Texas flooding adds new urgency to Houston’s home buyout program

As a series of monstrous torrential rains hit southeast Texas last week, thousands of homes were flooded in low-lying neighborhoods around Houston. The storms dropped months’ worth of precipitation on Houston in a matter of days, overtopping the rivers and streams that flow through the city and forcing authorities to divert millions of gallons of water from reservoirs. Elsewhere in the state, rain and winds killed at least three people, including a 4-year-old boy who was swept away by floodwaters.

Much of the deepest flooding occurred in the San Jacinto River, a serpentine waterway that winds along Houston’s eastern border and flows into the Gulf of Mexico. This area happens to be the site of perhaps the nation’s longest-running experiment in an adaptation policy known as “managed retreat,” which involves moving homeowners out of neighborhoods that will become increasingly vulnerable to disasters as climate change worsens. Harris County has spent millions of dollars buying up and demolishing at-risk homes along the river over the past decade. But last week’s floods demonstrated that even this nationwide program has not been able to keep pace with the escalating disaster.

“This is basically the largest and deepest river in the county, and the flood plain is so deep that we really can’t do any projects to repair these areas,” said James Wade, who is leading the buyouts of homes for the Harris County Flood Control District. . “We’re trying to get contiguous property in those areas so we can convert them back to nature.”

It’s been slow: Wade says the county has purchased about 600 flood-prone homes along the waterway over the past 30 years, almost all of which would have flooded in the recent storm if they hadn’t been bought and demolished. There are still more than 1,600 vulnerable homes that the county is trying to purchase, but it has struggled to secure the necessary funds and get owners on board.

Harris County was one of the first local governments in the United States to buy out flood-prone homes with money provided by FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. The county has acquired more than 4,000 homes in dozens of subdivisions around Houston since the turn of the century, essentially creating miniature ghost towns around the city and its suburbs. Many of these neighborhoods, including those around San Jacinto, were so prone to flooding that the county could not protect them with canals and retention ponds, which secure other residential areas.

The county doubled down on this strategy around San Jacinto after Hurricane Harvey flooded hundreds of homes along the river in 2017, confirming that many residences were “desperately deep” in the floodplain, in the county’s words . Not only is the land around the river low and swampy, but it is also downstream from a reservoir that must release water during floods so that it does not overflow.

The county used federal funds to purchase and demolish an entire subdivision called Forest Cove, converting the open space into a “greenway” park with walking and biking trails. Elsewhere, he bought out homeowners who had already raised their riverfront homes up to 14 feet in the air, but still suffered flooding during Hurricane Harvey. These buyouts were voluntary, but after years of advocacy, the county was able to persuade most owners to leave.

A separate county agency conducted a mandatory buyout in a few subdivisions where residents had repeatedly flooded, including a large community along the San Jacinto. The mandatory initiative has drawn criticism from residents who accuse the county of uprooting established communities, but the county sees it as a necessary measure to control flood risks in places where no other flood control strategy would work. More than six years after Harvey, officials are still working to close the last of these homes.

Yet this aggressive program has still not reached many vulnerable neighborhoods. The county receives most of its buyout funding from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which tend to distribute grants only after large disasters. It also issued a $2.5 billion bond to fund flood protection and buyouts, but that amount proved insufficient. There are far more flood-prone homes, even along the San Jacinto River, than the county can afford, let alone the rest of the Houston metropolitan area, one of the world’s largest urban centers. most populous in the country.

“Money is obviously the biggest constraint,” said Alex Greer, an associate professor of emergency management at the University at Albany who has studied buyout programs. “They often have many more interested owners than they have funds, and the financing comes way too late.” Wade does not yet know whether the flooding caused enough damage to meet the criteria for a presidential disaster declaration, which would unlock significant FEMA aid and likely help the county fund more buyouts along the river San Jacinto.

Additionally, buyouts can take years to complete. In most cases, the county must convince individual homeowners to enroll in a buyout program, then complete months of paperwork to purchase their homes, then wait for the homeowners to move out. If there are holdouts who do not want to leave, the buyouts end up taking place in a “checkerboard” pattern and the government cannot let the water take back the land. Some neighborhoods, like those in the more upscale Kingwood neighborhood, are fighting for alternatives, like new reservoirs upstream or dredging projects that could reduce flooding without homeowners needing to leave.

Even though residents along the beleaguered river have faced flooding for decades, Wade says he hopes this most recent flood will convince more of them to join the buyout program, allowing the county to return more land along the river to nature. However, without more money, he won’t be able to take advantage of what Greer calls the “window to seduce.”

“Right after a flood is when people are most like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’” he said. “But then there’s a lag between when they come forward and when we’re able to get the funds, and they might change their mind.”