Houston after Harvey: Struggle mirrors America’s
HOUSTON — The mayhem Hurricane Harvey unleashed on Houston didn’t only come from the sky. On the ground, it came sweeping in from the Katy Prairie some 30 miles west of downtown.
Water drains naturally in this stretch of Texas, or at least it used to. At more than 600 square miles, Houston has grown to be as big as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia combined, a giant spread of asphalt smothering many of the floodplains that once shuttled water from the prairies to the sea. When finished, the newest road to ring the city and propel its latest expansion, called the Grand Parkway, will encircle an area equivalent to all of Rhode Island.
For years, local authorities turned a blind eye to runaway development. Thousands of homes have been built next to, and even inside, the boundaries of the two big reservoirs devised by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s after devastating floods. Back then, Houston was 20 miles downstream, its population 400,000. Today, these reservoirs are smack in the middle of an urban agglomeration of 6 million.
Many of the residents living in and around the reservoirs didn’t even know they slept in harm’s way — until the water came pouring in from the prairie during Harvey.
The story of Harvey, Houston and the city’s difficult path forward is a quintessentially American tale. Time and again, America has bent the land to its will, imposing the doctrine of Manifest Destiny on nature’s most daunting obstacles. We have bridged the continent with railways and roads, erected cities in the desert, and changed the course of rivers.
Built on a mosquito-infested Texas swamp, Houston similarly willed itself into a great city. It is the country’s energy capital, home to oil and carbonproducing giants, to the space industry, medical research and engineers of every stripe. Its sprawl of highways and single-family homes are a postwar version of the American dream.
Unfortunately, nature always gets the last word. Houston’s growth contributed to the misery Harvey unleashed.
Sprawl is only part of the story. Houston is also built on an upbeat, pro-business strategy of low taxes and little government. Many Texans regard this as the key to prosperity, an antidote to Washington. It encapsulates a potent vision of an unfettered America.
Harvey called that concept into question. It was an unusually bad hurricane, dumping trillions of gallons of water in a few days, even more to the east of the city than to the west, in the prairie, and setting all kinds of records. But it was also the third big storm to slam Houston in three years, dispelling any notion Houston shouldn’t expect more of the same.
Global warming may not specifically have caused Harvey. But scientists have little doubt climate change is making storms worse and more frequent.
“Harvey caused me to look differently at the world we live in,” said Judge Ed Emmett, chief executive of Harris County, which encompasses Houston and much of the Katy Prairie. A self-described traditional Republican and big backer of the Grand Parkway, Emmett had planned on spending his twilight years in public service saving the Houston Astrodome from demolition. Harvey altered that. Now he thinks his mission is to protect the entire region.
After every natural calamity, U.S. politicians make big promises. They say: We will rebuild. We will not be defeated. Never again will we be caught unprepared.
But they rarely tackle the toughest obstacles. The hard truth, scientists say, is that climate change will increasingly require moving — not just rebuilding — entire neighborhoods, reshaping cities, even abandoning coastlines.
‘DON’T CALIFORNIA MY TEXAS’
The number of “heavy precipitation” events in the United States has skyrocketed since the 1960s. Since 1980, instances of extreme weather — hurricanes, floods, heat waves — linked to climate change have cost the United States $1.1 trillion. Studies show that for every dollar spent upfront in preparedness, U.S. taxpayers could save $4 in emergency relief and reconstruction — not counting health costs, the impact of lost jobs and business revenues and incalculable grief.
But that requires politicians to agree.
An upbeat narrative casts business-friendly Texas in the loner role of swashbuckling cowboy, disdainful of coastal elites. “Don’t California my Texas” has become a rallying cry for Republican state lawmakers and a theme repeated by Gov. Greg Abbott, who has complained about “a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”
He believes cities are the culprit. For years, Texas Republicans promoted local controls to push against federal court orders on issues such as desegregation and same-sex marriage. Now state leaders have made a U-turn. Abbott has complained about “political demagogues using climate change as an excuse to remake the American economy.”
Little wonder, post-Harvey, that state and local officials have anointed different flood and recovery czars. The system ensures nobody is clearly in charge.
Least of all in Houston. A bill that would have allowed Harris County merely to issue the equivalent of parking tickets to developers violating floodplain regulations — the sort of regulations that control flooding — was vetoed by the governor. Two other bills to study flooding in the Houston region, introduced in the last legislative session, died in committee.
And not long ago, when Houston’s Democratic mayor, Sylvester Turner, petitioned the governor to tap into the state’s multibillion-dollar Rainy Day Fund for post-Harvey debris removal, Abbott said he would not authorize money before 2019, when the Legislature is next scheduled to meet.
The problem is that hurricanes and floods, worsened by climate change, do not recognize political borders or county lines. Their toll is shared by everyone. The latest estimate from Moody’s puts recovery from Harvey at $81 billion, much of which will end up paid by taxpayers across the United States.
Harris County officials say they have received as many requests for buyouts since the hurricane (3,000) as there have been buyouts since the mid-1990s. Harvey turned out to be an equal opportunity disaster. In Meyerland, an affluent district where Brays Bayou burst its banks, Steve and Julie Sacks’ house flooded for the third time in three years. They are among the homeowners hoping for a buyout.
“But I’m not counting on one,” Steve Sacks told me. Buying out rich homes to repurpose vulnerable areas like Meyerland for flood detention, as Sacks notes, would require loads of money and remove valuable properties from tax rolls in a county that relies on property taxes.
WEATHER AT THE EXTREMES
Harris County demands that new developments retain enough rainwater on site to neutralize the effects of a 100-year storm. But those 100-year numbers date back years. They are based on mitigating a storm that averages 13.2 inches of rain in 24 hours. Harvey brought 25.9 inches in 24 hours. The Memorial Day flood in 2015 dropped 11 inches in three hours. The Tax Day flood in 2016 dumped 17 inches in 12 hours in the Katy Prairie.
Considering that most people whose homes flooded had no flood insurance, getting everyone to buy it might solve one problem — but would increase another. “We ought to call federal flood insurance what it actually is,” said Phil Bedient, an engineer. “It is subsidized floodplain development.” The Netherlands — the global gold standard for water management — does not offer a national flood insurance program for just this reason.