FLOOD-CONTROL MEASURES LOSING OUT IN WAVE OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING CUTS
are threatening its way of life.
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 may have been 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 that Houston shouldn’t expect more of the same.
Climate change holds a mirror up to every place its impact is felt. Global warming may not specifically have caused Harvey, any more than a single major league home run can be attributed to steroids.
That said, scientists have little doubt that climate change is making storms worse and more frequent. The floods that ravaged Houston on Memorial Day in 2015 and in April of 2016 — now called the Tax Day flood — left behind billions of dollars in damage. Coming right after those events, Harvey has led even some pro-development enthusiasts to rethink the city and its surroundings.
“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.
“Three 500-year floods in three years means either we’re free and clear for the next 1,500 years,” as he put it, “or something has seriously changed.”
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.
Resettling neighborhoods, making certain places off-limits to development, creating dikes and reservoirs is difficult, both financially and politically. It takes longer than most election cycles. Memories fade. Inertia sets in. Residents just want to get their lives back to normal. Politicians want votes, not trouble.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans, for better and worse, used its cataclysm as an opportunity to reboot, not just fixing levees but overhauling public schools, hospitals and many neighborhoods. It was a wrenching process. The mere suggestion of moving people out of vulnerable neighborhoods set off bitter protests, causing the city to back down from some of its most sweeping proposals.
Texas after Harvey is no different, and perhaps even less prepared to change. Like the rest of the United States, it is deeply divided between urban and rural, Democrat and Republican. Houston is a blue city with a black mayor in a bright red state. Here, especially in the hurricane’s wake, debates over the way ahead have split conservatives from one another and put environmentalists at odds with advocates of affordable housing.
Ultimately, though, any resolution will require that everyone face the same threats together.
‘Don’t California my Texas’
Jim Blackburn, a planner, environmental lawyer and something of a lightning rod around here, has been warning for years about climate change, the decrepit state of Houston’s reservoirs and the perils of developing the Katy Prairie. He remembers escaping years ago to the prairie to bird watch. One recent morning he drove me out there along the Grand Parkway and pulled into an unfinished subdivision.
A saleswoman in a model home boasted about $1 billion worth of box stores and malls being built nearby. The development, she said, adheres to county standards requiring that houses be raised above the 100-year floodplain. The woman handed Blackburn a glossy brochure and a disclaimer, which he scanned before climbing back into the car, shaking his head.
The disclaimer explained that roads outside the development, linking it to the parkway, occupy the 10-year floodplain, meaning they would have about a 10 percent chance of flooding every year.
“These days that means they’ll flood anytime you look at them funny,” Blackburn said. “It’s the new normal.”
That’s not far-off. 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.
“We suffered nothing short of a catastrophic disaster,” a veteran Texas lobbyist, Bill Miller, said. “It happens at a time when the people in the governing class in this state don’t believe in taxes and government. But they also don’t want anybody discouraged from coming here, because that’s bad for business.”
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 like 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.” At a Republican gathering in June, he talked about the experience of driving out of the state’s capital, Austin.
“It starts smelling different,” he told the audience. “And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom.”
Little wonder, post-harvey, that state and local officials have anointed different flood and recovery czars. Texas is sounding these days like Russia under the Romanovs. 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.
I met with the mayor in City Hall at the time. He noted that the Legislature had convened a special session to ban gender-neutral bathrooms. “If they can meet about toilets, why can’t they meet when the toilets overflow?” one frustrated city official said, before Abbott came up with $50 million from a separate fund to stem growing criticism.
Another official, this one with the county, made the point that the area around Houston is a patchwork of counties and municipalities with different rules and no coordination because Texans believed the upside of what became, in essence, institutionalized entropy was that it allowed residents to avoid the encumbrances of city governments, regulations and taxes.
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.
“The whole trans-mississippi pioneer enterprise was in fact brought to you by the federal government,” said Steven Conn, a historian and author of “Americans Against the City.”
The hypocrisy of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-texas, resisting federal aid to the New York region after Hurricane Sandy but then requesting it for Texas after Harvey, is in fact part of this same history.
