Climate plan in Texas faces pushback
Wealthier balk as minorities would get needed boost
Pleasantville is a few square miles of bungalows and industrial sites between Houston’s railways and freeways. It resembles a shallow bowl — quick to flood, like much of the city.
But like other neighborhoods with large Black and Latino populations and low property values, it never qualified for the pricey flood-control projects that protect wealthier parts of Houston.
Projects here “would be put on a list, and that’s where they would go to die,” said Bridgette Murray, who is president of the Pleasantville neighborhood association and whose house got 5 feet of water during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Faced with countless complaints, officials in Harris County, which manages flood control in and around Houston, threw out their old approach for spending billions of dollars on flood defenses after Harvey. Instead of prioritizing spending to protect the most valuable property, which benefited wealthier and whiter areas, they decided to instead prioritize disadvantaged neighborhoods that would have the hardest time recovering, including communities of color.
Opponents have criticized the program as social engineering. Advocates have lauded it as long overdue. And for flood-prone cities nationwide, the controversial plan has become a test case for grappling with the overlapping challenges of racial inequity and climate change.
Governments have long used a simple concept, costbenefit analysis, to decide where to focus money on flood protection: Spend it where property values are higher, for the best return on investment. However, that puts poorer minority areas at a disadvantage. And it feeds a cycle of decline as flooding returns again and again.
“The status quo wasn’t working,” said Lina Hidalgo, who in 2018 became the first Latina to win the position of county judge, Harris County’s top elected official.
But the county’s year-old experiment is more than a possible model for other communities. It is also a warning about the political resistance that can result.
The Democrats’ plan thrust into plain view the wealth and racial divides that long influenced which communities received flood assistance.
Community groups supporting the changes call them both necessary and humane. Opponents see the new program simply as a way for Democrats to channel public funds to Democratic-leaning voters, rather than using an approach they prefer, called “worst first” — the idea that the first priority for spending should be places facing the worst flood risk.
“They want the money for their neighborhoods. They don’t care about ours,” said Dave Martin, who is Houston’s mayor pro tem and represents the wealthy community of Kingwood on the City Council. “Using any mechanism other than worst first is ludicrous.”
Environmental policy experts say it makes no sense to decide which people get protection based on which property is more valuable. That reinforces historical discrimination, which contributed to minority neighborhoods having lower property values in the first place. And it does not ad“Everybody’s dress the deeper question of who needs the most help, or why.
“The benefit-cost approach has a false transparency, a false rigor,” said Earthea Nance, an associate professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University. That approach has a similar effect to redlining, she said, referring to the practice in decades past whereby governments and banks would deny mortgages to Black homebuyers. “Is that really what we want?”
A sequence of unlikely events pushed Harris County to reconsider its approach. First, Hurricane Harvey dropped more rain than any storm in U.S. history, flooding more than 166,000 homes countywide. The following summer, voters approved a $2.5 billion bond to fund more than 500 flood-control projects over several years, the largest such initiative history.
In November 2018, came a third surprise. For the first time in three decades, Democrats, buoyed by the county’s changing demographics and their party’s midterm wave, won control of the Harris County commission with the the chance to decide how those billions would be spent.
They vowed the focus would be on fairness. The problem was, nobody knew exactly what that meant.
Rodney Ellis, who until the election of 2018 had been the sole Democrat on the county’s five-member commission, had said the bond measure must include a commitment to the “equitable expenditure” of the money in return for his support. At the time, he avoided talking about how that provision should be interpreted, for fear Republicans would reject it. in the county’s
for equity, until they’re against it,” Ellis said. “Everybody’s for fairness, until they find out everybody won’t get what they want.”
After Democrats took control of the commission, they eventually decided to rank projects based in part on the “social vulnerability” of the communities they protected — an index created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that reflects what share of residents are minorities, cannot speak English, lack a job, are older, live in mobile homes, do not have cars or face other challenges.
The goal, according to Hidalgo, was to reflect how hard it would be for a neighborhood to recover from the next disaster, and prioritize flood-control projects in those areas — what she described as a more comprehensive version of the worst-first approach.
“That some of that had she said.
The commission passed that new approach along party lines, which in Harris County also means racial lines. The three Democrats who voted in favor are African American or Latino, while the two Republicans who voted against it are white.
Jack Cagle, one of the Republican commissioners who voted against the measure, praised the county’s flood-control department for working quickly on all the bond-funded projects over the past year, blunting the effect of the new prioritization. But he said his voters feel misled, after supporting a bond that they thought would focus on physical risk.
“If you voted on a premise of worst first, and now you’re being told, look, go to the end of the line, you could be unworthy — you’re going to get some pushback from that,” Cagle said. means elevating the communities gone overlooked,”