Paging Dr. Klineberg: Grave bias in the Houston Area Survey
Update: Response from Dr. Klineberg
I haven’t met Dr. Klineberg, but he seems like a nice guy. Despite my frustrated rant, he took the time to send me a polite letter explaining his stance on things. I thought it was only appropriate that I post his response here, since I posted my letter to him for the rest of the world to see. You can find Dr. Klineberg’s response at the end of the original post, below.
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I’ve been enjoying reading the Houston Area Survey, which is an annual report put together by Dr. Steven Klineberg. This is a great service to the community, and provides a really helpful resource for us to ‘take the pulse’ of the community year to year. This year’s report continues to show a strong increase in people’s awareness of urbanism and transit choices as viable solutions to many of Houston’s challenges, and important growth areas for Houston’s future. You can read more about that at Houston Tomorrow, where they’ve prepared a great summary of the relevant findings from the survey.
Now, on the whole, this is a great piece of work. I have one major, major beef with Dr. Klineberg, however:
Notice anything funny?
“Lives in the suburbs” is used as proof of socio-economic advancement. EXCUSE ME?!?!
I’m sorry, but that’s simply not valid. There are poor suburbs all over the country, Dr. Klineberg, just as there are wealthy inner-city areas. You mean to tell me that living in Baytown or Pasadena is a greater sign of socio-economic advancement than living in Montrose or River Oaks?
Living farther away from Downtown isn’t the same as being rich. In fact one of the major trends that has people worried these days is that THE POOR are increasingly the inhabitants of the suburban fringe! In fact, MORE POOR PEOPLE LIVE IN THE SUBURBS THAN IN CITIES!
To include the survey item “Lives in the suburbs” as an indicator of social advancement in an otherwise fine survey is shameful. This is a typical expression of the latent bias against the city, held most of all by old white people.
I’m fuming mad about this, and I’m sick of this kind of stuff. My wife and I often recieve pressure from the older generation of our families on this issue. Whether it’s subtle hints or plain statements, the question they ask is the same: When are you going to grow up and live in the suburbs like a responsible adult?
My answer? Never. I refuse to deal with the traffic, the bland environment, and the auto-dependency. When I buy a house it will be in the Heights, or Neartown, not Katy. If I have to save up longer, or buy something smaller to make that happen, so be it.
This bias against cities is a holdover from another era, and it no longer reflects the reality of life. For the average Joe to express this is frustrating, but for a supposedly open-minded, scholarly academic – it’s embarrassing.
Dr. Klineberg, you need to seriously reconsider this statistically indeterminate factor in your future surveys. Considering what a valueable resource your research is to this city, to include personal biases in your methodology is completely inappropriate.
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Response from Dr. Klineberg:
Thanks for pointing this out to me. That chart was intended only to measure broad socioeconomic progress among Latino immigrants by how long they had lived in the United States. I didn’t think of suburb vs. city as a particularly compelling measure of SES per se.
Of course, there are many wealthy people living in the the inner city (River Oaks, etc.), and there are many poor people living in the suburbs. And we are indeed a suburban nation (Here are some sociological facts: 54% of the U.S. population is now suburban; there are more non-family households in the suburbs than married-with-children households; the suburban poor now outnumber the urban poor by at least 1 million, the suburbs have replaced the cities as the nation’s economic and commercial cores.)
I also think, by the way, that the option of living in the city, in upscale loft-condominiums (ours is in the museum district), and near light-rail stations and pedestrian plazas, will become increasingly attractive in the years ahead. I predict that you will hear fewer and fewer comments about how come you’re not living the suburbs! That anti-city bias is indeed, as you say, “a holdover from another era.”
Still, it remains true that in Harris County, 61% of all Anglos do live in the suburbs, whereas 69% of all African Americans and 61% of all Latinos live in the city of Houston. People with professional degrees (beyond the four years of college) and those will high school diplomas or less than high school are more likely any other education groups to be living in the city, but there’s a near perfect linear relationship with income: more than 60% of all area residents who have household incomes above $100,000 are living the suburbs, and well more than 60% of those in households making less than $50,000 live in the City of Houston. But this too is changing.
So it still seems to me that there’s enough of a relationship here to take “living in the suburbs” as one indicator of assimilation on the part of immigrant communities (and doing so certainly does not reflect any personal bias on my part). The key point in slide 27 is simply that there is a remarkably consistent pattern among all such indicators (including homeownership, having health insurance, having access to the internet in one’s home or place of work, etc.) to indicate upward mobility on the part of Latino immigrants.
8 Comments
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I find this feeling strange as well, especially considering the number of rather exclusive neighborhoods within the city (River Oaks comes to mind) but I think you are right that it is generally based on a mindset from a different time and, historically based at least, on the concept of “white-flight.” Of course, ironically, most places within the City of Houston (even places like the Heights and Montrose) are actually rather suburban in nature anyway, even if they have more charm than homes found in places like Sugar Land.
As a side note, I can tell you that I fell much more secure and much safer in my little urban island in Houston when compared to almost any of the suburbs I have visited in Houston. Auto accidents, drunk drivers, random crimes, etc. Frankly, there seems to be so much random, violent crime in places like Pearland and Katy (just today there were two people murdered out there). No thank you.
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Very true.
In the city there are enough people around that crimes tend to be seen, and criminals caught. In the extreme isolation of the suburbs people can be murdered in their home and nobody knows for weeks.
It looks like, slowly but surely, crime is increasing in the suburbs and decreasing in the city. This isn’t shocking; for a long time cities were principally fortified bastions of civilization, seen as safe havens from the potentially dangerous outside world.
