WeWork announces its Houston-area third location in The Woodlands as the company expands locally

Coworking growth

WeWork's newest Houston-area location is headed to The Woodlands. Courtesy of WeWork

In 2018, WeWork more than doubled its presence in Houston in terms of desks available. The company went from one location in the Galleria area with 1,100 desks to adding a second location in downtown with 1,500 desks. In 2019, WeWork is expected to again double the number of coworking desks the company will have by the end of the year — most new desk space will come from WeWork's new location in The Woodlands.

"In 2018, WeWork grew its footprint in a very big way in Houston. Now, in 2019, we're growing even more, but in a way that's as much about desks as it is impact," says Roniel Bencosme, WeWork Houston's community director, in a news release. "In this next year, WeWork will build a constellation of opportunity through new spaces spread across Houston, and opening in the Woodlands is key to that effort."

WeWork will have 1,000 desks at the new northwest location (1725 Hughes Landing) across two floors and 52,000 square feet of space, according to the release. WeWork Galleria will add 775 desks in the fourth quarter of 2019, and 1,000 more desks will be added by end of the year pending new leases, the release says. Regionally, WeWork has a presence in five cities in Texas — Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and Plano — but will launch in its sixth Texas city, San Antonio, in early 2020.

In 2019, WeWork will also be growing its social impact programs on a national level in addition to its footprint. Recently, WeWork formed a partnership with the Female Founders Alliance, the Tent Partnership for Refugees, to hire 1,500 refugees at WeWork over the next five years. The company's veterans hiring initiative will also be hiring 1,500 veterans over the next five years.

Houstonians can also expect to see new WeWork Labs, WeWork's accelerator concept, around town, as well as the Veterans in Residence third cohort. WeWork's Flatiron School, which is in its downtown Houston location, will see new cohorts and boasts of a 98 percent job rate placement rate. The school alsy awarded $200,000 in scholarship dollars last year.

"Impact for WeWork is about enabling opportunity. We unlock access to thriving workspaces for companies of all sizes that would otherwise be out of reach," Bencosme says in the release. "We help cities like Houston attract top companies and reduce friction for them to put down roots. We're creating synergies and connectivity across the metro region at a level and scale that's never been done before. That's impact.

WeWork recently released its Global Impact Report for 2019, and the research tracked specifics about its Houston membership. Here were some key findings of the study locally:

  • The majority of Houston WeWork members (83 percent) are in the innovation economy, compared to 12% in the region as a whole.
  • When it comes to sustainable commuting, 42 percent of WeWork members walk, bike, or use public transit to go to work.
  • The Houston WeWork economy contributes over $1 billion to the city's GDP — either directly ($480 million) or indirectly ($530 million)
  • WeWork's small and medium-sized member companies in Houston have an average job growth rate of 32 percent (compared to 1 percent for all companies in Houston).
  • In Houston, 58 percent of WeWork members say the organization has helped their company accelerate its growth.
  • While 44 percent of senior roles at U.S. WeWork member companies are held by women, Houston's percentage of female-led companies at WeWork locally is slightly lower at 36 percent.
  • Of WeWork members that are entrepreneurs in Houston, 26 percent are first-time entrepreneurs, and 1 in 20 of the city's first-time entrepreneurs are WeWork members.

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Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

  • No. 1 – Virginia
  • No. 2 – New York
  • No. 3 – New Jersey
  • No. 4 – Washington
  • No. 5 – Connecticut
  • No. 6 – Utah
  • No. 7 – Colorado
  • No. 8 – Minnesota
  • No. 9 – Illinois
  • No. 10 – Massachusetts

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

23 Houston companies rank among America’s most future-ready businesses

future focused

By one measure, Spring-based tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises reigns as the most future-ready Houston-area company on the S&P 500 stock index.

HPE sits at No. 72 in a first-time ranking of the best S&P 500 companies for the future. Including HPE, 23 Houston-area companies appear on the list.

Published by The Wall Street Journal, the ranking was created by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. It evaluates how S&P 500 companies stack up in six areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility. To be ranked, a company had to be part of the S&P 500 as of Dec. 31.

Among the six categories, HPE ranked highest for innovation (No. 30) among local companies. The WSJ didn’t say why HPE scored so well for innovation. However, the company stands out in this category thanks to:

  • Creation of the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputing systems
  • Research into photonic computing and quantum networking
  • Last year’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, giving HPE an edge in AI-native networking
  • Establishment of the everything-as-a-service GreenLake hybrid cloud platform for data centers, colocation facilities and edge computing environments

In an interview with the Six Five podcast at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas, CEO Antonio Neri said the company’s strategy is “basically founded on innovation, and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.”

While HPE fared well in the innovation category, it ranked toward the bottom for financial fitness. What’s behind the No. 430 ranking in the financial category? HPE’s low score likely reflects a debt-heavy acquisition strategy coupled with a historically low-margin hardware business.

Here’s the full list of the 23 Houston-area companies included in the ranking of the best companies for the future:

  • No. 72 Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • No. 105 SLB
  • No. 120 Baker Hughes
  • No. 125 ConocoPhillips
  • No. 158 NRG Energy
  • No. 176 Targa Resources
  • No. 185 Chevron
  • No. 195 Halliburton
  • No. 223 Coterra Energy
  • No. 229 Waste Management
  • No. 235 Exxon Mobil
  • No. 250 Kinder Morgan
  • No. 257 Quanta Services
  • No. 276 CenterPoint Energy
  • No. 285 Sysco
  • No. 313 Occidental Petroleum
  • No. 318 Camden Property Trust
  • No. 333 EOG Resources
  • No. 365 LyondellBasell Industries
  • No. 373 Comfort Systems USA
  • No. 401 Crown Castle
  • No. 408 Phillips 66
  • No. 500 APA
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