H ouston is diverse. Houston is accepting.
These are core tenets of our city’s culture and identity, dogma repeated with pride by so many writers (guilty as charged), politicians, suits and even activists that it can be easy to forget that they’re only half true. We hide behind them when confronted with the truth that Houston, as lovely as she is, is often an unjust city where inequality runs so deep it has seeped into the very soil, and even onto our maps.
I wish I were making a metaphor. Pull up a map of Houston and plot almost anything across it: wealth disparities, health outcomes, race and ethnicity, flood risk, tree cover. Plot the nice sushi restaurants, the grocery stores, or even the density of Starbucks locations. The same shape appears every single time, and it has a name: the Houston Arrow.
What is the Houston Arrow?
It’s a corridor (guess the shape) that begins out west around the Addicks and Barker reservoirs and points east. Approximately bounded by Interstate 10 to the north and the Westpark Tollway to the south, it narrows into a triangle with downtown as its bull’s-eye…