Enduring Reflection: Houston Area Survey

By Christopher Dow

In more than a quarter of a century of collecting information about Houston and the people who live here, Stephen Klineberg has tracked the growth and development of one of America’s most extraordinary cities and, in the process, become a leading authority on urban development.

Klineberg, a professor of sociology at Rice since 1972, is the driving force behind the Houston Area Survey, the longest-running collection of data ever amassed about an American city. He knows Houston as few others do and easily rattles off the numbers — the racial demographics, say, or the median income, the unemployment rate or the tonnage entering the port. Just as often, he talks about Houston and the changes it has gone through as if the city is an old and valued friend.

The survey covers environmental issues, economic outlooks, immigration, ethnic communities, women’s rights, attitudes toward religious diversity and much more. “It is an incredibly rich set of data,” Klineberg said, the chair he’s sitting in barely able to contain the movement of his energetic enthusiasm. “When we step back, we see a city that underwent a total collapse of the economy and then a recovery into a restructured economy, all the while going through remarkable demographic changes.”

A Survey Is Born

Klineberg started the survey in 1982 after being called on to teach a research methods class. He wanted to offer the best and most interesting material he could, and a survey of Houston seemed like an appropriate way to give his students real-world, hands-on experience.

“That first class was a group of extraordinary undergraduates,” Klineberg said. “They helped create the questionnaire from scratch, and together, we did all the telephoning. They worked hard, and I am enormously grateful to them, as I am to all the survey classes that followed.”

Using a list of random phone numbers provided by a local research company, the students in that spring 1982 class called until they had completed 412 systematic interviews. “In the beginning,” Klineberg said, “we defined our ‘sample universe’ as anywhere we could call from Rice without having to pay long distance.” Today, the survey officially covers Harris County and reaches an average of 650 respondents every year.

At the time of the first survey, Houston was booming. “One million people had moved into Harris County between 1970 and 1982,” Klineberg said. “Eighty-two percent of all the primary-sector jobs in the city were tied to the oil business, and the price of oil increased tenfold during those years.”

Houston was world-famous for having imposed the least amount of controls on development of any city in the Western world. Houstonians proclaimed themselves to be the epitome of what Americans could achieve when left unfettered by zoning, taxes and government regulation. “It was a chance to survey attitudes among Houstonians about the ‘social costs’ of this remarkable growth,” Klineberg said, “and to collect information on public concerns about issues such as traffic, crime and pollution.”

From Syllabus to Shaper

Klineberg never intended the survey to go beyond that first semester, but two months after the interviews were completed, the oil boom crashed. Practically overnight, Houston became a very different city, and Klineberg realized he would have to do the survey again the following year. The Houston Post offered financial support in exchange for exclusive worldwide first-publication rights, and this made it possible to conduct the surveys on a regular basis.

“It became clear after five or six years that we were going to have to continue,” Klineberg said. “People were waiting each year to hear what we found. The surveys were providing objective and reliable information gathered by people without an ax to grind and conducted with the highest level of professional expertise.”

The survey has become the basis for a pair of courses. In one, students develop the questionnaire and analyze the survey data; in the other, they assess how well the city is addressing the challenges it faces. A postdoctoral fellowship, funded by Houston Endowment Inc., aids in publishing the results in professional journals. Graduate students and faculty from across the social sciences at Rice are making use of the surveys, and the HAS Summer Fellowship Program encourages graduate students around the country to employ the data in their own research. In addition, the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research, the world’s largest archivist of digital data, now includes the survey and makes its findings universally available.

The HAS finds, perhaps, its widest range of use outside academia. “It has become a valuable resource of reliable information on public attitudes and demographic trends,” Klineberg said. “I know that many nonprofits seeking grant support use the survey data as a background for why the work they’re doing is important.”

Klineberg gives innumerable presentations every year on the survey findings, including an annual report to the Greater Houston Partnership. Every couple of years, he presents the data to the Harris County delegation of the Texas Legislature. Recently, he gave a talk to the Hearst Foundation in New York City, using Houston as a microcosm of the new America of the 21st century.

The HAS has produced unexpected benefits for Rice as well. When the Houston community was queried about what it knows about Rice, the Houston Area Survey was one of the most frequently mentioned projects. “The surveys have enhanced Rice’s visibility in the community,” Klineberg said, “and that helps to expand public recognition of Rice’s commitment to doing work that is of value to the city.”

A Unique View for a Unique City

The survey currently is funded by a consortium of contributors that includes the AT&T Foundation, Gallery Furniture, Vinson & Elkins, the United Way and the Houston Chronicle. About one-third of the questions are identical each year, another third are questions rotated every two or three years, and the final third are questions on newly emerging issues or concerns.

