Houston vs Greensboro: which should you move to?

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in Houston went from 28,850 in 2021 to 26,383 in 2022, 25,517 in 2023, 26,758 in 2024 and 21,345 in 2025, a 20% drop in the last year and 26% in four, and property offenses from 97,068 to a peak of 105,522 in 2022, then 104,829, 100,302 and 92,382, 12% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft rose from 15,694 in 2021 to 20,085 in 2023 and fell to 12,516 in 2025. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 19% (18,341 to 14,839), robberies down 24% (6,359 to 4,859), rapes down 20% (1,729 to 1,377) and murders down 18% (329 to 270). HPD's own year-end counts show the same direction: homicides down from 331 to 272, robberies from 6,438 to 4,987 and aggravated assaults from 18,590 to 15,378 (Major Cities Chiefs Association survey, as reported by the Houston Chronicle). The 2025 CDE counts were read on 30 September 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised.

What the rates cover: Computed: 21,345 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Houston Police Department (ORI TXHPD0000) in calendar 2025, divided by the 2,397,315 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 2,413,559 the rate is 884. HPD's year-end figures as reported to the Major Cities Chiefs Association and quoted by the Houston Chronicle run slightly higher than the CDE's: 272 homicides, 4,987 robberies and 15,378 aggravated assaults, against 270, 4,859 and 14,839. The Chronicle did not give HPD's rape count, so HPD's own total on the FBI definition could not be rebuilt.

Homicides: 270 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 329 in 2024, about 11.3 per 100,000 on the city population. HPD's own year-end count, obtained by the Houston Chronicle through an open records request, was 272 against 331 in 2024, a 17% drop; nothing fetched explains the gap of two cases in each year between the two series. The high point in the CDE series since 2021 is 474, in 2021.

Down sharply in 2025 after a 2024 peak. On the FBI CDE's figures violent offenses were 2,466 in 2019, 2,723 in 2020, 2,642 in 2021, 2,456 in 2022, 2,514 in 2023, 2,820 in 2024 and 2,177 in 2025, about 829, 920 and 705 per 100,000 in the last three years on each July's Vintage 2025 population, so 2025 was 23% below 2024, the drop the police department itself announced (WFDD). Property offenses peaked at 11,446 in 2023 and fell to 10,410 in 2024 and 9,248 in 2025, down 11%. The SBI's summaries show the same 2023 and 2024 figures within a few offenses (2,509 and 2,816 violent). The FBI series needs care in two places. The CDE lists the department as reporting incident-based (NIBRS) data from 1 January 2019, and its 2018 counts are lower (1,860 violent), so 2018 is not used. And its January 2026 row is plainly incomplete, 37 violent and 78 property offenses against 216 and 730 in January 2025, with February also low, so 2026 is compared from March: March to August brought 1,078 violent offenses against 1,154 in the same months of 2025, down 7%, and 4,546 property offenses against 4,819, down 6%. The September 2026 row is partial. The CDE counts were read on 4 October 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised; the SBI's 2025 summary had not been published.

What the rates cover: Computed: 2,177 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Greensboro Police Department (ORI NC0410200) in calendar 2025, divided by the 308,667 Vintage 2025 city population; on the CDE's own agency population of 310,328 the rate is 702. The rate is high, for North Carolina and for the country: the CDE's 2025 rate for reporting North Carolina agencies is 331 per 100,000 and for the nation 329, so Greensboro's is a little more than twice either. It is the highest of the three North Carolina cities this site compares, above Charlotte's 607 (on CMPD's own count) and Raleigh's 396, and of the US cities here only Houston's 890 is higher in 2025 (Orlando's 835.8 is for 2022). Among the state's largest city police departments on the CDE's 2025 counts and populations it is second to Winston-Salem's 744, ahead of Fayetteville's 614, Charlotte-Mecklenburg's 559, High Point's 521, Durham's 507 and Raleigh's 395. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation's most recent annual summary, for 2024 (published October 2025), counts 2,816 violent offenses for the department that year, about 919 per 100,000, the highest rate of any city police department in its table of the state's largest agencies, ahead of Gastonia (826), Winston-Salem (806) and Asheville (801). The department's own year-end figures, 1,601 aggravated assaults and 426 robberies, are within 16 and 10 of the FBI's.

Homicides: 37 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, about 12.0 per 100,000 on the city population, against the CDE's 6.5 for North Carolina and 4.3 for the nation, and against Raleigh's 25 (4.9 per 100,000) and Charlotte's 96 (about 10). The CDE series is 44 in 2019, 60 in 2020, 51 in 2021, 41 in 2022, 74 in 2023, 43 in 2024 and 37 in 2025; the 2023 figure is the city's record, a spike for which the police department still has no single explanation (The Assembly). The department's own provisional year-end count for 2025 is 42 homicides, against 45 in 2024, and a quarter of them were tied directly to domestic violence (WFDD; The Assembly); nothing read explains the five-homicide gap between its count and the FBI's.

