The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.
When it comes to the best cities for Hispanic entrepreneurs in the U.S., a lot of them are in Texas according to recent research from the finance site, WalletHub. Jill Gonzalez, an analyst with WalletHub says the top 10 was dominated by Texas cities.
“We had Amarillo at number 8 here, Brownsville number 5, Corpus Christi number 4,” she says. “Then El Paso and Laredo at 2 and number 1, respectively – so a lot of Texas cities up near the top.”
She describes the factors the site looked at to determine which cities were the best for Hispanic-owned businesses.
“We looked at 21 indicators of business friendliness toward Hispanic entrepreneurs, so that includes things like the Hispanic entrepreneurship rate, the median annual income of Hispanics to the share of Hispanics with a bachelor’s degree as well as just overall Hispanic purchasing power,” she says.
When looking at these indicators, Texas did well across the board.
“The small business community within Texas is really good and there are actually a lot of programs here that really do help Hispanics get into starting and creating a business and help them really reach that 5-year-mark,” she says. “Which kind of is the demise of many small businesses across the country.”
Gonzalez added that in Laredo and El Paso anywhere from 50-70 percent of the businesses in those cities are owned by Hispanics.
Texas has a quite a few iconic music festivals – and Alec Jhangiani and Ramtin Nikzad saw a need for more festivals located in North Texas. So the pair founded the company, Fortress Presents. Nikzad says their background was in film.
“After 8 years of doing film festivals we’ve always kind of looked at the music side and saw some exciting things happening there,” he says.
That’s what led the two to plan Fortress Fest, held over the weekend in Fort Worth. Jhangiani says a major music festival seemed like the perfect way to develop a brand for even more events in North Texas.
If you braved the cooler temperatures, you probably caught acts like Austin’s own S U R V I V E, Canadian pop band Alvvays and hip-hop duo Run The Jewels.
Starting today, if you’re staying at an Airbnb location in Texas you’ll be paying a 6 percent hotel occupancy tax. The California-based home-rental company announced the change last month after reaching an agreement with the Texas Comptroller’s office.
