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Laredo consists of about 270,000 people, 95-96 percent Hispanic.
We're known as the number one land port. International trade is huge here in our city,
we do over 214 billion dollars worth of trade. We're very interrelated
socially, economically, toward our sister city, Nuevo Laredo, in the northern Mexican region.
What is troubling or puzzling to me is that the unemployment rate here in
Laredo, Texas, is lower than even the national and state but yet the poverty
level is is 32, 33 percent and it's been like that for... since I can remember,
and this is why now we're taking a closer glance at it and to
see if we can identify the primary indicators and then measuring those
through data, then managing and producing some sort of an action plan.
I'm here in Laredo as a Bloomberg Harvard fellow tasked with the
challenge of mapping poverty across the city. I've been interviewing different
organizations inside the city government and outside, so that I can get a sense of
the challenges that they're facing, a sense of the challenges that the
community is facing. Where do people live; where they go to school; what type of
food do they get access to; how do they move around the city; and what type of
transportation do they use? What type of weather and environment they face every day,
and I'm trying to put all of that information together so that I can
create maps that describe the challenges that the community is facing,
and especially those with impoverished conditions.
We know what the Census Bureau statistics tell us
but we don't really know what single individual is
dealing with in their homes, in their circumstances, in their lives. We haven't
made any assumptions. We've really left it open so that the data can tell us the
story, and then we can retool what we're doing and how we're doing it
Laredo is not the only city that's facing the specific challenges regarding
poverty that it has, but the overlap of government entities at all levels
meaning local, state, and federal, from one country, and the other make it a very
complex theater of operations.
Out of all of the households in Laredo, forty percent are single
parent households. Thirty-four percent of those are single female-led households.
Trying to understand that phenomena drew us into health data.
Another hypothesis we are pursuing is
the City of Laredo is structured in a very different way than
other cities. In the 19th Century there was a plan comprised of grids, but
the infrastructures that service the border and service both nations came in
and segmented this grid. It's basically a contradictory condition where we have
all these bridges connecting two nations, but we have elements that actually
fragment the the city in the other direction.
I was privileged to be able to
be at the forefront of the work group that is bringing forward some very
interesting findings for you tonight.
My name is Santiago Mota, I'm a Harvard grad student
I'm studying at the Graduate School of Design.
What was more or less the average /education of single females households?
Well these single female households start early. They have kids early.
What I do want to say is that
there is a great display of responsibility in the data through
practices of women's health and that was present in the Department of Health data.
And so what have other cities done to address that and making it less
expensive to be mobile.
It all starts with public transportation
and the way that the public space is designed and implemented, there's a stark
lack of sidewalks for example and shade.
Spending time in Laredo has been incredible.
Being able to ask tough questions to city officials, to have
access to their data, extract meaningful data points, to contribute to a larger
explanation, has been invaluable. Understanding also all the pressures
that they are facing as a local government, has been extremely interesting.
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