Does the city need a stronger flood plain ordinance?

Were the impacts of Hurricane Harvey in Houston a result of no zoning in the city of no limits?

This assertion seems to be the catch-all used by detractors for all that was exposed by Harvey in terms of the lack planning.

On the other hand, critics of regulation like to point out that zoned cities fared just as badly as Houston did during Harvey.

Mayor Sylvester Turner said: “Zoning wouldn’t have changed anything. We would have been a city with zoning that flooded.”

Zoning and the lack of zoning have colored discussions about how Houston develops for more than a 100 years. Zoning is a veritable lightning rod for animated discussions about development in our city. Zoning has detractors.

There are those who decry any kind of controls on development; to them, zoning would be the absolute worst kind of regulation. On the other hand, zoning has detractors among the urban cognoscenti, who consider it an impediment to the walkability that defines livable cities.

But just what do people mean when they say zoning? Do they perhaps mean to say “land-use regulations”? I suspect that most of us who are not professional planners confuse the two terms and use them interchangeably. These terms are related, but they are not the same. Zoning is a subset of land-use regulations. Zoning is about restriction or control of particular uses. This zone will be residential, that zone will be commercial, and this other zone will be industrial.

Land-use regulations can prohibit development in certain areas, such as flood plains, for example. A flood plain ordinance is not necessarily a “zoning” ordinance, but it is a land-use ordinance. A municipality could enact a single-focus ordinance regulating development in the flood plain without fear that such an ordinance could explode into full-fledged zoning. Cities with comprehensive plans and zoning could, of course, also enact a flood plain ordinance, and they could consider that ordinance as part of their zoning ordinance.

Limiting development in a flood plain in some sense is zoning. A certain kind of land is declared to some degree or another as unusable, in this case a flood plain. It is restricting something in a particular area or zone. Therein lies the confusion. Municipalities in Texas have the power to limit development in areas they consider a threat to human health and safety. Many would argue, of course, that municipalities not only have the power, they have the obligation and responsibility to act on behalf of public health and safety.

So let’s ratchet back that comment from the mayor. Let’s replace “zoning” with “flood plain ordinance.” Perhaps Turner could then have said this: “A flood plain ordinance would have changed everything. We would have been a city with an ordinance that minimized who got flooded.”

Zoning would not have protected us from Harvey. But that does not mean regulatory intervention would not have protected us.