Sluggish job growth and rising financial insecurity may have pushed Houston-area residents to name the economy as the biggest problem facing the region, according to results released Monday from the 45th annualKinder Houston Area Survey.
Rice University researchers surveyed almost 9,000 members of the Greater Houston Community Panel stretching across three counties: Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery. Started in 1982, the survey is the largest and longest-running survey of any major metro area in the nation and measures the attitudes of residents across the greater Houston area.
More than 1 in 5 respondents said they felt financially "worse off" than they did a year ago. The financial pressure felt particularly high among low-income households. Nearly 80% of those earning less than $25,000 said they would be unable to cover an unexpected expense of $400.
A rough job market may be to blame. Daniel Potter,director of the Houston Population Research Center and Surveys, said the Houston area was projected to add more than 70,000 jobs during the last year, but in reality added less than 20,000.
Researchers found the percentage of residents who rated the job opportunities in the area as "good or excellent" dropped nearly 30 percentage points. It's the largest single-year drop since the oil crisis in the early 1980s.
"When you’re looking at that kind of data, for folks to tell you, ‘Yeah, the job situation here is just not quite what we were hoping for it to be,' there’s an alignment that exists there as well," Potter said.
The second-most commonly reported concern was crime and safety. However, researchers found social cohesion, or the measure of how connected someone feels to their neighbors, to be a major factor.
The more connected someone felt, the less likely they were to say they felt unsafe. Someone with low social cohesion had a 55% chance of saying they felt unsafe in their daily lives. That number dropped to 37% for someone with high social cohesion.
Political and social attitudes
The survey also measured attitudes onpolitical and social topics, including book banning, gun control and the legalization of marijuana.
This year, researchers began asking not only about respondents' opinions on political and social topics, but also how they believed members of the opposite political party felt about those same issues. On average, people correctly guessed the other party's stance on two out of nine questions.
"In other words, we don’t know what other people are thinking, but we surely have perceptions and those perceptions are driving a lot of how we are behaving and engaging with one another." Potter said. "Because we do have these issues that we share a shocking amount of alignment on, but instead we’re told we should fight with one another."
For example, residents of all three Houston-area counties across both political parties have increased their support for universal background checks. But the research shows perceptions of the other side remained skewed.
"In fact, Democrats think about 34% of Republicans support universal background checks and Republicans think about 74% of Democrats support universal background checks. So they’re telling you we think we are different from them on this issue." Potter said. "So not only are they wrong in their perception of the other, they’re actually aligned in their favoring of this type of policy."
For the first time in the history of the survey, residents in Fort Bend and Montgomery counties joined Harris County in support for the legalization of recreational marijuana use. Opposition to book banning has also increased across all three counties.
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