A snapshot of Houston today

I love stories about demographics. I'm just a numbers geek (as if you couldn't tell), so anything with data in it fascinates me. This is from the American Community Survey.

Texas' high school graduation rate, 79 percent, was ahead only of Mississippi's among the 50 states and District of Columbia.

In case you've ever wondered where Chris Bell's line about Rick Perry being chair of the Thank God For Mississippi Committee comes from, now you know.

In the city of Houston, Hispanics make up 55 percent of the children under age 15, and just 17 percent of people 75 and older. In sharp contrast, 55 percent of those older residents are Anglo.

The disparity was mirrored throughout Texas, where 46 percent of children under 15 are Hispanic while 72 percent of state residents 75 and over are Anglos.

Overall, the population of Texas is among the nation's youngest; the median age of 33 years exceeds only Utah's.

The new demographic data is based on a rolling survey of 250,000 randomly selected U.S. households each month of 2005. The survey was conducted only in jurisdictions with populations over 65,000.

It excluded group quarters such as dormitories, nursing homes and prisons.

[...]

According to the mid-decade portrait, immigrants now make up 12.4 percent of the U.S. population, up from 11.2 percent in the 2000 Census. And the foreign-born population is spreading from gateway cities like Houston to historically Anglo cities and states in the Northwest, Northeast and other parts of the South.

The highest immigrant populations, however, continue to be in places like Houston and Texas.

Nearly 30 percent of Houston residents were foreign-born in 2005; 71 percent of those were not U.S. citizens.

That means that about twenty percent of Houston residents are not US citizens. I wouldn't have guessed it was that much. I say Houston's attractiveness to immigrants is a good thing and will continue to be so. I hope we as a city value that.

Anyway. All the data is here if you want to dig in and play around with it.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 16, 2006 to Elsewhere in Houston | TrackBack