These things come and go in cycles. I have a feeling the credit crunch and foreclosure crisis of the past year will be seen in the long view of history as a critical tipping point when suburbs on the whole began to decline and cities on the whole tended to revitalize.
We’ll see!
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Bias “against” the city? Are you nuts? The only bias in this town is against suburbs, man. The Chron is famous for that. I’m surprised Klineberg even wrote something different for a change without the pro-city Greater Houston Partnership breathing down his neck. I hate the city. It’s an old concrete jungle. You can have it. Kingwood or the Woodlands is light years ahead of the quality of living than anywhere in two counties. You don’t even have any lakes or trees, and your golf courses suck. The only time I ever go there is for jury duty and I’m out of there…back to my hiking and biking greenbelts, lakes, pools, new homes, perfect roadways and streets and manicured lawns and forests. The only reason there is a rising crime problem is because the city figured out how to get Metro to bus all your criminals outside of the city and let us deal with it. NOt only that, about 60 percent of the crime we do have is people driving out here from the city and targeting us.
We employ tens of thousands of Houstonians in our shopping centers, car repair places, restaurants and malls. Our schools are superior to HISD. Most city kids can’t even READ. “White flight” amuses me. It’s “everybody” flight now and we can still handle it better. The fact is, most people have this “I’ll never leave the city” attitude until they have kids and want to give them a decent education in a house that isn’t falling apart in a safe neighborhood, and they can still play in the backyard or the pools or the hundreds of parks or FORESTS we have. The they end up loving it and never return. It’s also far less polluted. 2.5 million people can’t be wrong, you’re surrounded. By the way, it’s not a bunch of “old white people” who know this…it’s everyone, and they love the suburb life if they ever lived in the nasty, inefficient, loud, polluted city. Not everyone who lives here works in the city, so don’t give me that garbage either….more than half of us…about 70 percent, run and own our own businesses…many more than you have, and a far greater variety.
Also, I hardly ever use my car. I use the greenbelts that hook up 18 different villages and stores and pools and churches and golf courses and doctor’s offices and dentists…I ride my bike with hundreds of others out here, enjoying nature. IO don’t need anything in the city, and I won’t spend $200 to watch a baseball game either. I’ll go over to our own outdoor music pavilions if I want to see entertainment or a concert, and most of the ticket buyers even there drive out from the city to take it all in. We have dozens of concerts and events going on all the time…car shows, art shows, everything. And we don’t even get mugged.
Enjoy your concrete paradise, and come take a boat ride anytime…it’s just down the street.
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Thanks for your insight, Joe.
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Very interesting discussion! Thanks for raising the questions and also posting the researcher’s response. I wanted to throw in a personal plug for Eastwood, my new neighborhood, which is about a mile-and-a-half from downtown. If you’re looking for affordable, close to downtown, and walkable, you can’t beat it. Kids can safely walk to get popsicles, and adults can walk to restaurants, groceries and laundromats.
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I live in Pasadena for reason only–there’s still a couple of apartments I can afford. Other than that, it’s an illegal alien haven with the accompanying problems. It certainly isn’t a sign of “doing good” to be living in some of these fringe cities.
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“I hate the city. It’s an old concrete jungle. You can have it. Kingwood or the Woodlands is light years ahead of the quality of living than anywhere in two counties.”
Well, if you like sitting in traffic. I’ve spent a lot of time in Kingwood, and if I could have every moment I sat in traffic on those two godawful roads in and out of it, looking at ugly strip malls and wishing I wasn’t in my car, I could accomplish a lot with that time.
Look, I don’t begrudge anybody who likes living in the burbs – people should enjoy the place they live – but one would hope you’d have the intelligence to realize that some people consider cultural attractions, walkability, good architecture, and traditional street plans that don’t cause traffic backups to be big contributors to quality of life. And one would hope that whether you like the city or not, you wouldn’t need to explain your opinion by pulling made up statistics and silly assertions out of your butt.
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Andrew – my sister and her (ex) husband used to get this from our folks too – once they had a kid, the assumption was that their home in San Francisco was simply not suitable, because it had almost no yard and OMG, you couldn’t walk from the garage into the house without going outside.
I pointed out that my nephew was going to grow up with the Golden Gate Park as his backyard, just down the street, and it was a bit nicer than the quarter acre behind the house we grew up in. And, because they lived in a pretty quiet neighborhood without huge resident turnover, a lot of familiar people.
The first time I visited after he was born, my sister and I went to the local coffee shop. I stood on the sidewalk holding the baby while she was inside getting our coffee. As we stood there, a woman got off the bus, stopped and looked at me, and said, “You’re not Alexander’s daddy!”
And I thought, how great, people in the neighborhood know him and know my sister and are going to be part of the “eyes on the street” (to use Jane Jacobs’ phrase) keeping an eye on him as he grows up in this neighborhood.
I don’t resent growing up in the burbs – though I grew up in a traditional New England suburb, which is a whole different animal that the suburbs here – they are are old towns that got linked into the cities as time passed, and retain many of the good things about small town life, which are utterly absent from modern suburbia – but I know plenty of people who grew up in big cities, and there’s no mystery about it. (And in fact, once I was a teenager, one of the amenities of that suburb was a train every half hour into the city, which opened up great horizons for me.)
It’s different. It’s good in many ways, it’s got some drawbacks, like most things in this life. Stick to your guns – unless you decide you want something different, and then don’t be too proud to change your mind.
(I have to admit that I am stunned by Joe’s revelation that 70% of the residents of the Woodlands own businesses, given that only 30% of Americans have ever owned a business. Why haven’t we read about the Woodlands in a business magazine? Is there something in the water there? I am sure Joe will point us at his source for this fascinating statistic any moment now!)