[City Journal] Doing Houston Wrong

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https://www.city-journal.org/html/doing-houston-wrong-15604.html

Doing Houston Wrong
Contrary to the sneers of elitist planners, Houston has the right approach to urban development.
Joel Kotkin Tory Gattis
December 13, 2017

Last August, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, causing massive flooding in the Houston area and likely becoming one of the most expensive disasters (current estimate: $81.5 billion) in U.S. history. In the aftermath, Houstonians rallied to rebuild and look after one another, but they did so with the echoes of a persistent chorus of criticism ringing in their ears: Houston, critics said, was partially to blame for what had happened.

Though some of the New York Times’s coverage, notably by Emily Badger, was fair-minded, much of it was full of selective reporting and bias. According to Michael Kimmelman, Houston struggled because it is not properly zoned and because it lacks the planning that one associates with cities like New York. “The very forces that pushed the city forward are threatening its way of life,” Kimmelman wrote. Kimmelman blames Houston’s notorious “sprawl,” underwritten, as one urbanist historian tells him, by “decentralization and anti-statism.”

The Times has a selective memory. New York is certainly zoned and planned, but it suffered $19 billion in damage from Superstorm Sandy, which dropped only a half-inch of rain. But Sandy’s storm surge flooded 51 square miles of New York and inundated 300,000 homes and 23,400 businesses—estimates that exclude the much-larger impacted area in the suburbs of New York City. “‘Smart growth’ plans didn’t prevent that,” noted the Wall Street Journal.

Higher density and zoning don’t guarantee a resilient infrastructure. New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was both dense and zoned, but this did not protect the city from devastation. In September, Hurricane Irma did considerable damage around residential towers and in downtown Miami. As Houston mayor Sylvester Turner put it: “Zoning wouldn’t have changed anything. We would have been a city with zoning that flooded.”

The real point of Kimmelman’s story, like much Times coverage of almost any natural disaster, is that the effects of climate change are already here, and to avoid them, cities must adopt a specific view of urban development and an accompanying planning agenda. “Texas after Harvey is no different, and perhaps even less prepared to change” than New Orleans, Kimmelman maintains. But Houston responded to disastrous flooding many times before climate change became an issue, including after the 1900 hurricane that essentially destroyed Galveston, and another that deluged downtown Houston in 1935. Yet Kimmelman and other commentators blame Houston for purportedly ignoring nature and inviting disaster. “No city could have withstood Harvey without serious harm, but Houston made itself more vulnerable than necessary,” intoned Bloomberg. “Paving over the saw-grass prairie reduced the ground’s capacity to absorb rainfall. Flood-control reservoirs were too small. Building codes were inadequate. Roads became rivers.”

Hysteria about climate change and finger-wagging about zoning do not address the real issue: boosting resilience. Houston has already shown that it can learn from the past. Previous storms, such as Hurricane Ike (2008) and Hurricane Allison (2001), led to regulations requiring “detention ponds,” which temporarily capture storm water, for all new developments more than 10,000 square feet in land area. These detention basins require no net increase in runoff from new developments. Electricity can’t be turned on for a development until it passes detention inspections, which reoccur annually.

Overall, the Harris County Flood Control District has spent over $4 billion on infrastructure, and spends another $100 million each year—a far cry from doing “nothing,” as critics imply. The Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical complex, suffered significant flooding damage during Allison, but it made improvements afterward—installing warning systems, pumps, elevated electrical equipment, and floodgates and doors that prevented flooding damage during Harvey. The media devoted much attention to Houston’s flooded streets but rarely noted that the city designed those streets as last-resort water-detention ponds. Though 30 percent of Harris County was underwater at some point during Harvey, less than 7 percent of homes were damaged. The enhanced regulations helped the region withstand a disaster that would have humbled New York, and which still afflicts New Orleans. In less than two weeks, Houston was largely back in operation.

The notion that setting aside more open space would have contained Harvey is dubious at best. As Charles Marohn notes at Strongtowns, critics lack a “proper sense of scale.” Between 1992 and 2010, according to research by Texas A&M, nearly 25,000 acres of wetlands were lost to development around Houston; they would have stored nearly 4 billion gallons of stormwater. That sounds like a lot, but Harvey dropped an estimated 19 trillion gallons of rain on Texas. The lost stormwater-storage capacity amounts to 0.2 percent of the water that fell during the storm. And too high a greenspace requirement would have led to even more sprawl, pushing developers further out, as has occurred in cities around the world, such as Toronto and London.

Much of what critics think they know about Houston is simply untrue.
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