Mistrust pervades flood rule fight
Council balks amid skepticism about regulations
Hurricane Harvey was supposed to be a gamechanger. Those who downplayed other recent deadly floods couldn’t say much last August after every single one of the county’s 22 bayous overflowed their banks and inundated hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.
Still, that trauma has not ensured Mayor Sylvester Turner an easy path to restricting development in the flood plains that run alongside those bayous.
What seemed like a stunned consensus that change was needed, seven months later looks like every other City Hall fight over new regulations.
Turner described his proposal in broad terms at a late January council meeting but did not provide draft language or supporting data. He drew immediate opposition from council members when he said he expected to vote on the item within a month.
Happy to fill that information void, lobbyists spent weeks huddled with city council members on behalf of home builders, land developers, engineers and real estate professionals — all of whom happen to be among the most reliable campaign donors at City Hall.
Their arguments, along with those of numerous individual homeowners, tap into a hostility toward regulation that runs deep in Houston.
Houston always has been known as a free-
wheeling place where anyone could make a buck. The city’s founding began with two New York real estate speculators gleefully misrepresenting the climate to lure settlers. Voters have rejected land use restrictions three times since World War II, and revered Bob Lanier, the deep-pocketed developer they elected as mayor three times in the 1990s.
And so, months after Hurricane Harvey dumped 50 inches of rain or more on much of Greater Houston, supporters of Turner’s proposals are back on defense ahead of Wednesday’s scheduled vote.
Stricter regulations
The proposed regulations, opponents say, would undermine growth, hamstring Houston’s competitive edge as an affordable big city and destroy the property values of thousands of homeowners, including many who did not flood in Harvey.
“We have a development reputation of being very laissezfaire and saying you can kind of build where you’re going to want to build and build what you want to build,” said Kyle Shelton of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, which has been convening panels on flood resilience since Harvey. “This is one of the more recent really big attempts to say, ‘Well, no, there are some places where here’s what you’re going to have to do.’ Naturally, that’s going to get discussion and get pushback in Houston, because it’s not something that we’ve done a lot.”
Turner is asking the city council to require all new construction in Houston’s flood plains to be built 2 feet above the projected water level in a 500year storm, which is deemed to have a 0.2 percent chance of happening in any given year.
Current rules mandate that buildings be constructed 1 foot above the flood level in a less severe 100-year storm and apply only within the 100-year flood plain, where properties are considered to have a 1 percent annual chance of being inundated. Minimum home elevations would be imposed within the 500-year flood plain for the first time.
Few of the details were clear to council members or others who heard Turner discuss the coming changes for the first time in late January, however.
In fact, Houston Public Works did not release a detailed analysis of Harvey data to justify the administration’s recommended elevations until six weeks later.
That report, circulated after the designated window for public feedback had closed, showed 84 percent of homes Harvey flooded in Houston’s flood plains would have been spared if they had been built at the height recommended in the mayor’s proposal.
Information gap
The policy rollout frustrated some council members, including Councilman Mike Laster, who represents a southwestern district where roughly 750 homes took on at least 18 inches of water during Harvey.
“I believe that we have done ourselves, our community and this process an enormous disservice in the way in which we’ve proceeded to talk about this issue and present it to the public,” Laster said at a recent committee hearing. “We’ve had virtually no public meetings. We virtually had no public deliberation or time for this to sink in in the public’s mind. Because we’ve not done those two things, we have raised suspicions in neighborhoods.”
Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said the familiar pattern of the debate is unsurprising. That, he said, is because Houston’s strong-mayor form of government gives Turner control over the content of the council agenda and the city departments that draft and implement policies, and because of the “knee-jerk culture in Houston, where any regulation is initially assumed to be bad regulation.”
“There’s a real tendency of the mayor and the rest of the executive branch to come up with the proposals and policies and then try to ram them through the council because there’s a real information asymmetry between the mayor’s office and council,” Jones said. “Even if it’s optimal legislation, council often reacts very negatively about having been kept in the dark, and so many oppose something they otherwise would have supported, not because of the policy itself but because of the process.”
That information gap also makes council members susceptible to lobbying, Jones said, in part because the council members have no more than a handful of staff and often split time between their nominally parttime council positions and regular careers.
In fact, industry representatives played a key role in drafting two of the three amendments council members offered to the flood plain proposal when it reached the council table last week.
‘Doing something different’
Representatives of the Houston Association of Realtors crafted most of Councilman Jack Christie’s amendment to exempt some homes with no history of flooding from the new requirements, Christie’s chief of staff Matt Brollier said.
Brollier said it made sense to discuss the issue with industry experts because city officials had not responded to requests from Christie’s office for basic information.
Councilman Greg Travis said the Greater Houston Builders Association, with input from other groups, helped develop his proposal that seeks to loosen the city’s proposed restrictions on adding “fill” dirt to a site when redeveloping small lots in the 500-year flood plain. The change, he added, aligns with his constituents’ concerns, not simply those of industry groups.
Skeptical council members also have made no secret of their preference for the arguments advanced by real estate industry representatives over Public Works’ own analysis.
One Realtor at a recent council hearing said her agents were “horrified” by the proposal’s threat to property values. Another said the city’s data show that the current rules are working because more than 70 percent of structures in the flood plain were not damaged during Harvey.
“I take your opinion very highly because you’re a Realtor; you’re out there where the rubber meets the road,” Councilman Michael Kubosh told one. “As much as I like these engineers, they haven’t been able to answer my questions about things.”
Turner said he is confident he will have the support to adopt the flood plain proposal.
“Any time you’re talking about a policy shift, those ideas are going to be debated, discussed and vetted,” Turner said. “Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s contentious. It simply means that we’re doing something different in the postHarvey era, which I think most Houstonians expect.”
Next, the city plans to take up the second half of Turner’s elevation proposal: requiring new homes to sit at least 2 feet off the ground citywide, including in areas with no established flood risk.
If the current debate is any indicator, that may be a hard sell.