Harvey recovery isn’t over for many
Getting back on their feet was enough for some; making a better Houston is their life’s work for others.
Ben Broadway never thought he’d be the kind of person to take pictures with the mayor and speak at City Hall. He grew up in Fifth Ward with family but bounced around a bit after his mother died. He didn’t finish high school. In 2007, he went blind after being bitten by a brown recluse and having his foot amputated. He met his future fiancée, Emily, down at the Lighthouse of Houston, a nonprofit that provides services for people with vision loss.
Together, they made plans to move from their southwest apartment into a Habitat for Humanity house on the northeast side of town, the area that still felt most like home to Broadway. Before they could, Harvey hit.
Emily’s mom drove them around the Lakewood subdivision where their future home, like all the others on the block, had flooded and needed to be gutted. She described the scene to them. “On the corner of the street, there was this monstrous pile of debris, and her mom said, “This is Sheetrock, this is cabinets, this is doors that they pulled out of all the homes,” Broadway remembered.
It was devastating.
It took more than two years before they finally moved into their home. They lived together, inseparable Ben-andEmily, for less than two years before she passed away from an autoimmune disease in 2021.
It was Emily who helped push him to get the home and to stay positive through the trying months of rebuilding and waiting. Now he fights for her, for his daughter and for his whole neighborhood. Three days a week, he’s at dialysis but Tuesdays, you can probably find him at City Hall and Wednesdays, he’s with Northeast Action Collective, a group focused on improving drainage in the area.
“I feel my happiest when I’m fighting for the NAC,” Broadway said.
Five years on from the unprecedented storm that dumped more than 50 inches of rain on parts of the city, hope looks very different depending on where you are in Houston. Hope might look like a home rebuilt and raised up a few feet. Or it might look like a crowd of people speaking at City Hall, some of whom never imagined they’d speak face to face with the mayor, advocating on behalf of their neighbors.
The difference between those two visions is huge and bridging that divide is critical to the success of our city. After Harvey, there was an explosion of recovery efforts, from crowd-sourced donations all the way up to research consortiums. Much of that activity has ebbed five years on. But in certain areas of the city, the devastation of the storm and the sudden influx of funding looking to address its impacts helped strengthen community networks that have still not let up when it comes to making Houston a safer and more equitable place to call home.
Carolyn Addison Rivera did not see her retirement going this way, chasing down illegal dumpers, calling 311 and speaking at City Hall.
The former educator has lived in her Settegast home for more than four decades and there was no question that she wanted to return after it took on water during Harvey. She had always been involved in the neighborhood but after the storm, she took it on full-time, learning about city ordinances and who to call. She helped stock drop homes in the area with disaster supplies that were running short supply. And she’s trying to get the city to invest more in drainage and the flooding that seems to accompany every heavy rain.
Older residents in the area can remember a time when that wasn’t the case, signaling the decades-long shift to frequent flooding that has affected many communities on the northeast side.
“When we moved out here,” Malberth Moses said, “they would come through on a regular basis and clean those ditches out.” A lot has changed since he moved to Rosewood in Trinity Gardens as a kid in the 1960s. Back then, his neighbors were mostly white and did all they could to make the family feel unwelcome, recalled Moses.
But they stayed. After Harvey damaged the home he still shared with his mother, he knew he had to stay, too.
They rebuilt with the help of West Street Recovery, a group formed after Harvey, first with rescues and donations but quickly expanding to home repairs and community organizing. But the process took a toll on everyone. By the time his mom was able to move back in, she’d lost her vision and lived only four days in her newly repaired home. Moses’ health likewise suffered and hasn’t recovered.
All of this weighs on Moses. He spends a lot of time indoors at home, coughing as soon as it starts to get warm. If not for his ongoing work with West Street and other groups, he said he probably wouldn’t get out much.
Even for people already involved in community organizing, Harvey was an awakening.
Author, artist and organizer Willow Naomi Curry’s aunts’ house where she was staying in Settegast flooded during Harvey, setting off years of housing instability. Then, in 2019, she learned that she might have been exposed to toxic chemicals as a kid growing up in Kashmere Gardens from the nearby rail yard. Both of her parents died from cancer. The combination of it all — the uncertainty set off by Harvey and the realization that her community had been poisoned — changed how she felt about home.
“It made Houston really feel hostile as a place to live and settle down,” she said.
Yvette Arellano had a similar awakening during Harvey. They were working with Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services then, so when the floodwaters filled their neighborhood near the Ship Channel, they knew right away to worry about potential toxic chemicals in the waters. They put a notice out, right before the storm hit. But, looking back, they said they believed that environmental and health agencies would quickly pick up the slack, tracking emissions, monitoring potential exposures and penalizing polluters who might have broken the law.
The storm exposed difficult truths for Arellano, who went on to found Fenceline Watch, about the failure of some of those institutions to help and to listen to communities, especially those in harm’s way. Instead, they sought to make those community voices — in Spanish, in Vietnamese and in so many other languages — even louder. “This is the tide that really has the potential” to shift the way things are done in Texas, Arellano said. “That’s my hope.”
This vision of recovery is an expansive one. It’s not just about tarps and rooftops. It’s a vision of a safe place for everyone to call home and it requires everyone working together.
“The problems are not solvable one street at time or one household at a time,” said Ben Hirsch, who helped found West Street Recovery. “This kind of collective action around improving bayous or improving the drainage infrastructure,” he said, “people realize they can’t do that as a one-person thing, they need to be part of a group.”
Sociologist and Rice University professor Rachel Tolbert Kimbro found that community ties were a strong reason that families decided to stay put after flooding. Twenty-eight of the 36 mothers she interviewed in a well-off Houston neighborhood stayed after Harvey. There were all sorts of reasons: the pre-existing community bonds, the school they all loved, the hopeful logic that saw Harvey as a fluke. But there was also the unwillingness to consider that perhaps this neighborhood they had so carefully chosen wasn’t the good choice they thought they made after all. Even the mothers that did leave used words like “abandoned” to describe what they’d done.
As much as their reasons for staying were tied to a sense of community, their recoveries were more individual. They had flood insurance and were more or less made whole at the end of it all. They knew the city was already undertaking a project to widen the nearby bayou and so they mostly didn’t get involved in the same way Broadway, Rivera, Moses and others did.
“There was virtually no engagement,” said Kimbro.
Their experience reflects the inequities baked into the current recovery process. A nationwide study from Rice University’s James Elliott and University of Illinois at Chicago’s Junia Howell found that racial wealth gaps tended to widen the most in counties that experienced more natural disasters, a phenomenon that was made even worse by the flow of FEMA dollars to those counties. In other words, it’s not just that the disasters affect people differently, it’s that recovery does too.
While the labor of dedicated neighborhood groups, concerned citizens and passionate retirees has helped elevate calls for a just recovery, our elected leaders at all levels of government are the ones who should be leading the way here.
Broadway can’t see coming rain clouds but he worries about them. “With me being blind and disabled,” he said, “I’m constantly checking the weather.”
Even a heavy rain can flood the streets so bad that MetroLift can’t make it to his house and he’s been active in pushing for better ditch maintenance and more progress on Greens and Halls bayous.
Sometimes, Broadway sits in his garage and listens to the kids playing in the street. He wants them to have everything they deserve. “That’s why I fight,” he said.
For many Houstonians, just getting back on their own feet was struggle enough but others made rebuilding a better Houston their life’s work.
For this, we owe them our thanks and a break.