​Driving around the vast Houston region, you will see an abundance of green and white signs noting that you are now “Entering Houston City Limit”, or crossing the “Fort Bend County Line”. These helpful markers make the otherwise invisible borders of these important jurisdictions apparent to us without the aid of a map. Less apparent are the boundaries of a type of jurisdiction that is, in many cases, equally as important as cities and counties, the school district.

Ty Jacobsen & Kirby Snideman
CDS Community Development Strategies

Google Earth has recently updated their aerial imagery, capturing the flooding that swamped Houston earlier this spring. The latest imagery is dated April 2016, which provides a stark contrast from imagery taken in previous months. 

Note: To access this imagery, you need to download Google Earth and utilize the historical imagery function. Click here for more information. 

The images below are side by side comparisons of various locations in Houston where the flooding was visually striking. In the first three images, the before pictures on the left were taken in March 2016. In the last image, the before picture was taken in November 2015. CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW TO ENLARGE.

Brazos near Thompsons
Below is Brazos River flooding near Sienna Plantation, Riverstone, and the town of Thompsons. You can see the difference between the levee protected neighborhoods north and east of the river vs. the rural land to the west and south around Thompsons. 

The map below shows the largest race or ethnicity in each Census Block Group geography in the 8-county Houston region* in 2000 and in 2010.  Each of the four major race or ethnic groups in the Houston region are color-coded, and the shade of each color indicates the magnitude of the largest group in each geography.  The darker colors indicate Block Groups where greater than 80% of the population is part of the largest race or ethnicity.  The medium shades show where the largest group makes up between 50% and 80% of the population.  The lightest shade of each race or ethnic group’s color code indicates a geography where the largest ethnic group makes up less than 50% of the population.  It is these lightest shade Block Groups where race and ethnic diversity is highest.