Grant to help Houston become more resilient

City to hire program director, start developing a ‘resilience strategy’

Houston is set to join a host of major cities Wednesday in a program aimed at boosting resilience to shocks and stresses, including natural disasters and systemic urban problems.

Through the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities” program and a $1.8 million Shell sponsorship, the city will hire a full-time chief resilience officer for two years and develop what the foundation calls a “resilience strategy.”

“Urban resilience is the capacity of the city to survive disaster, but don’t just think about that as sudden disasters like hurricanes or floods,” said Michael Berkowitz, president of the 100 Resilient Cities program. “You can also think of it like slow-burn disasters — long-term food or energy shortages, or high crime or macroeconomic trends.”

About $500,000 will go toward the resilience officer’s salary, with the other funds covering staffing, technical resources to develop the resilience plan and Houston’s membership in the network of cities.

Mayor Sylvester Turner in 2016 appointed Stephen Costello, a civil engineer and former city council member, as the city’s chief resilience officer. Costello will continue his role as Houston’s “flood czar” — working to limit future flood risk — while Turner will appoint a new resilience officer with a broader mandate to address issues that could include affordable housing shortages or poor infrastructure.

The mayor has not yet

determined who will fill the role, a spokesman said Tuesday.

The Rockefeller Foundation, a private New York-based philanthropic group, created the resilient cities program in 2013. The program last accepted a group of cities in May 2016, rounding out its list of 100. Program organizers plan to continue adding new cities on a case-by-base basis, communications director Andrew Brenner said.

New opportunity

The grant’s timing — four days after Harris County voters approved a $2.5 billion flood bond on Hurricane Harvey’s one-year anniversary — was not intentional, Berkowitz said, but he sees opportunity in the resources devoted to local flood control.

“For Houston, the question is, how do you use all this money and energy and attention not just to prepare for the next hurricane and flood … but also to strengthen the communities, the city, the infrastructure?” Berkowitz said.

As an example of multipurpose flood control infrastructure, Berkowitz cited water plazas in Rotterdam — a Dutch city built in a river delta — that collect stormwater runoff and double as recreational areas when the city is not flooding.

Aside from the grant, the partnership will arm the city with consulting and technical support, including access to private and public groups that partner with the resilient cities program; a network of resilience officers from other cities; and the aid of technical adviser Jeff Hebert, a former New Orleans deputy mayor and vice president of a sustainability-focused research nonprofit in Baton Rouge.

Hebert, who served as New Orleans’ chief resilience officer, described himself as “the quarterback” of a team that will advise the Houston CRO. The team includes experts on economic development, flood mitigation and infrastructure — “expertise in areas we know will be top of mind to Houstonians,” Hebert said.

“You have to sort of think through one idea in many different ways, so you can achieve a greater outcome,” he said.

Forty-seven cities so far have compiled resilience strategies, including Dallas. El Paso also participates in the program, along with New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and many other coastal cities.

A closer look

Theresa O’Donnell, Dallas’ chief resilience officer, said the process was “eye-opening” following her prior role dealing with zoning and planning mostly in prosperous parts of Dallas.

O’Donnell noticed, for instance, the lack of public transportation in West Dallas, and the city’s high number of disconnected youth — young people not working or not in school — who are “not ready to meet the challenges of a 21st century economy.”

“Dallas, like Houston, has an amazing economy. We’re growing really fast, there’s a lot of folks making a lot of money here,” O’Donnell said. “This, though, allowed me the opportunity to look into the things that weren’t working quite so well.”

Kyle Shelton, the director of strategic partnerships at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said the development of a resilience plan will allow the city to address interconnected issues that sometimes are treated separately.

“I would argue the more creatively we think, there’s very little limit to the type of projects we could do,” Shelton said.