BLS counted 3,495,300 nonfarm jobs in the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 44,700 or 1.3% on the year. Construction grew fastest (+5.5%, to 269,000), then professional and business services (+2.6%, to 581,300) and government (+1.9%), with education and health services and leisure and hospitality both up 1.3%, while information (-5.9%), financial activities (-1.2%), mining and logging (-0.5%, to 73,300) and manufacturing (-0.2%, to 240,400) shrank. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 695,600 jobs, unchanged on the year. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48264200000000001) was 3,510,100 in August 2026, 1.2% above August 2025. The Greater Houston Partnership counts 27 Fortune 500 headquarters in the region on the 2026 list, tied with Chicago for second among US metros behind New York and ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth's 24, with a 28th due when Expand Energy moves to Spring; ExxonMobil (No. 9) and Chevron (No. 21) lead them. Port Houston calls the Houston Ship Channel complex the nation's largest port for waterborne tonnage (309.5 million tons in 2023, USACE) and the fifth-ranked US container port by TEUs.

Main sectors: Energy: oil and gas producers, refiners, pipelines and oilfield services (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips, Enterprise Products Partners, Baker Hughes, Halliburton, Cheniere Energy), Trade, transportation and utilities, the metro's largest sector (the Port of Houston, the nation's largest port by waterborne tonnage; Sysco; United Airlines at Bush Intercontinental; CenterPoint Energy, NRG Energy), Professional and business services, including engineering and construction (KBR, Quanta Services, Comfort Systems USA, Waste Management), Health care and life sciences (the Texas Medical Center, Memorial Hermann, Houston Methodist, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas Children's Hospital), Petrochemicals and advanced manufacturing along the Houston Ship Channel (Westlake, NOV).

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Tax Foundation puts Texas's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes at 1.40%, and school districts must exempt $140,000 of a homestead's value from their tax. The City of Houston's own rate for tax year 2025 is 51.919 cents per $100 of taxable value, left unchanged by an 11-3 council vote on 15 October 2025 although the city controller warned it would open a $53 million gap in the $7 billion fiscal 2026 budget; the budget committee chair, who voted against, said there was still room under both the state's and the city's own revenue caps. On 10 June 2026 the council passed a $7.5 billion budget for fiscal 2027 by 15 to 1, closing a projected deficit of more than $200 million with no increase in the property tax rate and a new $5 monthly solid waste fee on residential water bills. The rate for tax year 2026 had not been published in anything fetched. The county, school district, METRO and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

BLS counted 374,600 nonfarm jobs in the Greensboro-High Point MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 3,500 or 0.9% on the year. Health care and social assistance (+1,800, or 3.7%, to 50,700), professional and business services (+1,500, or 3.1%, to 49,500) and construction (mining, logging and construction +1,400, or 7.4%, to 20,400) added the most, while manufacturing lost 1,500 (-3.1%, to 47,300), information 400 (to 3,200) and trade, transportation and utilities 400 (to 83,600). Manufacturing is 12.6% of the metro's jobs, and three of the ten largest employers on Guilford County's 2025 list are truck, bus and apparel companies. That list is the county's, from its 2025 financial report; the City of Greensboro's own report was not reachable from this environment, so no city list is given. It is led by Cone Health (13,000), Guilford County Schools (10,667), the City (3,753), the Postal Service (3,683) and the Volvo Group (3,037), with High Point University (2,723), Ralph Lauren (2,671), N.C. A&T (2,307) and Thomas Built Buses (2,000); in 2016 the list included UNCG, Bank of America and High Point Regional, and Guilford County Schools was first. Most residents work in the city: 71.8% of the city's 153,212 workers worked inside it in 2024 and 13.4% outside Guilford County, many of them in the Triad's other cities. 16.7% worked from home, and the mean commute for the rest was 22 minutes, with 5.3% spending an hour or more (ACS 2024 1-year, B08007, B08008, B08013, B08301 and B08303).

Main sectors: Manufacturing, about one job in eight: 47,300 of the metro's 374,600 nonfarm jobs in August 2026, down 1,500 on the year, with the Volvo Group (3,037 in Guilford County) and Thomas Built Buses (2,000) among the county's ten largest employers, Mack Trucks and Volvo Trucks of North America headquartered in the city, and Toyota's battery plant near Greensboro, which began shipping batteries in mid-2025, Health care: Cone Health, the Greensboro-based nonprofit hospital system, is Guilford County's largest employer (13,000), and health care and social assistance added 1,800 metro jobs in a year, to 50,700, the most of any sector, Trade, transportation and logistics, the metro's largest supersector at 83,600 jobs, where Interstates 40, 73 and 85 meet: FedEx's mid-Atlantic hub at the airport and a regional freight rail hub (Wikipedia), Aviation and aerospace at Piedmont Triad International Airport: Honda Aircraft's headquarters, aircraft maintenance (HAECO Americas, now part of AAR, and Marshall), and Boom Supersonic's Overture Superfactory, finished in June 2024 for an airliner that is not yet flying (Wikipedia), Education and government: Guilford County Schools (10,667 employees), the City of Greensboro (3,753), the Postal Service (3,683), Guilford County (2,975) and N.C. A&T (2,307), with UNCG and five other colleges in the city, in a government sector of 43,400 metro jobs.

