Other view: Hurricanes Harvey, Irma stir debate on development

Recent natural disasters in U.S. urban areas have also been man-made disasters.

In 2005, the failure of New Orleans' levees and the destruction of Louisiana's wetlands magnified the damage from Hurricane Katrina. 

Last week, too much concrete, too little planning and too little respect for nature's capacity to absorb water left Houston and its sprawling suburbs all the more vulnerable when Hurricane Harvey deluged the region with record-shattering rains.

To be sure, no city — regardless of planning or natural buffers — could have withstood such an onslaught of water without flooding. Harvey dropped an average 36 inches of rain over five days and nearly 50 inches in a few places.

But the damage didn't have to be a bad as it was, nor should Houstonians have had to suffer through two other crippling floods since Memorial Day in 2015.

Houston starts with some natural deficits. It’s flat. It’s rainy. It has hard clay soil, which doesn’t easily absorb water. All the more reason to employ well-known strategies to minimize flooding. Instead, such strategies were mostly ignored during a decades-long building binge that turned the Houston metropolitan area into the 5th largest in the United States, home to nearly 6.7 million people.

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Also disregarded was a 1996 report by county engineers, unearthed this week by The Dallas Morning News. The report warned that Houston’s two huge reservoirs, if not upgraded or provided with new underground drainage, would someday add to flooding. And that’s precisely what happened during Harvey. When the reservoirs threatened to overflow, federal authorities opened the floodgates, releasing a torrent into nearby neighborhoods. 

Defenders of Houston’s relentless growth dismiss scientists and engineers who champion new approaches as anti-growth, pro-zoning elitists who look down on Houston’s boomtown building style. But most critics aren't against all growth. They're in favor of smarter growth, which requires new building strategies.

Among the most urgent:

Respecting nature. As developers have ranged farther from Houston's center looking for cheap land, they’ve built over prairies and freshwater wetlands, which absorb water. Roofs, pavements, roads, malls and parking lots have replaced these natural sponges, forcing more runoff that flows downstream to other developments and the city.  According to a Texas A&M analysis, from 1992 to 2010, Harris County, which contains almost all of Houston, lost 15,855 acres of wetlands— an area nearly 19 times the size of New York’s Central Park. To change this pattern, “I would not advocate zoning,” says land use expert Samuel Brody of Texas A&M. “We need to grow … with more common sense.”

Building drainage.  New communities need to include more detention ponds and open green spaces, such as parks or golf courses, to contain runoff. This lessens flooding not only in those developments but also in other communities downstream. Houston officials for too long failed to put in tough regulations to require more drainage, and when they finally did, some were ignored by developers, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis. The metro area can no longer count on its 22 bayous and two reservoirs, which were built or last expanded more than four decades ago and were easily overwhelmed by Harvey’s rains.

Getting out of harm’s way. Smarter land use, more water storage and an ongoing project to expand one of the major bayous will get Houston only part of the way toward safety. Government officials will need to champion buyouts of homes and other properties that have flooded repeatedly to get people out of harm’s way and make room for more open spaces. The biggest obstacles? Few homeowners want their home to be the one that goes. And few politicians want to take the risk of alienating voters. The process requires political courage and monetary incentives.

Getting Houston's leaders, developers and even some residents to buy into such changes won't be easy, but without them the city's future growth will be at risk.

In New Orleans, the answer was rebuilding levees and erecting huge barriers to keep out storm surges.

In Houston, for a storm like Harvey, “it is more about building places for the water to go,” says Rice University engineering professor Phil Bedient. Residents of the sprawling metropolitan area will have to learn that working with, not against, nature can make floods less frequent and far less catastrophic.

That's a lesson not just for Houston but for cities in the path of Hurricane Irma as well.

— USA Today