"On its surface, Houston tells a story of how human ingenuity uninhibited by government regulation creates the American Dream," says the new "State of the South" report, issued every other year by MDC, a nonprofit based in Durham, N.C.

"On its surface," you think: Cue the scary music.

The report describes young people's prospects across the South, and goes into depth for Houston and eight other places, urban and rural, big and small. Houston, driven by the nation's most booming economy, looks particularly good in that company. Notes the report: "A low-income person in Houston is more likely to reach the top 20 percent of earners than in any other large Southern city."

That distinction, unfortunately, is like being the classiest Kardashian, or the tallest mountain in Harris County: It's not much to brag about. "It's harder in the South than in any other region in the nation for someone born at the bottom of the income ladder to make it higher up the ladder as an adult," MDC president David Dodson noted in a press release.

Even more alarming: Our future, the report says, is shaky. The report quotes George Grainger, a senior program officer of the Houston Endowment: "If you look at how well this city is doing, is it masking some challenging undercurrents to long-term success?"

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Though Houston leads the country in job creation, low-wage jobs are growing at a faster rate than new jobs as a whole. Hispanic and African-American students continue to lag behind Anglos in educational achievement -- an alarming fact just on its face, but even more so given that the city's population is ever less white. As elderly Anglos retire from high-paying jobs, will anyone be ready to fill them?

Few of those concerns will come as a surprise to Houston's urban nerds, the people who follow this city the way that a sports fan follows a team. They'll recognize many familiar names and ideas in the report's Houston section: There are quotes and data from Stephen Klineberg of the Kinder Institute; there's criticism of Joel Kotkin, coiner of the phrase "opportunity urbanism"; there's discussion of charter schools, education reform and Neighborhood Centers' innovative model for delivering services to low-income people.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the report is the context in which it sets Houston, and the questions that raises: Is being the best in the South good enough? And if it is, can we sustain even that?