North Carolina's flat income tax rate has come down every year since 2022, to 4.25% for 2025 and 3.99% for 2026. Property tax is levied by Guilford County and the City on assessed value. For 2025-26 a house in the City paid 140.30 cents per $100 of assessed value, the County's 73.05 cents plus the City's 67.25, on the North Carolina Department of Revenue's table of county and municipal rates; the County had held 73.05 cents for five years. Those values date from the County's 1 January 2022 reappraisal, and the Department measures how far they had fallen behind: assessments averaged 68.31% of sale prices, which makes the effective combined rate 0.9583% of market value. On the same table Raleigh's combined rate was 87.21 cents (0.8319% effective) and Charlotte's 76.68 cents (0.6808%), so Greensboro's was the highest of the three North Carolina cities this site compares on either measure. Downtown Improvement District parcels pay 9 cents more, and the College Hill and Dunleath historic districts 1 and 5 cents. For 2026-27 both rates rose sharply: the City adopted 79.85 cents on 16 June 2026, up 12.6 cents, and the County 78.95 cents on 25 June, up 5.9, a combined 158.80 cents. They rose because Senate Bill 889, signed on 19 June 2026, put off the County's 2026 reappraisal, so the 2026 bills are on the old 2022 values and the new values apply to the 2027 bills; the City's taxable base for the year is about $40.1 billion instead of the $56.1 billion the new values would have given (Guilford County; Rhino Times). The County estimates a revenue-neutral rate of 58.54 cents once the new values apply. Zillow's typical home value for the City was $263,264 in August 2026, flat on the year (up 0.04%) and the lowest of the three North Carolina cities here, against Raleigh's $428,671 and Charlotte's $392,573; of the US cities here only El Paso's, San Antonio's and Houston's are lower. Its observed rent index was $1,392 a month, up 2.1%, below every other US city here except San Antonio. The bills, insurance and fees that follow from these figures belong to the housing layer.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Texas is one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (KFF, August 2026). It had the highest uninsured rate of any state in 2024: 16.7%, or 5,152,427 of 30,799,312 people, against 8.2% nationally and 12.0% in Georgia, the next highest, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates. The City of Houston's rate was 23.3% (553,576 of 2,370,907), Harris County's 20.8% and the metro's 18.4%. The Texas Medical Center, south of downtown, calls itself the largest medical complex in the world: by its own count 10,000 patient beds, more than 120,000 employees, 10 million patient encounters and 750,000 emergency visits a year, and among its members the world's largest children's hospital and largest cancer hospital (Texas Children's and MD Anderson). Harris Health's Ben Taub Hospital in the medical center, licensed for 402 beds, is the county's public Level I trauma center and treats more than 80,000 emergency patients a year; in May 2024 Harris Health broke ground on a $1.6 billion, 12-story hospital on its Lyndon B. Johnson campus in northeast Houston, due to open in late 2028 as the first Level I trauma center in the county outside the medical center. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Houston ISD, the largest school district in Texas, has been run by a state-appointed board and superintendent, Mike Miles, since the Texas Education Agency took it over in 2023. It counted 168,810 students on its official snapshot of 31 October 2025, down 4.5% from 176,727 a year earlier, and just over 155,600 on 4 September 2026, nearly 10,000 fewer than in September 2025, and it is cutting staff and campus budgets as a result (Houston Chronicle). The Texas Tribune counts 21,000 students lost since the takeover began, a faster decline than any of its urban peers, and about $190 million in state funding with them. Under Miles the number of F-rated campuses fell from 56 to five, but voters rejected a $4.4 billion bond in 2024, the largest Texas school bond ever to fail, and in August 2026 Miles said the official end of the takeover may come at the end of the 2026-27 year. The University of Houston (48,950 students in fall 2025) and Rice University (8,880 in fall 2024) are both inside the city, and Houston Community College renamed itself Houston City College in 2025.