According to Klineberg, no other metropolitan area has been the focus of a long-term survey of this sort. “There used to be a project called the Detroit Area Study, but it’s no longer active,” he said. “And there’s a Los Angeles County Survey every year, but it’s conducted with different investigators who come in with different ideas of what they want to study, so it doesn’t track many of the long-term trends.”

Nor, apparently, is there another comparable demographic area in the United States. “Houston is often thought of as Los Angeles’ little brother because it’s the same kind of spread-out city at the forefront of the new ethnic diversity,” Klineberg said. “But although Los Angeles and New York City together have one-third of all the foreign-born residents in this country, no city has been changed as dramatically by the new immigration as Houston.”

Tracking Trends

The demographic trends are a principal focus of the survey. During the oil boom, Houston’s population growth was primarily composed of Anglos. In sharp contrast, virtually all the growth in the last quarter-century has been from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. “This traditionally biracial Southern city, dominated and controlled by white men, has suddenly become one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse metropolitan areas in the country,” Klineberg said.

No other city in America has a long-running record of this sort or has experienced such profound transformations. “You can see in Houston, more clearly than in any other city in the country, the economic and demographic contours of the new America,” Klineberg said. “What happens in Houston — how we manage that transition and how we succeed in building a truly inclusive, multiethnic society — will have enormous implications not just for Houston’s future, but for the American future.”

The survey data also reveal the parameters of the new economy. “Houston was riding the resources of the industrial age,” Klineberg said. “We made money out of exploiting natural resources, such as cotton, timber, cattle and oil.” It wasn’t until the oil bust that Houston went through the same deindustrialization process as the rest of the country. Now, the city is in the midst of a global, high-tech economy, where the source of wealth has more to do with human resources and with access to cutting-edge knowledge.

“Houston’s long-term future is not going to be based on oil and gas, but on the growth of bio-nano-info-envirotech,” Klineberg said. “Here, you can see the principal challenge of the new economy. If Houston is to experience continuing prosperity in the 21st century, it will have to develop into an urban destination that attracts the best and brightest in America — people who can live anywhere. And Rice is central to the growth of the knowledge economy in Houston.”

Changes and Challenges

Klineberg is struck by how much Houstonians seem to appreciate their city. “People consistently rate Houston more highly than other metropolitan areas,” he said. “They like the low cost of living, the diversity of restaurants and festivals and the fact that Houston is one of the few cities with world-class symphony, ballet, opera and repertory theatre.”

In addition, the past few years have witnessed an increasing interest in urban life. “After 2004, we picked up a shift in the numbers of Anglos in the suburbs saying they would be very interested in someday moving to the city,” Klineberg said. “And there has been a decline in the proportion of Anglos living in the inner city who say they want to move to the suburbs.”

At the same time, the surveys have documented growing anxieties about crime, health care, immigration, traffic congestion and pollution common to all Americans. The public is increasingly worried that the country itself is headed for “more difficult times” rather than “better times.” A major issue, Klineberg said, is the need for vast improvements in public education.

“We live in a world where the ‘blue-collar path’ to financial security has largely disappeared, where having only a high school diploma can lock you in poverty,” he said. “We have to get this generation of young people through high school and into at least two years of community college, yet almost 50 percent of all Latino and African-American males are dropping out of high school. That spells disaster for any city in the knowledge economy, where a highly skilled work force is critical for economic prosperity.”

A second challenge is managing growth. “It is predicted that another 1 million people will move into Harris County in the next 20 years,” Klineberg said. “If we don’t take steps now to guide that growth in enlightened ways, much of this region’s remaining green space will disappear into subdivisions and parking lots, traffic congestion as well as air and water pollution will worsen, and the overall quality of life in the Houston area may well deteriorate in irretrievable ways. And if that occurs, can anyone doubt that the region’s prospects for sustained economic prosperity will deteriorate along with it? The key is to come together in a shared vision of the city we want to build, and then find ways to encourage the kind of development that can make it happen.”

The Bottom Line

Every city in America is facing comparable challenges, and Houston is a microcosm of America in these respects. Without originally intending to, the HAS has captured and encapsulated Houston’s primary challenges and made them easier to grasp, especially in a city that is so diversified and spread out. “The surveys show clearly how the city has changed, and they help to clarify what we need to do to go forward,” Klineberg said. “At Rice, the Houston Area Survey has become one of our best sociological teaching tools, and at the same time, it has benefited the wider community.”