The Texas Observer

Dear Observer Community, Short-term rentals—for which companies like Airbnb serve as brokers—are sucking up housing inventory across Texas, driving up prices for renters and home buyers alike. For longterm residents whose neighborhoods have been taken over by tourists, there’s also the noise, trash, and parade of strangers who lack community roots. Our cover story by Contributor Eva Ruth Moravec examines the toll on neighborhoods and how residents and cities have fought back. But any modest progress local governments have made in regulating the industry may soon fall victim to Republicans’ quest to wrest control away from cities with the recently passed “Death Star” bill. In a collaboration with Latino USA, Contributor Reynaldo Leaños Jr. looks at the military’s efforts to recruit Latinos, which oversell the benefits and understate the risks,…

The forthcoming impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton is guaranteed to provide a colorful show and a lesson on how Texans occasionally confront the corrupt through a highly anachronistic political tool. Many Americans may only recall the impeachments of U.S. Presidents Donald Trump or Bill Clinton—fraught theatrical affairs in which the House voted to impeach and a politically divided Senate then failed to convict. But such political trials are centuries-old, having been imported by the Founding Fathers from England, where an impeachment conviction could lead to beheading for egregious rogues. Under today’s U.S. and Texas constitutions, the most dire result is simply an embarrassing spectacle and possible removal from office. No one dies or goes to jail. Although it still seems unlikely that Paxton, the ultimate survivor, will lose…

My great-grandfather, José-María Arana, was a racist. After the United States barred Chinese men from immigrating under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, tens of thousands sought a new life in Mexico, where they faced no warmer a welcome as they established themselves. A former schoolteacher and businessman, José-María led a vicious campaign against the Chinese in the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California in the early 1900s. Seeking “all legal means to eliminate the Asian merchant,” whose growing prosperity he viewed as a threat to the working class and Mexican national identity, José-María formed a junta of local businessmen in 1912 to address what he called “the tremendous calamity of the Chinese jaundice.” He launched a newspaper, Pro-Patria, whose masthead boldly proclaimed, “Mexico for the Mexicans and…

Ricardo Nuila is a third-generation physician at Ben Taub Hospital, a busy public facility operated by Harris Health in the Texas Medical Center. An internal medicine specialist, he’s part of a staff dominated by residents and graduates of Baylor College of Medicine. And in his spare time, he writes. His compelling essays and new book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine (Simon and Schuster, 2023), focus on how many people get stranded in healthcare limbo—or needlessly lose their limbs or lives—in America’s cumbersome and costly healthcare system because of uncontrolled costs, overbilling, and greed promoted by health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. Nuila thinks a good public hospital network across America could outperform even the most expensive private alternatives. He spoke to the Texas Observer about why.…

SANGER Weather has been really weird with heat waves, hail, Saharan dust, and Canadian smoke swirling everywhere. Suddenly, the National Weather Service predicted hail as big as DVDs would hit Texas. And voilà: In Sanger, chunks of ice as large as 6 inches in diameter fell from the sky. One Texas TV station received photos from viewers who collected ice balls bigger than golf balls, tennis balls, and even that summer treat: a ripe tomato. RICHMOND It looked like yet another attack on Texas public education when a 5-foot-long alligator wandered to the sidewalk of a Richmond elementary school. School leaders responded rapidly to this threat. “The rumors are true. We had to turn away a visitor from registration this morning,” one posted on social media. A local game warden…

Lize Burr & Chris Hyams Lynne Dobson & Greg Wooldridge Dale Linebarger The McHam Project The Rapoport Family Foundation Alec Rhodes Carlton Carl Paul & Marian Cones Vincent LoVoi John Parten Winkler Family Foundation Gabriel Arana & Michael Collis H.L. Bryan Zeph Capo Kate Donaho Robert Frump Headliners Foundation Laura Hernandez Carrie James Kathleen McElroy Ronald Moore Rene & Jimmy Wisch Memorial Fund Margaret & Robert Ayers James Canup Andy Carson Joan Cheever Lois Chiles Debra Danburg & Randy Chapman Jo Didner & J. Michael Hershey Thomas Doneker Edgemon Family Foundation Yodo Faulk Cindy Fisher & Mike Kanin Noble G Fortson Gil Glover Tom Griebel Donna Bolding Hamilton Noah & Brittany Kyle Hawley Charlotte Herzele Kelly Inselmann Mr. & Mrs. I.H. Kempner III L.U. Kint, Jr. Darlene Lanham Dick Lavine…