Houston’s unregulated sprawl, Conn added, gives physical form to this politics of “decentralization and anti-statism.”
It’s not New York
At the same time, Houston is in many ways a forward-looking, progressive city. Before it elected Turner, it elected a mayor who was a lesbian. The city is in thrall to cars and highways and has precious little mass transit, but the municipality of Houston relies more on renewable energy than any other big city in the United States. Houston has more green space, relative to paved, than New York.
And what many Houston residents like about it, its supporters say, is precisely that it isn’t New York or San Francisco or Boston. They insist that its business-friendly, light-on-regulations approach helps account for a big rise in employment since 2000. A report by the city’s Center for Opportunity Urbanism, a pro-development organization, which cautions against overreacting to Harvey, said: “The city emanates a conviction that people should have the freedom to determine their destiny.”
Thomas Cole, director of the Mcgovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at the Texas Medical School of Houston, recalled how, during the 1960s, business leaders and politicians conspired with media executives to desegregate Houston quietly, seeing the turmoil that desegregation was causing elsewhere in the South. Decades later, Houston boasts of becoming the most diverse big city in the country, with comparatively low housing costs that translate to higher levels of minority homeownership.
But what does “affordable” really mean if residents have to pay hefty transportation costs and rebuild, time and again, after floods? Houston’s affordability leans on loosely regulated, lowcost immigrant labor providing an abundance of cheaply made, slab-on-grade, single-family houses that sprawl on all that open land, in areas like the Katy Prairie.
And it relies heavily on U.S. taxpayers providing government tax credits, mortgage interest deductions, gas subsidies, artificially low flood insurance rates, highway construction money — and emergency relief, including buying out homeowners to remove their properties from harm’s way.
Harris County officials say they have received as many requests for buyouts since the hurricane (3,000) as there have been buyouts since the mid1990s. 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.
Bruce Hooper would move, too. During Harvey, he woke up to crackling sounds, when floodwaters started to seep into his appliances and electrical outlets. Hooper lives in a poor area called Kashmere Gardens. I found him sitting on a tattered lawn chair outside the shell of his tumbledown rental. An unemployed former parks employee, Hooper told me that he and his family of five had to be airlifted out by the Coast Guard after a detention pond overflowed and water inside the house rose from ankle to chest high in an hour. He would live elsewhere, he said, but like many others without flood insurance or savings, “we got nowhere else to go.”
Weather at the extremes
One afternoon I biked with Guy Hagstette around Buffalo Bayou Park. Hagstette is director of parks and civic projects for the Kinder Foundation, which underwrote much of the $75 million downtown park. We met at Allen’s Landing, where the Buffalo and White Oak bayous converge before flowing into the Houston Ship Channel. The Allen brothers were real estate swindlers from New York who founded Houston in 1836. After oil turned up beneath the muck and clay, they seemed like prophets.
Harvey burst the tall banks of Buffalo Bayou Park, flooding the city’s theater district and City Hall. It collapsed riverbanks and left dunes of silt that buried pedestrian paths, playgrounds and fields.
“This will take a lot more than tweaking,” Hagstette told me. He meant not just repairing and fortifying the park, but also adapting Houston to the new normal.
For starters, that will require fresh numbers. Harris County demands that new developments retain enough rainwater on site to neutralize the effects of a 100year 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 dropped 11 inches in three hours. The Tax Day flood dumped 17 inches in 12 hours in the Katy Prairie.
“We need to get climatologists, politicians and policymakers talking to each other,” Jeff Lindner told me. “They’re not.” As meteorologist for the Harris County Flood Control District, Lindner spent five sleepless days and nights during Harvey as an unshakable, tousled expert in a blue, button-down shirt, going on television and providing Houstonians with useful information. We met at the flood control district office one morning.
“There’s little question the earth is warming,” he said, adding as a qualifier: “Regardless of whether it’s a natural cycle or human-induced, hotter air holds more moisture. And so for Harris County that means the potential for more extreme events.”
Lindner’s concern, he said, is that “by the time policy is in place it will already lag behind the latest information.”
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,” as Phil Bedient, an engineer and colleague of Blackburn’s at Rice, put it. “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.