Wealthy Residents of Houston Don't Like Fairness for Infrastructure Spending When It Means their Neighborhoods Don't Get Funding First

Pleasantville, a few square miles of bungalows and industrial sites stuck between Houston’s railways and freeways, was always quick to flood-- like much of the city. But as a neighborhood with large Black and Hispanic populations and low property values, it never qualified for the pricey flood-control projects that protected wealthier parts of Houston. Flood control projects in Pleasantville “would be put on a list, and that’s where they would go to die,” said Bridgette Murray, who is president of the Pleasantville neighborhood association and whose house got five feet of water during Hurricane Harvey.

Faced with countless complaints like these, officials in Harris County, which manages flood control in and around Houston, threw out their old approach for spending billions of dollars on flood defenses after Harvey. Instead of prioritizing spending to protect the most valuable property, which benefited wealthier and whiter areas, they decided to instead prioritize disadvantaged neighborhoods that would have the hardest time recovering, including communities of color.

The New York Times recently documented how wealthy opponents have criticized the program as social engineering. Advocates have lauded it as long overdue. And for flood-prone cities nationwide, the controversial plan has become a test case for grappling with the overlapping challenges of racial inequity and climate change.

Community groups supporting the change call it both necessary and humane. Opponents (mostly in rich, white neighborhoods) see the new program simply as a way for Democrats to channel public funds to Democratic leaning voters, rather than using an approach they prefer, called “worst first” — the idea that the first priority for spending should be places facing the worst flood risk. “They want the money for their neighborhoods. They don’t care about ours,” said Dave Martin, who represents the wealthy community of Kingwood on the City Council. “Using any mechanism other than worst first is ludicrous.”

Environmental policy experts say it makes no sense to decide which people get protection based on which property is more valuable. That approach reinforces historical discrimination, which contributed to minority neighborhoods having lower property values in the first place. And it doesn’t address the deeper question of who needs the most help, or why.

“The benefit-cost approach has a false transparency, a false rigor,” said Earthea Nance, an associate professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University. That approach has a similar effect to redlining, she said, referring to the practice in decades past whereby governments and banks would deny mortgages to Black home buyers. “Is that really what we want?”

A sequence of unlikely events pushed Harris County to reconsider its approach. First, in 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped more rain than any storm in U.S. history, flooding more than 166,000 homes countywide. The following summer, voters approved a $2.5 billion bond to fund more than 500 flood-control projects over several years, the largest such initiative in the county’s history. A few months later, in November 2018, came a third surprise. For the first time in three decades, Democrats, buoyed by the county’s changing demographics and their party’s midterm wave, won control of the Harris County commission, called the Commissioners Court, and with it, the chance to decide just how that $2.5 billion would be spent. They vowed the focus would be on fairness. The problem was, nobody knew exactly what that meant.

After Democrats took control of the commission, they eventually decided to rank projects based in part on the “social vulnerability” of the communities they protected — an index created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that reflects what share of residents are minorities, can’t speak English, lack a job, are older, live in mobile homes, don’t have cars or face other challenges. The goal, according to Ms. Hidalgo, was to reflect how hard it would be for a neighborhood to recover from the next disaster, and prioritize flood-control projects in those areas — what she described as a more comprehensive version of the worst-first approach. “That means elevating some of the communities that had gone overlooked,” she said. The commission passed that new approach along party lines, which in Harris County also means racial lines. The three Democrats who voted in favor are African-American or Hispanic, while the two Republicans who voted against it are white.

Twenty-five miles north of Pleasantville, in the wealthy neighborhood of Kingwood (at the edge of Lake Houston) Beth Guide’s house flooded last year. When the county said it would prioritize flood-control projects based in part on social vulnerability, she objected. The only criterion, she said, should be who faces the greatest flood risk. “I don’t care if your house is a million-dollar house or a $30,000 hovel in the middle of nowhere,” said Ms. Guide, who runs a digital-marketing agency. “This literally should be, ‘Whose life is in the most danger?’” What Guide conveniently forgets is that if poor families can't afford to protect their homes against hurricanes, then their lives are more in danger.

Greg Travis is a Republican member of Houston’s city council for a wealthy district that straddles Buffalo Bayou, a waterway whose flood-control projects have mostly been pushed to the end of the queue under the new system. He said the Democrats’ approach endangers the region’s tax revenues by letting flooding continue to threaten the values of his constituents’ homes. Travis conveniently forgets that residents of his neighborhood can like afford to recover from a hurricane (and preserve their homes' values).

Other community groups look at it differently thaan Beth Guide and Greg Travis. “This is the same public investment that’s been going to whiter and more prominent areas for decades,” said Chrishelle Palay, who leads the Houston Organizing Movement for Equity, a group that sought the change. “They just call it their ‘tax dollars hard at work.’”