New development

Mayor and City Council take high ground, raising the bar for builders after Harvey.

Texas history teaches us a compelling lesson about the importance of acting quickly in the wake of a natural disaster.

After powerful hurricanes struck the Gulf Coast in 1875 and 1886, Galveston civic leaders debated whether they should protect their city by building a seawall. They talked and squabbled about it for years, but as time passed so did the sense of urgency that suffused the debate following both storms.

Only after the 1900 hurricane killed an estimated 8,000 people did Galveston finally take action and construct the seawall that’s protected the island ever since. The deadliest natural disaster in American history finally ended the arguments. Historians can only speculate how many lives would’ve been saved if the city government had stopped dithering about it and built the seawall years earlier.

That lesson seems especially relevant in light of what happened last week at City Hall. Mayor Sylvester Turner and a majority of council members seized the moment and adopted standards mandating new construction in floodplains be built higher off the ground. But the close vote split largely along party lines following three hours of contentious debate. As the city presses ahead with its response to Harvey, the mayor must work on building consensus among council members. And it’s clear some council members need to quit carrying water for the real estate industry.

Right now, buildings constructed in the 100-year floodplain — in other words, in places thought to have a 1 percent chance of going underwater in any given year — must be built at least one foot above the flood level. Beginning Sept. 1, the rules become more demanding, and they apply to a wider range of properties. All new buildings within the 500-year floodplain — which have a 0.2 percent of going under water in any year — must be built at least two feet above the projected flood level.

Some council members think the new rules go too far. Councilman Jack Christie proposed an amendment that would have relaxed the proposed elevation requirements in the 500-year flood plain and link the rules to each property’s specific history and flood risk. Councilman Greg Travis, pointing out that new mapping is expected to expand the 100-year flood plain, proposed rolling back the rules after those maps are released.

Both of those amendments failed. But the story behind the changes proposed by some council members reveals quite a lot about what’s gone haywire with real estate development in Houston. As the Chronicle’s Mike Morris and Rebecca Elliott reported, Christie’s amendment was crafted largely by the Houston Association of Realtors. Another Travis amendment was developed with the help of the Greater Houston Builders Association. And Councilman Michael Kubosh basically said in an open council meeting that he trusted the opinions of Realtors over the city’s engineers’.

In addition to Christie, Travis and Kubosh, council members Mike Knox, Brenda Stardig, Steve Le and Mike Laster also voted against the new rules.

Again, Houston’s politicians should stop listening to the builders, developers and real estate agents who spent decades recklessly building in flood pools and paving the Katy Prairie.

Still, council members had some legitimate complaints about how these new rules were rolled out. The mayor first discussed the policy changes in late January, but the Department of Public Works and Engineering didn’t release an analysis of the data behind the proposal until six weeks later, after the window for public feedback had already closed. Council members have griped for decades that mayors don’t give them enough time to review proposals before they come up for a vote, but these new development standards could have been introduced with more finesse. As the mayor proposes future flood mitigation measures, we hope he taps the consensus building talents he developed in the Texas Legislature to win more widespread acceptance of his agenda.

As Galveston learned more than a century ago, the aftermath of a disaster creates a limited window for action. The new standards adopted last week mark an overdue shift in the city’s laissez faire attitude toward development. Just like after Galveston’s storm, we can only wonder how many lives and how much property might have been saved if our city government had acted earlier.