How many Buddhists in greater Houston?

The Buddhist blogosphere (e.g., here, and here) is all a-buzz with the results of this recent Pew Forum study, which revises upward (in fact, almost doubles) previous estimates of Buddhism prevalence in the United States.  According to that study, between three and four million people nationwide declare themselves to be Buddhist.

It raises the obvious question:  Given this new information, how many Buddhists are there in greater Houston?

Small statue on the grounds of Chua Phap Nguyen / Dharma Spring Temple, Pearland, TX.

An estimate can be derived in a couple of different ways.  First, a straight percentage calculation can be done using the population for "greater Houston" (which is defined by the U.S. Census as an "urbanized area").

Yikes, that's hard to read. 
Go to this link if you'd like legible information.

The July 2011 total population estimate for greater Houston is 6.08 million persons.  Taking the Pew population prevalence at face value (between 1% and 1.3%) yields somewhere between about 60,000 and 80,000 local Buddhists.

Growing, growing, and growing, Buddhist or otherwise. 
Total area population graph from this economic development source. 

It would be interesting to further refine (or at least corroborate) that number with an estimate based on the local population composition itself, rather than by simply applying national statistics.  Here, it's easy to get confounded by statistics that pertain to "Houston" (the City of) and "greater Houston" (the metropolitan area).  According to the 2010 Census racial statistics for the City of Houston, 6.4% of the population is Asian.  Extrapolating this regionally and coupling it with the Pew estimate that 14% of Asian Americans are Buddhists yields a local population of about 54,000 just from the membership contributions of Asians alone.  Pew Forum also noted that roughtly one third of American Buddhists are not Asian.  Assuming this same ratio holds true locally, the total number would then be estimated at roughly 82,000 local Buddhists, which is in line with the general estimates given above.  However, this estimate may be a little inflated, because greater Houston's Asian population is a bit larger than the 5% national average. 

The Pew study also reveals that Vietnamese identification with Buddhism is particularly strong, and is, in fact, the only measured Asian nationality for which Buddhism dominates.

Screengrabbed from here.

Well-known Houston blogger Tory Gattis has described the recent substantial migration of Vietnamese Americans to the greater Houston area, building on descriptions published by the Los Angeles Times and other sources.  Tory estimated that there were 85,000 Vietnamese Americans in Houston as of 2006, but also referenced a HAIF thread which estimated 160,000 - 180,000 within the greater Houston area.  Census numbers can be difficult to tease apart, but this blog article estimated 104,000 Vietamese Americans in the Houston area as of 2010.  Taking that number, which is the middling estimate, and coupling it with the Pew percentage, would yield approximately 45,000 local Vietnamese American Buddhists alone.

To the approximately 70,000 local Buddhists out there, I say hello and welcome.
:-)

A port in a Google storm

This morning, I sent emails to twelve local Buddhist Temples and organizations announcing the availability of this blog space for the transmission of information about Buddhist-related and meditation-related events.  Twelve is by no means the entire local selection of Temples and groups, but it's a start.

I mentioned in that email that this will be a noncommercial, unsponsored blog.  In keeping the blog non-monetized, it will help ensure that no favoritism toward any given lineage, institution, or group is implied, and that no personal profit is being sought. 

In my "Welcome" post, I mentioned three reasons that inspired me to develop this blog.  There was actually a fourth reason:  the recent Quan Am Festival at Houston's Vietnam Buddhist Center. 

Quan Am statue from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quan_Am_1656.jpg 

Houston Chronicle reported on that very large festival so extensively that it actually made the front page of the newspaper's electronic version, complete with thirty-three photographs (!).  And yet upon reading that story, I realized that, not only had I (an avid daily news reader) not heard about the festival in advance, I hadn't even heard of the Temple itself.  When I Google "Houston Buddhism", no mention of this Temple occurs in the first seven pages of links.  In fact, the Chronicle story ranks higher in Google popularity than the Temple itself, despite the fact that the Temple appears to be extensively developed, and (for instance) claims to have the largest Quan Am statue in the Western hemisphere.   

These types of results are not ideal.  While information about this Temple is probably easily accessible to the well-integrated Vietnamese immigrant community, other searchers attempting to discover it would face a difficult task. 

To the end of promoting the exchange of such information across immigrant, convert, and secular meditation communities, please consider forwarding the South Houston Sangha News website link to your friends and like-minded associates.  If you have your own blog, please consider adding this site to your blogroll.  Even if you yourself have no interest in reading regular posts here, you can still be a benefit to other searchers by increasing this site's web traffic.  Google ranks its search returns largely by number of clicks on a site.  The more clicks, the easier this site will be for new searchers to find.

Within the past week, I have had two different associates say to me, in reference to another local Temple, "I have driven by that Temple several times, but I haven't stopped in, because I don't know what's there."  This is the kind of hesitancy and confusion that I hope this blog can help alleviate.  It can be extremely stressful for American convert Buddhists and non-sectarian meditators to search for a Sangha home.  Some American Christian churches respond to searchers using assertive recruitment tactics (random examples here and here; milder forms of recruitment are reportedly common at many other churches).  Any visitor to these churches is vigorously pursued with telephone calls, lectures, and even unannounced visits from congregational recruiters at their personal residence.  Some people may wonder if they would be subjected to a similar type of pressure if they were to visit a local Buddhist group or Temple.  This anxiety coupled with lack of basic knowledge of the different facilities can conspire to keep people away who might otherwise benefit from (and bring benefit to) a Sangha association.

I hope to rectify some of that confusion via a future series of "profile" descriptions of our local groups and Temples.  Until that time, thanks again for reading.