Only 61% of Houston sidewalks are in good condition, data shows

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- In the El Dorado/Prairie Oaks community, no sidewalks mean great-grandmothers like Geneva Smith worry about children trying to cross the street to see friends.

"You wonder, 'Are they going to fall down in front of a car? Are the cars going to hit them,'" Smith said.

It means a brand new mother, Mariah, worries about pushing her newborn in a stroller.

"It is important because when you are walking down the sidewalk, you want to look at something, not something horrible," Mariah said.

It means bus commuter Patrice Howard worries about getting to the bus stop alive.

"The 18-wheelers and the regular trucks and cars come through here, and anything could possibly happen," Howard said.

Matt Zdun, a data reporter with ABC13's news partners at the Houston Chronicle, dove into city records and learned these concerns are founded.

"Houstonians are very familiar with sidewalks, the bad, the good, even the ugly of sidewalks," Zdun said.

Zdun found that the last major survey of the city's nearly 6,000 miles of Houston sidewalks was done back in 2022, and nearly 40% of sidewalks across the city are said to be in poor or fair condition. The El Dorado/Oats Prairie neighborhood was found to be in the worst shape, with around 21% of sidewalks in poor or fair condition.

"Because there is such a wide variety of different kinds of sidewalks, we see that some neighborhoods have really good ones and some neighborhoods have really bad ones, and that affects how you feel about your community," Zdun said.

The City said it sets aside $3 million every year to build and repair sidewalks, but the money doesn't go far, with six-figure price tags attached to just a few miles of sidewalks.

"A consistent theme across people that I talked to is that the city needs to find a pot of money to pay for building and repairing sidewalks," Zdun said.

He hopes that by giving people this information, they will be empowered to talk to city leaders about improvements they want to see in their neighborhoods.

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