A ‘Resilient City’ must overcome more than storms

Last week’s announcement by Mayor Sylvester Turner that Houston will join the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program offers an opportunity to shape the direction of our region for the next 20 years.

At the news conference, Turner indicated that Houston was now just joining the 100RC program, several years after the “courtship” between the city and the foundation began.

To understand why 100RC is potentially transformational for our region but why it took so long for this partnership to occur, one needs to consider how the meaning of “resilience” has evolved among our city’s civic leaders.

Following the Memorial and Tax Day storms, Turner appointed former City Councilman Stephen Costello as Houston’s “Flood Czar.” He was also given the official title of chief resilience officer. At that time, the city had applied to compete along with over 370 cities to participate in the Rockefeller Foundation’s global resilience program.

But Houston was not selected. Our decision to focus our resilience efforts on drainage and flooding conflicted with the foundation’s notion that resilience was about something bigger.

For the Rockefeller Foundation, a resilient city is one that’s prepared to deal with both acute shocks (such as hurricanes or tornadoes, earthquakes or terrorist attacks) and chronic stresses (such as mobility and affordable housing), the sort of ills that over time corrode our day-to-day quality of life.

Acute shocks tend to spotlight and exacerbate chronic stresses. Think back ten years to Hurricane Ike, which left many without power and without access to food and medicine for several weeks. Today, just a year after Hurricane Harvey, it’s easy for most of us to overlook the fact that many of our fellow Houstonians have yet to move back into their homes.

It’s important to stay focused on flooding, as our coastal geography, with rising temperatures and sea levels, virtually assures that Hurricane Harvey will not be the last 500-year storm we see in our lifetimes.

But it’s also important not to forget that the next shock will be different than Harvey. The next shock could combine flooding, storm surge, loss of electricity and maybe something totally different, like a cyberattack. It’s understandable that we’re reacting to the most recent crisis given the ongoing devastation. But is what happened during Harvey going to prepare us for the next crisis?

The 100 Resilient Cities program will also allow us to begin addressing chronic stresses such as affordable housing, transportation, education and income disparity.

And it will provide an opportunity to challenge assumptions, to ask whether our real estate development model, the cherished driver for Houston’s robust economic growth, may need tweaking in an era when the climate is changing, and to consider how we as a region stretching across 10,000 square miles can begin to work across jurisdictional and mental silos.

We at the Center for Houston’s Future believe that it is this broad work on resilience that could transform our community into a region that competes globally with places as diverse and powerful as New York, San Francisco, Singapore and London. We’re an organization of change agents focused on building that coalition of organizations and like-minded individuals who are ready to achieve that vision.

After Harvey, as a newly appointed nonprofit CEO running an organization tasked with addressing “Houston’s Future,” I traveled to New York City to meet Michael Berkowitz, CEO of 100 Resilient Cities, to follow up on our chance encounter at a conference and learn the story of why Houston had been passed over for the 100RC program.

I asked the Foundation to reconsider that decision and for the last nine months have been nurturing a process that would include Houston in a program that could transform our region. The results of our work at the Center were born last week with the addition of Houston to the 100RC program.

This is exceptionally good news, and we commend Turner and his staff , along with Berkowitz and the 100RC team for putting this deal together. But we are just now at the starting line. The hard work of understanding and becoming a truly resilient region is only beginning.