Status Updates From Prophetic City: Houston on ...

“We sometimes forget that the overlap among the groups is usually far greater than the differences in overall tendencies. Across all the sociological divisions, we are much more alike in our attitudes and beliefs than we are different, and most of us have been changing in more progressive directions over the years in our views of the present and the future.”

“The old one-life/one-career imperative is rapidly giving way to the expectation that in this time of constant change and longer lifespans, Americans will experience some five to six career changes during their working years.

We are condemned, if that’s the word, to lives of continual learning and we need to build the educational infrastructure to ensure that those opportunities are available to all of us.”

“Ultimately, we will need to become a true learning society overall, in which everyone from birth through retirement has access to opportunities for new learning and personal growth.”

“We can build a truly successful universal city and nation, the first of its kind in human history history.

Where we are failing most spectacularly is in making the critical sustained investments that will broaden access to quality education and lifelong learning so that all area residents are enabled to compete and thrive in today’s high-tech, knowledge-based economy.”

“What the Houston surveys have shown, over and over again, is that Houstonians who care about education and celebrate the coming together of all the world’s peoples are not only not alone they are in the majority. And their numbers are growing.”

“Will we come to understand that these are all *our* children?

They will be the workers, citizens, taxpayers, and voters in Houston and America in the years ahead. If today’s young people, who are disproportionately Hispanic and African-American, are unprepared to succeed in the new economy, our city and yours will not have much of a future. And neither will America.”

“Because of the surveys, we know what Houston thinks and wants. We know who Houstonians are. Nobody has to come in and do a focus group to find out.

But the biggest risk to Houston’s future is that we will just keep muddling along.

The biggest great to our future is that we will lower our aspirations, based on the false belief that our dreams for building a great city aren’t possible. They are possible.”

“I don’t think Houston will fail, but we might have to hit a wall first. And this will be very hard for a proud city. Fights over the years have allowed me to see a path forward to build some better things, and to end the life of a few bad things. And all of it makes me smile.”

We environmentalists need to be much more adept at thinking in economic terms, in thinking about livelihoods, in thinking about jobs. We will have to help the refining and chemical industries find their way to carbon neutrality.”

“Solving for flooding is *the* window, because it will take us into the densification we need, building upward instead of out over the floodplains and in the flood zones.

I think we are at a point where important new changes are both possible and imperative. Houston has to find another path.

“In a democracy, even one as flawed and slow to respond as is the current American version, when the views of the general public. Have shifted decisively, they tend eventually to be heard in the shaping of public policy.”

“The only way to build a successful and equitable multiethnic society is to ensure that all the meets of the rising generation in all of our communities have a reasonable chance to acquire the educational credentials and technical skill that today’s economy requires.”

“All Houston-area residents are now minorities; all are being called upon to build something that has never existed before in human history: a truly successful, inclusive, equitable, and united multiethnic society, made up of nearly all the ethnicities and all the religions of the world, gathered together in this one remarkable place.”

“As Hispanics, Anglos, and Asians become more affluent, they come to believe that if you haven’t succeeded its most probably because of your own lack of effort or talent. African Americans, in contrast, continue to acknowledge, no matter how wealthy they become, that poverty is most often the result of circumstances people can’t control and that government programs are needed to help people get on their feet”

“Will the attitudes change eventually? They surely will, but probably not until we manage to reduce significantly the remaining intergroup inequalities. The continuing pervasive segregation in Houston, and indeed in all of urban America, helps to perpetuate the misconception and misunderstandings that keep Anglos and blacks in their separate worlds.”

“It seems undeniable that Houston’s continued high levels of residential segregation are at least in part a reflection of the continuing resistance to neighborhood integration on the part of the Anglo Houstonians themselves.”

“The firm resistance among Anglos to living in a neighborhood where the residents are majority black or Latino had not changed at all in the course of those fourteen years.”

“While blacks and Latinos seem equally happy to live with each other and with Anglos in all the ratios described in the vignettes, Anglos, in contrast, are significantly less willing to buy a house in a neighborhood that is 60% black or 60% Latino, even when informed that the local schools are excellent and the crime rates are low.”

“One area in particular has been slow to change, despite the general embrace of the region’s growing diversity: The surveys show clearly how difficult it has been for Anglos to change their attitudes toward blacks when asked about living with these groups as neighbors. Houston’s profoundly segregated communities continue to reflect the underlying biases that keep the groups apart.”

“Education is the civil rights issue of our time.”

“Virtually all of the most critical financial investments that have been responsible for the remarkable economic success of this famously anti-government, free enterprise city were as much the products of government programs and public spending as they were of private initiatives.”