Even after Hurricane Harvey, the best efforts by Harris County officials to purchase the most flood-prone homes won’t make a dent in the larger problem — worsening flooding, and a buyout program that can’t keep up.
“I can’t go through this again,” she said. “I don’t have it in me.”
The 2015 flood was minor enough she mopped it up with towels, but her
house flooded badly last year when a city water pipe under her patio
burst open during heavy rains. Then Harvey destroyed the entire first
floor.
Howard, a longtime nonprofit director who calls herself a “mouthy
person,” left a message with the mayor’s office demanding that the
government buy her house.
If only it were that easy.
Experts see buyouts as a cornerstone of disaster recovery, a way to
take the most chronically flooded homes and turn them into open space so
they can improve drainage and lower flood risk for the surrounding
area.
It’s hard to find another county in America that has accomplished
more buyouts than Harris County. Since 1985, the Harris County Flood
Control District — the main entity managing buyouts in the Houston area —
has spent $342 million to purchase about 3,100 properties. But thanks
to a decadeslong trend of increased flooding in Houston, caused by a combination of
urban sprawl, lax building regulations and intense rainstorms linked to
climate change, buyouts haven’t kept up with the destruction.
At the rate Harris County has been going, it would take more than three
decades to acquire the 3,300 or so homes on the district’s priority
buyout list — a drop in the bucket compared to the number of properties
that flooded these past three years alone. Hurricane Harvey damaged at
least 69,000 properties in the county, according to preliminary figures
that are likely an underestimate. Devastating floods also hit the county
in 2015 and 2016.
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Source: ProPublica
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