COVID-19 job loss hits Houston’s low-wage neighborhoods hardest

Houston neighborhoods with many low-wage workers, such as Gulfton, Sharpstown and Greenspoint, are likely the city’s hardest hit by COVID-19-related job loss, according to new research from Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

Using ZIP code-level and neighborhood-level data on COVID-19 cases and job loss, the Kinder Institute found that most neighborhoods in Houston have likely lost 7%-8% of jobs in the last month. However, several neighborhoods in southwest Houston and near George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) have likely experienced job loss in excess of 9%. These figures are estimates and apply to neighborhoods where workers live, not where their jobs are located.

The Kinder Institute has created a dashboard that shows these estimates and allows users to drill down on unemployment in specific industries and neighborhoods. More detail is also available in an Urban Edge blog post: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2020/04/29/Covid-19-economy-job-loss-hits-already-vulnerable-neighborhoods-unemployment.

Some specifics:

• Sharpstown, Gulfton and Greenspoint have likely suffered significant job loss because so many residents work in the accommodation and food services industry.
• Construction workers who might have experienced job loss mostly live in east Harris County, including the Baytown, La Porte and Pasadena areas.
• COVID-19 related job losses in retail are spatially distributed quite evenly across Harris County, except the west side of the Interstate 610 loop. Those are wealthy neighborhoods where few residents work in the retail industry.

Key takeaways:

• Low-income renters are among the most vulnerable populations. Job instability and housing insecurity make it difficult for those families to weather the pandemic. For example, in Aldine West and Aldine Southeast, over 60% of renters spend over 30% of their income on rent. With job loss estimated to be about 8.6% for both neighborhoods, the struggle to keep a stable home will be even greater.
• Single-parent families face a considerable challenge; 75% of children in the Third Ward and 71% in the IAH neighborhood live with single parents. These areas also face an estimated job loss of 8.6% and 8.9% among their residents, respectively.

This research adapted methodology developed by the Urban Institute and used the Texas Workforce Commission’s unemployment claims data for March 21-April 18. The Urban Institute used data on low-wage workers only; the Kinder Institute also used data on high-wage workers to account for job losses in the oil and gas industry.

The Kinder Institute used its Community Tabulation Areas (CTAs) as the neighborhood boundaries. The CTAs are designed to serve as approximations of neighborhoods, based specifically on census geographic boundaries, to facilitate the aggregation of census data to geographies larger than census tracts but smaller than counties. By taking social community boundaries such as super neighborhoods, market areas and school districts into account, it is hoped that CTAs will serve as a more suitable approximation of neighborhoods than ZIP Code Tabulation Areas.