Photo: Kenneth Surin.
“Parts of Houston in the floodway, parts of New Orleans submerged during Katrina, parts of Florida—these places never should have been developed in the first place.”
— Thomas Debo (emeritus professor of city planning at Georgia Tech)
I’m in Houston for a week, not having been here since the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey in August 2017.
Houston (population of 6.1 million in the greater metropolitan area) is built on an ancient network of rivers (“the bayou”) that has been increasingly prone to flood over-run in recent times.
Houston is the largest American city without zoning laws. This has resulted in haphazard urban sprawl, as a drive around the city confirms– mile after mile of housing tracts are interspersed with strip malls, with no coherence to their respective locations– a brand-new McMansion, fronted with fake Greek columns, will be plonked in the middle of an unprepossessing row of older shops.
Then there is exurbia, that is, self-contained satellite towns, capable of existing independently of the downtown, while still being linked to the downtown area by a system of overpasses and highways.
Exurbia has been let off the leash here.
The ensuing sprawl on the flood plain (the city stretches over 600sq miles) has encroached on absorbent prairies and wetland. This sponge-like terrain has been replaced by impervious hard surfaces which cannot contain storm water, thereby overwhelming the drainage capacity of…