Kyle Trojahn
Portrait of Kyle Trojahn

Kyle Trojahn

I study how Texas works, analyze the data that describes it, and build the systems that keep that data trustworthy.

Data and Systems Analyst on the Data & Research team at Texas 2036, a nonpartisan policy organization in Austin.

Download résumé (PDF) Email me See projects
My work across Texas
All 254 Texas counties are shaded for statewide analysis. Highlighted: the five-county Austin metro for regional education and workforce research, five Dallas-Fort Worth and four Greater Houston counties for debt-collection mapping, the city of Galveston and Cameron County as research case studies with field interviews in Brownsville and Harlingen, and Austin as home base.Dallas-Fort Worthprecinct debt mapsGreater Houstondebt maps, fee catalogBrownsville and Harlingenfield interviews, metro planAustinhome baseCentral Texasfive-county Austin metroGalvestoncase study city

All work

My statewide work covers all 254 counties. Highlighted are the places where I have done regionally focused research. Pick a chapter to follow it.

Places
  • Statewide, all 254 counties
  • Dallas-Fort Worth
  • Greater Houston
  • Central Texas
  • Galveston
  • Brownsville and Harlingen

Texas Data Visualizer

Every Texas neighborhood, on one map

An interactive map I built that goes from a single Census block to the whole state. Pick from more than 45 measures, compare 2010 to today on the same boundaries, and raise the map into 3D to see where things pile up. Guided tours fly through the skylines of each Texas region, its transit systems, and its metros, with a fact card at every stop. For researchers: hot spots, clustering, regression, custom indices, and exports to Stata, SPSS, SAS, Excel, and GIS.

  • 45+measures
  • 9geographies, block to state
  • 3Census periods, 2010 to 2024
  • 15guided tours across Texas
Open the visualizer How it’s built
Texas Census tracts shaded by population density, with Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and the Austin-San Antonio corridor brightest Texas Census tracts shaded by population change from 2010-2014 to 2020-2024, with the fastest growth in rings around the major metros Three-dimensional map of Texas counties raised by population density, with Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, and Travis counties standing tallest Texas high-voltage transmission lines glowing orange across the state, densest around Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston Austin-area Census tracts shaded by the share of households that rent, with CapMetro’s Red Line drawn in red, over a dark street basemap
01 / 05Population density

People per square mile, by Census tract, 2020–2024.

FewerMore

Drawn from the visualizer’s own tiles

Policy, analysis, and the infrastructure underneath

These usually get treated as separate jobs. I do all three, and each makes the others better: the policy question shapes how the data gets built, and well-built data changes what policy can ask.

Policy research

Turning evidence into something legislators, agencies, and local officials can act on.

  • Invited testimony on data privacy before a Texas House committee
  • Lead author of a five-organization public comment on new state lending rules
  • District-specific briefs and committee testimony during the 2025 session
  • Data and equity analysis for a local policy memo on toll debt

Data analysis

Statistical and geospatial analysis of large administrative datasets.

  • Debt-collection lawsuits across all 254 Texas counties, 2019 to 2025
  • Analysis of data covering every public-school student in Texas
  • A 600,000+ observation Census block dataset on what city limits change
  • A field study of how data brokers answer Texans' privacy requests

Data infrastructure

The pipelines, governance, and tools that make data trustworthy and reusable.

  • A vetted catalog of statewide metrics, each traced to its source
  • A resumable collector for seven years of statewide court records
  • A tested de-identification tool for sensitive survey data
  • A multi-geography Texas map built on vector tiles

The issues I keep coming back to

Across seven research and policy organizations, the same questions recur: how Texans learn and work, what things cost them, and how the state's places and infrastructure hold together.

Affordability and consumer protection

Debt-collection lawsuits, small-business lending, court fines and fees, and data privacy at Texas Appleseed.

Water, energy, and utilities

Water and wastewater vulnerabilities at RAND, utility and emergency-management fieldwork at Princeton.

Transportation

Equitable decision-making across 32 state and regional transportation agencies, toll-debt policy in Harris County, and a survey experiment on support for transit.

Regional economic development

An economic development plan for the Brownsville metro, a site selection memo for the St. Louis region, and an economic baseline on regional divergence.

Public education and workforce

Analysis of every Texas public-school student, from classroom to career, at E3 Alliance and Texas 2036.

Cities and boundaries

How annexation, city limits, and extraterritorial jurisdictions shape civic participation and services across Texas.

Selected work

Four projects that show the range. See all projects, or browse the data I've worked with.

Texas Appleseed, 2026

A field study of Texans' privacy rights

Sixteen trained participants tested how data brokers answer requests under Texas privacy law. The preliminary findings became invited testimony before a Texas House committee.

Princeton University, 2023 to 2024

Changing city limits

A 600,000-block dataset on how annexation reshapes who lives inside Texas cities and who votes, with field interviews in Brownsville and Harlingen.