Living there

Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country and the energy capital of its fifth-largest metro, which added 126,720 people in 2024-25, more than any other. It spreads into four counties with 22.7 miles of light rail near the core, and 68.7% of its workers drive alone, though its 3.4% transit share is the highest of the Texas cities this site compares. Water is its hazard: Harvey flooded 154,170 homes in Harris County in 2017, most of them outside the mapped floodplain, and Beryl left more than two million customers without power in July heat in 2024. Summer is long and humid rather than extreme, with far fewer 100F days than Dallas but 111 days a year at 90F or above and 1,317 mm of rain. Texas takes no income tax, 23.3% of the city's residents have no health insurance, and the Texas Medical Center, the largest in the world by its own count, sits a few miles south of downtown. The open questions are fiscal and civic: the council held the property tax rate flat in October 2025 against its controller's warning and passed a fiscal 2027 budget that closes a deficit of more than $200 million without raising it, METRO has shelved the University Line that was once the cornerstone of its expansion plan, and Houston ISD, under state control since 2023, began 2026-27 with nearly 10,000 fewer students than the year before.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or individual private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and North Carolina is one of the 41 states, counting the District of Columbia, that have adopted the Medicaid expansion (KFF); the expansion covers about 740,000 people statewide. Federal and state changes narrow it: from January 1, 2027 most expansion adults aged 19 to 64 must show 80 hours a month of work, school or volunteering, or $580 a month in earnings, and renew every six months, and rules for non-citizens tighten (NCDHHS). The City of Greensboro's uninsured rate was 7.5% in 2024 (22,905 of 305,237), against 8.6% for North Carolina and 8.2% nationally, slightly above Raleigh's 7.1% and well below Charlotte's 12.1% (ACS 2024 1-year, B27001). One system dominates. Cone Health, a nonprofit based in Greensboro and Guilford County's largest employer with 13,000 staff, runs Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, a 517-bed tertiary hospital opened in 1953 that is the largest in its four-county region and a Level II trauma center, with Wesley Long Hospital and a behavioral health hospital in the city and hospitals in Burlington and Reidsville (Wikipedia; Guilford County). It was acquired in December 2024 by Risant Health, a nonprofit created by Kaiser Permanente. Moses Cone was a whites-only hospital until 1963, when a federal appeals court ruled in Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital that its federal funding barred segregation, a decision that shaped Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Wikipedia). This file did not verify wait times for primary or specialist care.

Education

Greensboro is a college city. On the ACS 2024 1-year estimates 40,213 of its 297,824 residents aged 3 and over were enrolled in college (35,401 undergraduates) or graduate school (4,812), 13.5%, against 6.6% nationally and 6.7% in North Carolina. North Carolina A&T State University, in East Greensboro, enrolled 15,275 students in fall 2025, up 6.7% on 14,311, with 2,018 graduate students, and is the largest historically Black university in the country (N.C. A&T); it reported an estimated 15,700 for fall 2026 with a record first-year class of 3,214 (HBCU Gameday). The University of North Carolina at Greensboro enrolled 18,682 in fall 2025, up 3.7%, and more than 19,000 in fall 2026, its most since 2020 (UNCG). Guilford College, founded by Quakers in 1837, Greensboro College and Bennett College, a historically Black college for women whose students took part in the 1960 sit-ins, are private; Elon University's law school is downtown, and Guilford Technical Community College has campuses in the city and its main campus in Jamestown (Wikipedia). Public schools are run by Guilford County Schools, the countywide district and the third-largest in the state, with 67,620 students in 2024-25 and 121 schools in 2025-26 (NCES). Enrollment has fallen since 2018-19, and in 2025 the district proposed closing four small elementary schools, citing an older population moving in and more students in charter schools (WFDD).

Living there

Greensboro is the Gate City, a railroad town that grew on textiles: the Cone brothers' denim and flannel mills turned it from a village into a city around 1900, and textile, tobacco and apparel companies still have headquarters here (Wikipedia). It is also where the sit-in movement began: on 1 February 1960 four students from N.C. A&T sat down at the whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter on Elm Street, and the building is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, with the counter in place. Today it is North Carolina's third city, with 308,667 people, a manufacturing economy that is still about one job in eight in the metro, with trucks, buses and aircraft made in and around the city, and Cone Health as the largest employer, and two public universities, N.C. A&T, the country's largest historically Black university, and UNCG, with nearly 34,000 students between them in fall 2025. Next to Raleigh and Charlotte it is cheaper and slower: it grew 3.2% from 2020 to 2025 against their 8% and 10%, its typical home is $263,264 and its rent $1,392 on Zillow's indexes, the lowest of the three, and its household income ($63,516) is more than $21,000 below theirs. It also has the highest violent crime rate of the three, 705 per 100,000 on the FBI's 2025 counts, twice the state's, though that was 23% below 2024, and the coldest and snowiest winters, with 7.1 in of snow a year and ice storms. Its property tax rate rose by 18.5 cents per $100 for 2026-27 because the state put off the County's reappraisal, and the 2027 bills will be the first on the new values.