Fall 2025
By Mike Snyder

In spring 2010, Houston was gripped by an uncharacteristic sense of gloom.

Just 20% of residents responding to the 29th Houston Area Survey, released on April 20 that year, said their financial circumstances had improved in the past few years — half the level of 2008. Meanwhile, 48% said they expected their finances to get better in the upcoming years, a decline of 10 percentage points from 2008.

Both numbers were the lowest recorded since the survey began in 1982. And at this moment — the nadir of public confidence — Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research began its work. As it marks its 15th anniversary, the growing institute continues to conduct research that can help the area’s leaders steer the region through the uncertain years ahead.

“We aim to do research as a public good,” said Ruth N. López Turley, who joined the institute in 2011 and has served as its director since 2022. 

Fifteen years ago, Houstonians had reasons to feel pessimistic. The nation was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, which led to the collapse of the housing market and the failure of major financial institutions. In that same year, Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston Island, causing more than 200 deaths and tens of billions of dollars in property damage. Years later, an aerial view of the Houston area showed many rooftops still covered with blue tarps.

The pain of these events was compounded by a sort of collective civic shock, the result of a widespread “this can’t happen here” mentality. Many area residents, drawn to Houston by the prospect of good jobs and a relatively low cost of living, thought of the place as a perennial boomtown, somehow immune from normal business cycles.

“Houston was booming through the entire 20th century, brought about by the tenfold increase in the value of oil,” said Stephen Klineberg, a recently retired Rice sociology professor who was the founder and longtime director of the annual Houston Area Survey. 

“We did oil the way Detroit did cars. And you could not not make money, basically,” said Klineberg. “And it was a city world famous for having imposed the least amount of controls on development of any city in the Western world. Who cares if it’s ugly? So what if it smells? It’s the smell of money. Come on down.”

They came. The Houston metropolitan area added more than 1.2 million people, the most of any metro in the country, between 2000 and 2010. Many of the new residents had no memory of the 1980s financial downturn caused by a plunge in oil prices. But those troubled years were still fresh in Klineberg’s mind.

“It was a total collapse of the economy, the worst regional recession of any part of the country at any time since World War II, in a city that had known nothing but economic boom from its beginnings until the fateful date of May 1982 when the oil boom collapsed,” Klineberg recalled. By the end of 1983, he said, 100,000 jobs had been lost, and by 1986, one of every seven jobs that had existed in Houston in 1982 had disappeared.

Houston experienced a robust recovery in the 1990s, but the 2010 survey results showed that, once again, the bubble had burst. Harris County’s unemployment rate had risen to 8.5% from 6.3% in 2009. The benefits of rising stock prices and a gradually recovering local housing market had not trickled down to most of the area’s residents.

“The average person is still suffering,” Klineberg said at the time.

A Home for the Survey

The survey that revealed these dismal attitudes, meanwhile, was settling into a new institutional home. In February 2010, Rice’s Center on Race, Religion and Public Life merged with the university’s Urban Research Center to create the Institute on Urban Research. In a March 16, 2010, editorial, the Houston Chronicle praised the new center, saying it had the potential to “make Houston a key influence on how Americans face demographic change, education, public health and immigration in their own cities.”

Among the readers of that editorial were Nancy and Rich Kinder, two of Houston’s most influential philanthropists. It helped inspire them to give, through the Kinder Foundation, $15 million to support the institute’s work. In gratitude, Rice renamed the organization: the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

In a statement, the Kinder Foundation said its initial grant, and a second grant of $50 million in 2022, were based on the Kinders’ conviction that the center needed to grow beyond pure research: “Given that Houston was fast becoming a minority-majority region, we felt that the Houston Area Survey would serve as a solid foundation for understanding regional strengths and challenges and conducting research that provides information that can be applied to actionable solutions.”

The Kinder Institute would amass the resources and expertise to analyze and apply the survey data on some of the area’s most urgent issues — education, transportation, crime and immigration, among others — beyond the immediate financial struggles. 

“It was not just research for research,” said Bob Eury, the longtime leader of a downtown improvement organization and one of the original Kinder Institute advisory board members. “It was research to be used in our community and ultimately in other communities as well.”
 

Early Impact

Michael Emerson, a Rice sociology professor, was the founder of the Center on Race, Religion and Public Life. With the merger, he and Klineberg became the co-founding directors of the Kinder Institute. The experience of these two leaders was vital in getting the new entity off to a good start, Eury said.

“Michael was very interested in the underserved communities,” Eury said, and “the institute was launched with a program that was already well known and well respected, with a research person running it, Steve [Klineberg], whom everybody loved.”

The new institute’s first formal office was on the top floor of Lovett Hall. Staff members were hired to add research and operational capacity. And the new “think and do tank” was soon producing valuable insights for policymakers on some of the most vital issues facing the area.

The Houston Region Diversity Report, published in 2012, found that segregation remained high in some parts of Houston even as the broader metropolitan area grew more diverse. Houston, in fact, was the most diverse metro in the country, and some of its suburbs, including Pearland and Missouri City, were even more racially and ethnically balanced.

A year later, the institute published the Houston Area Asian Survey: Diversity and Transformation Among Asians in Houston. This was an ambitious and challenging effort, involving 60,000 phone calls to recruit 500 subjects for interviews in multiple languages, to sample the attitudes and backgrounds of Asian Americans in the Greater Houston area based on surveys from 1995, 2002 and 2011. The respondents represented 27 nationalities.

