As part of its “Beauty of Life” campaign, the city of Sugar Land Civic Arts Division is organizing its first hand-painted traffic boxes series, officials announced in a May 1 news release.

Sha Davis, Sugar Land’s civic arts manager, said that although the city has done other traffic box art projects in the past, those were all vinyl wrapped and these are the first ones to be hand-painted.

The overview: A selection committee chose four artists and the “high-pedestrian traffic” locations where their boxes will be showcased, with:

• Micah Salinas at Eldridge Park
• John Alva at Eldridge Road at West Airport Boulevard
• Brynee Henry at Brooks and Gunther streets
• Maya Imani Watson at Gillingham Lane and Jess Pirtle Boulevard

Rainbow Cloudz has opened a second location in Sugar Land Town Square, selling plushies, Pokémon, Labubus, accessories and other items.

The gist: Along with selling toys and collectable items, the store operates as a slime bar and children’s party venue, according to its website.

During store hours, no reservation is required for children to walk in and begin scooping slime into pretend ice cream sundaes. Additionally, the bar features slime with different textures and colors that guests can pair with fun toppings.

• 2230 Lone Star Drive, Sugar Land

Demolition of the vacant Northwest Mall is underway within the Hwy. 290 and Loop 610 corridor, the site for a proposed train station that would offer high-speed travel between Houston and Dallas, a project spokesperson confirmed with Community Impact.

What we know: Demolition began in mid-April and is expected to take approximately 12 months, the spokesperson said. The historic mall opened in 1968 but shuttered its doors in 2017, causing the building to sit abandoned for nearly 10 years.

The spokesperson did not answer questions regarding the approval process for the proposed high-speed rail project, which has not received an official green light, or a timeline for any construction beyond the demolition.

Some context: Texas Central, which has since rebranded to Texas High Speed Rail, originally led the project as a privately-funded venture, Community Impact previously reported. Amtrak then temporarily joined the project after receiving a $63.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

However, the federal government pulled the grant last year due to ballooning costs, pushing the project back to the private sector. 

In a one-year snapshot of Greater Houston attitudes, residents expressed the largest drop in confidence about regional job opportunities in more than 40 years, according to survey results released April 27 from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

About the data: Rice University researchers collected nearly 9,000 responses between January and February from residents in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties.

At a glance: One quarter of residents across all three counties named the economy as the “biggest problem” facing the Houston area this year compared to 16% in 2025, survey results show.

Crime and safety was the second-most commonly identified problem, followed by the cost of housing for Harris County residents and traffic for residents of Fort Bend and Montgomery counties. 

Another detail: The percentage of residents reporting they are “just getting by” or “finding it difficult to get by” increased across all income groups in the past year, survey results show.

Also of note: About 7 in 10 residents expressed concern about the environment’s effects on their health, researchers found. 

More than 53,000 students will be invited to join Texas’ education savings account program this week, the state comptroller’s office said May 4.

The details: Families will be notified by email between May 4-6 if they were awarded funds in the second round of the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, per a news release from the comptroller’s office.

To date, nearly 96,000 students have been selected to participate, with these students set to receive about $820 million of the $1 billion state lawmakers allocated for the program, an agency spokesperson said. Of the 53,000 second-round awardees, over 51,000 are from low-income families. The other 2,000 students accepted this week were found to qualify for disability-related funding, the agency said.

The background: Families accepted to the TEFA program will receive state funds to send their children to private schools or homeschool them for the 2026-27 school year.

Proponents of the new program have said it will expand educational opportunities, while critics have expressed concerns that the program will unfairly benefit students already enrolled in private schools.