, not the old ones).
  Second, it seems that the racial makeup of the elementary schools is based on overall data of the zoned area, not of children who actually attend the school. Due to demographic differences between races (age, household size, etc.), and due to the fact that HISD has a pretty broad school choice program, there can be a big difference between the two numbers. The school my kid goes to is listed as 29% black/latino, whereas the actual attendance is 51%. River Oaks Elementary, one of the whitest districts on the map, is listed as 8% minority, but HISD gives the numbers as 32% minority (plus another 27% Asian, who apparently aren’t a minority).
• Toby January 9, 2018 at 11:00 am

  Independence Heights does have it all. Including my lawn mower, bicycle, items from my glove compartment, and just about everything else that’s vanished from my driveway over the years.
• J January 9, 2018 at 11:17 am

  Thanks Toby! First hard laugh since I got the flu.
• Local Planner January 9, 2018 at 12:22 pm

  I agree with Angostura – the comment about static solution vs dynamic problem captures it well. Particularly in suburban areas (but also in selected locations in the urban core), the single family housing market itself becomes inextricably tied to perceived and actual school demographics. Over time, people sort their own residential locations based on school zone boundaries – if you change the boundaries, you ultimately change the residential racial / class patterns as well. And for what it’s worth, in the Houston area at least, the perceived income levels of students are equally or more important than race / ethnicity in this decisionmaking – our region (including most of the suburbs) are just too ethnically diverse to assure white folks of an all-white classroom except for an increasingly limited number of locations, so seeking that becomes fairly quixotic.
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  That said, I’m glad that I’m starting to see the academicians and policy analysts finally start to understand this, even in a limited way – they really seemed blind to it for a long time.
• Jonathan January 9, 2018 at 5:01 pm

  I’m zoned to Poe, but if I had kids, they wouldn’t go there. I don’t think much of HISD. Lamar is a war zone (my best friend is a teacher there) and its one of the better schools in HISD. Pitiful. It’s infuriating to pay taxes for bad schools made up of people that don’t actually live in your neighborhood.