Among other findings, the Asian survey showed the flaws in the stereotype of Asian Americans as the “model minority,” a perception which implied that members of other racial and ethnic minorities were less successful because they didn’t work as hard. The survey helped place Houston’s diversity on a national stage.

The institute’s Global Cities initiative put Houston in an international context. It also led Emerson and sociologist Kevin Smiley of the University of Buffalo to publish “Market Cities, People Cities” in 2018, which compared urban policies and lifestyles in Houston and Copenhagen, Denmark. The authors’ research, including Kinder Institute surveys, showed that Houston exemplified a city that emphasized jobs and wealth creation, while Copenhagen focused on quality-of-life issues. 

“Which path each city chooses leads to many other differences between the two cities,” Emerson said, including higher levels of civic trust among Copenhagen residents and, in Houston, parks and waterway improvements funded by private rather than public investment. 

Other Kinder Institute research revealed the need for more investment in education and steps to overcome disparities in health care access. 

The education report was blunt in its assessment, noting that more than half of Harris County residents under age 20 in 2010 were Latino and another fifth were Black — the two groups most likely to be living in poverty. “The new demographic realities make it clear that, if Houston’s African American and Latino young people are unprepared to succeed in today’s knowledge economy, it is difficult to imagine a prosperous future for the region as a whole,” the report stated.

Education has been a particular focus under López Turley, who founded the Kinder Institute’s Houston Education Resource Consortium as a research-practice partnership with the Houston Independent School District — one of the nation’s largest urban school districts.

“HISD was our original partner,” a relationship that began in 2011, López Turley said. “The reason why having long-term community partnerships is important is that we can build relationships of trust.”

López Turley used the tools of academic research — data analysis, critical problem-solving and deep subject matter expertise — to help HISD improve student outcomes. These efforts gained momentum with infusions of support from Laura and John Arnold and Houston Endowment.

“It’s been extremely challenging, and yet we have seen progress,” said López Turley, noting the Texas Legislature’s approval of statewide, all-day prekindergarten programs after the institute shared its research and testified before state lawmakers.  

Facing Disasters

From 2014 to 2022, the Kinder Institute entered an expansion period. Then-director Bill Fulton, a former mayor and urban planner, brought a national perspective. 

“When I arrived in October 2014, I knew very little about the city. Most urban experts in the United States — except maybe Steve Klineberg — simply didn’t take Houston seriously as a ‘real city,’” Fulton said. “Important to urban planners like me, Houston didn’t even have zoning. I mean, really?”

Investments from Houston Endowment allowed the institute to take the city seriously, launching new research programs focused on urban disparity, development, transportation, placemaking and governance. The institute also expanded its community outreach and data efforts.

In 2016, the institute published a key report, “The Houston Pension Question,” which helped guide city leaders in confronting a $3.9 billion unfunded pension liability. Leaders credited the institute’s work in helping avoid a financial disaster.  

During this period, the institute contended with three devastating floods, then COVID-19 and Winter Storm Uri in 2021 — each disaster revealing deeper disparities across Houston.

“A city that has always prided itself on opportunity for all was exposed as profoundly unequal,” Fulton said. 

To understand the impacts of these crises, the institute helped launch the Texas Flood Registry, which ultimately collected data from over 20,000 households about the impacts of flooding. The Gulf Coast Coronavirus (COVID-19) Community Impact Survey shortly followed, and it captured insights from over 12,000 Houston-area households about the pandemic. 

Housing emerged as an area of focus under Fulton as well, with the 2020 State of Housing in Harris County and Houston serving as the starting point of an annual series tracking how the city — long considered affordable to working families — was beginning to experience a crisis of declining affordability at a time of increasing vulnerability. 
 

Built for the Future

The formative years of the institute continue to shape its trajectory — and the city’s.

Population growth has continued unabated. From 2010 to 2025, 1.5 million people have moved to the Houston metro, making it the second-fastest growing in the country.  

The challenges of urban life remain, but they are now magnified with increasing threats from extreme weather, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and a new era of economic uncertainty. 

As it has expanded its research, data and engagement initiatives, the institute has tripled in size, now boasting a staff of over 80 researchers and support personnel. Research activity has been reorganized into five centers — education, health, housing, economic mobility and population — each with its own team and slate of projects.

The growth and reorganization, López Turley said, are aimed at “setting up the institute’s infrastructure so it’s focused on what comes next.”    

López Turley’s research partnership approach is infused throughout the organization. Today, eight school districts collectively serving over 500,000 students are part of the institute’s education consortium. In addition, United Way of Greater Houston and the Houston Housing Authority have signed on as formal partners, collaborating on new research questions around financial security and affordable housing.

“When you compare that to other organizations and other cities, it stands above,” said Algenita Scott Davis, a founding member of the Kinder Institute’s advisory board. 

Along the way, the Houston Area Survey has also grown and remains a key piece of the institute’s future, enhanced by the creation of the Greater Houston Community Panel.

In 2025, the survey reached almost 10,000 residents, expanding beyond Harris County to Fort Bend and Montgomery counties — the three counties combined account for almost 20% of Texas’ population — with a response rate of 81%. The size of the panel makes it possible to not only analyze each county, but also sets of neighborhoods within them. 

Kinder Institute staff contributed to this story.