Everybody should have a say in recovery efforts
Hurricane Harvey was a historic event — a storm that dropped more than a year’s worth of rain on Houston in less than a week. The scale of the recovery will be equally unprecedented. Houston is a massive, sprawling metropolis, larger than New Jersey and more populous than 33 states. There isn’t a modern parallel for the task that now faces Texas.
In the aftermath, there will be an impulse to do or build something similarly huge and photogenic — and to do it as quickly as possible. Some will stake their political future on becoming Houston’s savior, and they’ll push for something akin to New Orleans’ already-sinking surge barrier or New York’s “Rebuild by Design” competition, which has yet to produce a single completed project. Houstonians should be wary of anyone attempting to push their city down either path.
The urge for expedience runs the risk of excluding Houston’s most vulnerable residents from having a voice in the recovery. The poor are often the hardest hit by storms like Harvey, and any plan to reimagine Houston’s future without their input should be a nonstarter.
After natural disasters, there is often a push to employ what’s become known as the Shock Doctrine — the exploitation of a crisis to radically transform a city’s physical and social landscape. This often leads to the purge of a city’s poorest residents and a redirection of Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), the primary source of federal antipoverty funding, away from low-income neighborhoods and toward wealthy enclaves.
After Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) received nearly $20 billion in CDBGs to fund the state’s rebuilding efforts. Though CDBGs typically come with the stipulation that at least 70 percent of funds be spent on low- and medium-income households, the LRA was permitted to waive those requirements.
It also received permission from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to forgo the community engagement process usually required for CDBG projects
Framed as a way to expedite Louisiana’s recovery, the LRA’s use of community development grants actually slowed the recovery, according to sociologists Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg. The way the state used CDBGs contradicted the program’s anti-poverty mission by excluding many low-income African-American households from New Orleans’ recovery.
Houston should build its recovery around two key principles. First, the recovery should be led by its people, not an elite task force of disaster planning experts. While technical knowledge is important to Houston’s future, no amount of it can outweigh the value that Houstonians themselves would bring if given the opportunity to chart their city’s future.
The second principle is that Houston must acknowledge the existential threat posed by climate change. To deal with rain events like Harvey, Houston should become the nation’s leader in green infrastructure — the designed wetlands, parks and landscapes that provide a public amenity and help absorb stormwater. Buffalo Bayou Park — inspired by Ian McHarg and George Mitchell’s work in The Woodlands — is already an international exemplar of such an approach. A diffuse network of green infrastructure — perhaps linked with the Bayou Greenways 2020 plan — would provide more opportunities for a shared recovery in Houston.
Climate change is the most important national security issue of our time, and few cities are more vulnerable to its effects than Houston. Harvey is not an aberration — it’s a harbinger of what’s to come. We can’t afford to get this recovery wrong.