Why Brays Bayou families chose to stay after Harvey

Just after Hurricane Harvey hit in the fall of 2017, I began a research project to track families in one repetitively flooded, affluent neighborhood in southwest Houston along Brays Bayou (with the pseudonym Bayou Oaks). I conducted in-depth interviews with 36 neighborhood mothers, because mothers tend to be decision-makers when it comes to choosing where to live. To my surprise, 28 of the 36 families, all of whom experienced significant home flooding, ultimately decided to stay put rather than move out. The central question of the resulting book, “In Too Deep,” is: why stay in harm’s way?

The question of what to do with homes and neighborhoods in harm’s way is a very difficult one. Policymakers, journalists and scholars all have a tendency to think too abstractly. The families in flooded communities, and how they actually operate, seem absent from much of the public debate. If our best strategy to cope with the losses of neighborhoods is “managed retreat,” or systematic policy efforts to proactively move people out of floodprone areas, my research shows the potential challenges of this approach, especially among families with school-aged children. Too little of the debate over moving people from flood zones takes into account how families actually make decisions about where to live, and whether to leave. Cold economic calculations are one thing; a mother’s desire for her child to attend a particular school in a complicated school system is quite another. Families are not making these decisions in a vacuum; they are listening to and being influenced by their neighbors. Policies that support the relocation of entire communities (and school zones) together may be better embraced by residents.

That so few families decided to move out of Bayou Oaks, including 11 families who had flooded at least twice in three years, is initially surprising. Many of the moth

ers who flooded for the first time during Harvey believed that flood to be a fluke, despite the prior two floods that impacted other parts of the neighborhood. This is especially interesting because virtually all of the mothers understood and endorsed the concept of climate change, including how it could directly impact Bayou Oaks. In fact, they were pessimistic about the future of not just their neighborhood but also their city as a whole.

“Deborah,” a pseudonym for one of the mothers who moved out of Bayou Oaks and into an elevated home nearby, said: “I think climate change is going to subsume the entire city of Houston.”

So while the mothers not only believed climate change was real, but also that their city and neighborhood were likely to keep flooding, these beliefs did not, by and large, shake them from their conviction to stay. This paradox — simultaneously believing their neighborhood was “doomed” but deciding to stay nonetheless — is one of the puzzles my research tries to understand. The vast majority stayed because they believed the neighborhood was the best place to raise their children in Houston. The choice of Bayou Oaks was thus part of their curation of family life, which they saw as their responsibility and took very seriously. This desire to curate their children’s lives so carefully is, of course, at direct odds with the concept of knowingly putting your children at risk of experiencing another significant flooding event. The mothers tended to downplay the risk of future flooding, perhaps as a way of explaining away this tension. The risk of another flood, they felt, was less risky than moving their families out of the neighborhood they had so carefully selected.

When I spoke again with one of the mothers, “Rebecca,” in January 2019, 17 months after Harvey, she confessed that the entire family was still sleeping on mattresses on the floor. She had not been able to bring herself to get the new beds she purchased after the Memorial Day flood out of storage out of fear the frames would be damaged again. She was planning to wait until hurricane season was over — but when we talked, it had been over for several months already. May and the start of the next hurricane season was now just around the corner. Their storage unit was also still filled with boxes and boxes of household items and keepsakes. “What’s the point?” she said, derisively. “It’s all just gonna get destroyed if we move it back into the house.” Despite this halfway style of living, Rebecca believed that staying was the best thing for her children. She had ensured her children’s access to great schools by living in this neighborhood, and her family and her children were embedded in the community in ways she judged as important. In fact, she, like so many of the mothers, wanted to stay for her children.

The story of Bayou Oaks provides a cautionary tale for policymakers. When families believe they have found the best place to live, the best place to raise their children — and especially when good schools are at stake — it will not be easy to convince them to move. I explicitly asked the mothers what they would do if they received a federal buyout payment they thought was fair. They told me they would try to buy a home that was elevated — in Bayou Oaks.

Future responses to climate change must understand the reasons why people are rooted to places and work to mitigate their concerns about leaving. Of course, not all communities are affluent like Bayou Oaks, where most families had choices about whether to stay or go, or what to do to remediate their homes. But people across all social classes have deep connections to places — and reasons to stay put rather than uproot their families. Policymakers must be willing to work with communities and understand the multifaceted reasons they may have for wanting to stay in harm’s way.