economic fabric
What is Houston made of?
news coverage + 3×registered companies + 2×mapped places, log-scaled vs strongest sector
momentum
What the city turned toward · Jan–Apr 2026
Each topic's share of news attention, January–April 2026 against September–December 2025 — news ingestion paused in May, so this is the latest complete window.
Policing Law Enforcement
27 → 105 news reports
▲89%
Legal Judicial
33 → 23 news reports
▼66%
Governance
68 → 228 news reports
▲63%
Immigration Border
57 → 52 news reports
▼56%
Accidents
52 → 166 news reports
▲55%
Elections Politics
15 → 19 news reports
▼38%
Missing Persons
14 → 19 news reports
▼34%
Protest
7 → 19 news reports
▲32%
Corruption
11 → 18 news reports
▼20%
Infrastructure & housing
23 → 55 news reports
▲16%
a rising share means the city's attention is turning toward it — not necessarily more incidents
top city themes
What Houston's news is about
Themes across the city's entire news coverage — ≈268.5K located reports — with each theme's momentum, its most specific keywords, and how the coverage feels. A CRITICAL badge means most of that theme's coverage is extremely negative.
Sports
▲105.0% growing
Mlb Starting Pitchers · Mlb Player Performance · Mlb Team Standings · Mlb Team Strategies
66% positive coverage
Business
▲23.6% growing
Offshore Well Completion · Exploration Drilling · Deepwater Drilling · Pipeline Construction
87% positive coverage
Football
▲21.3% growing
College Playoffs · Nfl Player Stats · Nfl Starting Lineup · Nba Team Legends
64% positive coverage
Politics
▲67.3% growing
Hurricane Mitigation · Flood Resilience · Border Enforcement Practices · Weather Emergency
84% negative coverage
Baseball
▲90.5% growing
Mlb Starting Pitchers · Mlb Player Performance · Mlb Team Standings · Mlb Team Strategies
67% positive coverage
Energy
▲53.7% growing
Offshore Well Completion · Exploration Drilling · Deepwater Drilling · Oil Price Volatility
76% positive coverage
Crime
▲57.1% growing
Multiple Victim Shooting · Mass Shooting · Felony Homicides · School Homicide
100% negative coverage
Technology
▲208.7% growing
Lunar Rovers · Artemis Program · Lunar Surface · Deepwater Drilling
95% positive coverage
Finance
▲39.6% growing
Cash Dividend · Dividend Declaration · Oil Price Volatility · Special Dividend
86% positive coverage
momentum window: Jan–Apr 2026 vs Sep–Dec 2025 · sentiment is a property of the news coverage, not a city rating
city signals
The character of Houston
- ✓Energy command center— Oil and energy lead with 2434 tracked companies.
- ✓Medical research engine— MD Anderson and Baylor dominate locally produced research.
- ✓Deep technology bench— 2035 technology companies and 38 mapped places underpin a leading sector.
- ✓Logistics crossroads— Freight forwarders, logistics companies and Target's new facility.
- ✓Startup funding depth— 2027 companies have raised outside money.
- ✓Institutional employment anchor— Schools, medical centers and consultancies recur among leading recruiters.
- ✓Resilience laboratory— Floods, hurricanes, aerosols and disaster resilience shape city-focused research.
- ✓Manufacturing foothold— 861 manufacturing-adjacent companies sit beside rising infrastructure attention.
everyday life
Living in Houston means…
- ✓Planning around severe weather— Floods, hurricanes, storm damage and outages are growing concerns.
- ✓Feeling medical gravity— Cancer centers and health care employers shape work and research.
- ✓Watching road safety closely— Accident attention jumped recently despite a longer decline.
- ✓Working around big institutions— Hospitals, schools, consultancies and energy firms recruit heavily.
- ✓Keeping office skills current— Excel, Word, Office and project management dominate advertised skills.
- ✓Living with hard news— 38% of coverage reads negative.
read from the news record — not a survey
hidden depth
Things most people don't know
- In the available research record, MD Anderson Cancer Center leads every local institution.
- The city's mapped business layer includes 7 translators alongside software firms and computer consultants.
- Narendra Modi is among the loudest political voices mentioning Houston, with 125 tracked mentions.
- Target opened a 1.2mln-square-foot supply-chain facility in Houston in April 2026.
- Houston's KBR made a strategic investment in direct-lithium-extraction company Geolith.