The Paycheck Protection Program, implemented in April and closed on August 8th, is a loan designed to provide a direct incentive for small businesses to keep their workers on the payroll during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 365,000 loans up to $150,000 each have been given out to qualifying small businesses through participating lenders in Texas. This dashboard shows the number of PPP loans and the amount approved by ZIP codes and industries.

Homeownership can provide a path to long-term wealth accumulation. Check out HCDC Data Digest to learn about homeownership in Harris County.

As community groups canvass neighborhoods door to door to determine what actually happened when Harvey's record-breaking rain fell across the region, newly available data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency reveals where some of the highest impacts were recorded, capturing everything from home and car damage to food and shelter needs.

The community tabulation areas (CTAs) developed by the Kinder Institute are designed to serve as approximations of neighborhoods, based specifically on census geographic boundaries. Check to see how the Kinder Institute delineated the CTA boundaries.

The neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19 related job losses are residential areas where workers in industries like hotel and food services are concentrated. To help identify those at-risk neighborhoods, we estimated how many jobs might have been lost or at risk by residents in each neighborhood in Harris County.

In 2017, Congress established the Investing in Opportunity Act - Opportunity Zones in order to spur investment in some of the nation’s most underserved neighborhoods by offering capital gains tax incentives to investors. The HCDC team has created a story board to explain the mechanism of the program and provides information on all designated OZs in metro Houston.

Drawing from numerous data sources, researchers at the Kinder Institute have conducted analysis and created an interactive story map to present the information of estimated damages caused by Hurricane Harvey. The Story Map provides the community with Harvey-related data including estimated economic cost of the storm; rainfall estimates; most affected neighborhoods; location, age and building type of likely affected homes; demographic characteristics of the affected population; and the affected schools’ information.

On February 15, 2021, a historic winter storm hit the Houston area, leaving in its wake widespread, days-long power outages, a water crisis, and a host of other infrastructure-related challenges. This infographic provides a quick analysis of the more than 6,200 water-related requests that were submitted to 311 Houston during the aftermath of the Arctic blast.

Higher education is becoming increasingly more in demand as it's predicted that by the year 2020, 65 percent of all jobs in the U.S. will require some post-secondary education and training beyond high school. Knowing this, the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC) used the Houston Community Data Connections platform to track hundreds of thousands of Houston-area students' educational and professional careers for 17 years.

2-1-1 is a free helpline operated by United Way of Greater Houston 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in many languages. With harvey-related 211 call data between August 28 and October 10, we created the dashboard to show the distribution of harvey-related 2-1-1 calls across Harris County area, major needs as well as many other interesting patterns. Click to explore the data.