Four years later, homes rise above future floods
Workers swarmed around and under the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. They uncoiled cables, pounded thick wooden beams into place, wielded shovels, stretched out tape measures. In the previous few weeks, this team had lifted the house in Nassau Bay four feet above its original elevation; the goal was 10 feet. It’s a big, intricate job combining sophisticated engineering, high-tech equipment and many hours of hard, dirty labor under a merciless August sun.
The contractor, Arkitektura Development Inc., specializes in elevating houses built on slab foundations. Its president, Phillip Contreras, told me the firm has raised more than 500 houses in the greater Houston area since Hurricane Harvey dumped record-breaking rainfall on the region four years ago. Much of the financing has come through a federal program intended to reduce the risk of repetitive flood damage to
A federal program allows residents to fix the problem and remain in their community
buildings covered by the National Flood Insurance Program, which subsidizes coverage of structures in flood-prone areas. The program paid $1.2 billion in claims in 2020. Federal officials have proposed making its premium system fairer and more rational with reforms that would shift the cost burden toward owners of more valuable properties. But these efforts are facing pushback from, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “the caucus that wants taxpayers in Kansas to subsidize owners who keep rebuilding homes on the shore.”
It’s safe to assume that this policy debate was not on the minds of the crews toiling last week at the site of a home overlooking Clear Creek, where I talked to Contreras. I talked to Contreras at the site of a home overlooking Clear Creek that his crews were raising. The family who occupied it during Harvey gutted the house after it flooded but chose to sell rather than repair it, he said. The new owners opted to elevate the structure. Many clients, Contreras said, come to him after learning it would cost them more to tear down and rebuild. And they don’t want to move: “They get less house and there’s no yard and no water view,” he said.
Watching his crew at work, I reflected on the powerful lure of the “water view.” My late mother-in-law, Kathleen Farrar, lived for many years on Cape Cod, but the family property was some five miles from the sea — about as landlocked as it gets on that spit of New England sand. When she took her kids to the beach and they gawked at the big houses facing the waves, Kathleen often remarked that people who owned waterfront property had to be very rich or very foolish.
Harvey’s floods, the worst in a series of water calamities to strike Houston in the past two decades, led to a lot of soulsearching and some significant policy changes. Learned people undertook deep studies to identify strategies to limit flood damage. There was much talk of the need for a “paradigm shift.”
As these discussions played out, one obvious question was how to reduce development in flood-prone areas through tactics such as buyouts and tougher building regulations. Christof Spieler, an engineer and former Metro board member who served as project manager for the Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Task Force, said raising homes to prevent future flooding might make more sense if the home is in a floodplain rather than a floodway — the actual water channel during a flood. “If you build something in the floodway, you are constricting the ability of the water [to move downstream],” he said. “We shouldn’t be putting new obstructions in the floodways.”
A year after Harvey, one expert called for a massive, $20 billion initiative to remove homes from floodplains, a step that would eliminate entire neighborhoods and communities. But wouldn’t that approach be a bit … defensive? Houston prefers a more muscular posture; it likes to engineer and build its way out of problems.
More than a century ago, when its leaders coveted the economic power of a major port, the city’s 50-mile distance from the Gulf of Mexico didn’t deter them. They just dug a big ditch. Perhaps the same mindset informs the notion of stretching houses skyward as if they were made of
Silly Putty. Contreras said he believes the home-elevation strategy has been used more often in Houston than in other flood-prone communities. His company, based in Webster, is one of a handful of contractors with the expertise to do the highly specialized work, he said.
Four years before Harvey struck, the leaders of Nassau Bay, a city of about 4,000 people on the edge of Clear Lake, launched an effort to elevate every home in the city on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “severe repetitive loss” list. About 60 Nassau Bay houses have been raised so far, City Manager Jason Reynolds said. One of them, perched on the edge of a canal that leads to
Clear Lake, belongs to Tim Gaffigan, who told me that Arkitektura’s workers are about 85 percent finished with the job of elevating his house by 10 feet.
The house had flooded four times when Gaffigan and his wife bought it in 2014. On an August day three years later, the couple awoke at 4:30 a.m. and saw “a sea of water all across the neighborhood” as Harvey’s rains descended. They stuffed two weeks’ worth of clothes into bags and waded through chestdeep water to a hotel. After returning and finding three inches of water in the house, they opted to repair and raise their home. The home’s history — all that water, over and over — helped them qualify for a grant that’s paying most of the cost of elevating the structure.
“The main driving factor for me was financial,” Gaffigan said, noting that his annual flood insurance premium increased from about $1,500 before Harvey to more than $7,600 this year. The elevation will bring the premium back down, he said.
I asked Gaffigan why he chose to buy a house that he knew had flooded four times. “I’ve lived in this area since I was 5 years old, and flooding becomes kind of a norm, if you will,” he said.
And what would he say to a taxpayer in, say, Iowa, with a view of a cornfield, who might resent paying taxes to help him preserve his waterfront vista?
“I would say life is full of choices. You make yours and I make mine,” Gaffigan said. He noted that taxpayers would ultimately benefit from the
FEMA program because flood risks in affected properties will diminish, reducing the agency’s payouts for repair grants. Of course, the payouts would also be less if people hadn’t built in flood-prone areas to begin with. But they did, and not just in Houston. And even after the floods, they remain.
“It’s the community that keeps them here,” said Reynolds, the Nassau Bay city manager. “They enjoy where they live and the community they’re surrounded by. If there’s an opportunity to take their home out of harm’s way, they want to do it.”
The trauma of wading through a waist-deep deluge in the middle of the night wasn’t enough to drive Gaffigan and his wife away from their watery abode. Money and technology offered them a way to stay put with an added measure of safety. People love to live near the water. Not all of them are rich, and who am I to say that they’re all foolish?