Jennifer Hadayia sees it often during her presentations.
Eyes widen, eyebrows raise.
It’s the look among audience members’ faces as the executive director of Air Alliance Houston introduces a Houston mapping phenomenon known as the Houston Arrow.
“There’s a light bulb that goes off,” she said. “And I see that light bulb regularly.”
When mapping any slew of variables in the city — from rates of childhood asthma, to the city’s white population, even a neighborhood’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change — an arrow-like shape appears.
Within the Arrow fall neighborhoods like Montrose, River Oaks and the Heights. Wealthy enclaves that embody Houston’s prosperity. Outside the Arrow, however, fall neighborhoods like Northside, Kashmere Gardens and Greater Fifth Ward, areas that historically have been divided by highways and suffered the impacts of industrial pollution.
A four part series of articles produced in 2021 by the One Breath Partnership, a coalition made up of Rice University and several environmental organizations, dubbed it “the shape of Houston’s inequity.”
Changing the Arrow’s shape — removing the boundaries of Houston’s inequity — has proven to be an ongoing, uphill battle.
Inequity takes shape
Forming along Houston’s west side, the stem of the Arrow is bordered by Interstate 10 to the north and the Westpark Tollway and Interstate 69 to the south. It ends in a triangular tip pointing toward the city’s eastside communities, barely jutting into Houston’s downtown core and encapsulating much of the Heights to the north and the Texas Medical District and Rice Village to the south.
“It’s that dividing line between haves and have-nots,” said Grace Tee Lewis, a senior health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Diving into the history of the phenomenon, the One Breath project analyzes how historical investment in certain areas, such as River Oaks and Memorial Park, helped create the Arrow’s shape.
“River Oaks would anchor a prosperous west side of town, to the benefit of those developers, as the east side would remain the site of industry, commerce and everyone else,” wrote Leah Binkovitz in the One Breath project.
Those investments, Binkovitz wrote, were coupled with decades of policy decisions — the routing and re-routing of highways, redlining and racial covenants that barred Black and brown residents from buying homes in certain communities, and Houston’s continued use of tax-increment reinvestment zones, or TIRZs, that disproportionately pour funds into areas with existing resources — to further platform wealthy, west side enclaves and solidify the Arrow’s lasting shape.
“It wasn’t just new houses and parks,” Binkovitz wrote. “Neighborhoods inside the Arrow also benefited from personal relationships that were able to shape the outcomes of unwelcome infrastructure like highways, too.”
Bridgette Murray lives in Pleasantville, outside the Arrow.
She is president of the Pleasantville Area Super Neighborhood Council and has seen firsthand how her community has been affected by the policies that formed the Arrow.
Access to healthcare, food availability and transportation issues, Murray said, are just a few of the issues exacerbated by the Arrow.
“When you think about redlining, a lot of the decisions that were made in the Jim Crow era, we’re living with the results of that,” Murray said. “And I truly believe the Arrow is a reflection of some of those decisions.”
Keith Downey, president of the Kashmere Gardens Super Neighborhood Council, said he has felt the Arrow’s impacts since he was a child, before ever learning of the mapping phenomenon.
Born and raised in Greater Fifth Ward, Downey would travel each Sunday to Houston’s west side to attend church. He remembers seeing the west side’s tree-lined streets and quality grocery stores. One thing missing, he said, were the industrial plants.
From understanding to advocacy
Hadayia uses the One Breath project and a series of maps to explain the Arrow to audiences because it helps contextualize the work she does with Air Alliance.
The nonprofit, with a mission “to reduce the public health impacts from air pollution and advance environmental justice,” often engages in place-based work, Hadayia said.
So, educating people on how neighborhoods within the Arrow historically have received disproportionate investments, helps them understand why Air Alliance and other public health-focused nonprofits spend time investing in neighborhoods outside those boundaries.
Once people understand the Arrow’s impacts, Hadayia said, they often are inspired to make a change.
Using data to make a change is at the heart of the recently published U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, Lewis said.
A national mapping tool, the CVI uses 184 sets of data to rank more than 70,000 U.S. Census tracts to see which communities face the greatest challenges from the impacts of a changing climate.
Examining Houston using the CVI brings the Arrow clearly into focus, with communities outside ranking far more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than those within.
Creating maps that highlight the Arrow is a key part of changing its shape, Lewis said. Visualizing the data starts conversations that can hold people accountable to make change.
For Lewis, it was important the CVI go beyond just mapping a problem. The index also includes resources for community leaders and local governments to make their communities more climate resilient.
After living in New York for 27 years, Downey came home to Kashmere Gardens to invest in his community, he said.
When he returned, he said, the impacts of the Arrow had worsened.
“We would not have had to plant 700 trees in Kashmere Gardens last year and into this year if there was enough green space, if there was enough good air quality,” Downey said.
As a community leader, Downey said he “constantly” talks about the Arrow. It has become an educational tool in his belt.
Policy changes
Zoe Middleton officially came to understand the Arrow as a mapping concept while working with the nonprofit Texas Housers, examining social data about income and housing inequality in Houston.
Before that, however, she said the Arrow was something she experienced in her daily life, just moving around the city.
Now, Middleton uses the Arrow in her job as a senior advisor to Harris County Precinct One Commissioner Rodney Ellis.
It has become both a framework and a language to use when implementing new policies and practices, she said.
Middleton pointed toward Harris County’s equity framework for distributing American Rescue Plan funds and the Harris Prospers initiative as examples of policy work done with the Arrow in mind.
Similarly, at Air Alliance, Hadayia said she uses the Arrow to determine which communities the organization should focus its highest priority initiatives.
Hadayia, Lewis and Middleton each recognized the magnitude of working in their own ways to dismantle the Arrow.
When she first discovered it, Middleton said she was “extremely frustrated” by how entrenched the inequality was.
The three women, however, also remain hopeful.
“If it was designed, it can be undesigned,” Middleton said.
Hadayia agreed, saying that human-made conditions created the Arrow, so it can be undone by human action.
She also emphasized the importance of celebrating small wins, since it could take decades to create an Arrow-free Houston.
Part of the long-term solution, Lewis said, is electing leaders with the political will to make policy changes.