Almost 40 years ago, when I moved to Houston, I fell in love with the extraordinary beauty of this City. And nowhere in Houston is more beautiful than the Lake Houston Area. The pictures below show why it’s worth fighting for.
Nature in the Lake Houston Area isn’t a place you go to visit. You don’t have to drive or fly to it. It’s all around you. Step out your back door and you’re already there. You’re breathing it. You’re being it.
Harvey Was an Eye Opener
Right up until Hurricane Harvey, I felt, on balance, this was the most perfect place in America to raise my family. Houston offers career opportunities found in few other cities. And the Lake Houston Area, in particular, offers the things my family and I value.
Harvey didn’t change my mind about those things. But it did open my eyes to some things I should have paid closer attention to. All around us, that perfect environment was quietly and steadily being eroded for decades.
It’s not gone. But it is threatened. Every day. More than a thousand other posts on this web site amply chronicle those threats. I won’t dwell on them here. Nor will I dwell on how “the greatest flood ever” kept being replaced by the new “greatest flood ever.”
What We Need to Fight For
I would like, instead, to share several images that show it’s not too late to preserve what we have. But to do that, we have to fight for it.
We need to fight for:
Responsible aggregate mining.
Better development practices that respect nature.
Upstream floodplain regulations that reduce flooding.
Flood mitigation efforts that keep the 100-year floodplain a 100-year floodplain.
Why We Need to Fight
I took all of the pictures below in the last three months. They show what we need to save. All were shot inside America’s fourth largest city, which makes them even more unique.
The Kingwood Country Club’s Lake Course.Can you spot the thousands of homes around it?West Fork of the San Jacinto with Lake Houston on the horizon. Looking SE.For decades, development preserved nature.This is the result.Looking north at Lake Houston across the spillway.Looking south over the Lake Houston Dam toward the industry that powers America and the world.Looking east from the West Fork toward the East Fork of the San Jacinto with Royal Shores between them.Looking north along the East Fork. Kingwood’s East End Park is in the center and Huffman is on the right.Looking SE. FM1960 cuts across Lake Houston and through Huffman in the foreground Looking Southwest in the opposite direction from over FM1960, with Lake Houston in background.Looking East across FM2100 and Huffman toward Kingwood on the other side of the lake.Looking West. The Luce Bayou Interbasin Transfer Project where it enters into Luce Bayou and the headwaters of Lake Houston.Looking north from the Commons on Lake Houston toward where the new Grand Parkway is circling Houston (out of sight) near the top of the frame.This entire area could soon be developed.Looking southeast across Kingwood Park High School. Kingwood, where 70,000 people live, is almost invisible, hidden among the trees between the school and Lake Houston at the top of the frame.Looking north over Forest Cove, toward I-69 and Insperity, Kingwood’s $4 billion company, all hidden in the trees.Looking NW from the confluence of Spring Creek and the San Jacinto West Fork.All of this land has been bought by a developer.Fishing from your back door.
If this isn’t worth fighting for, I don’t know what is.
Bob Rehak
Please join the fight. There’s another legislative session starting in six months.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/15/2020
1051 Days since Hurricane Harvey
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20200616-RJR_3539.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=18001200adminadmin2020-07-15 21:33:202020-07-15 23:00:01Worth Fighting For
How do we break the process of building in floodways and then repairing flooded homes with taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance as many as forty times?
A 66-page study by Erica Vilay and Phil Pollman, two candidates for Masters Degrees in Public Policy from Harvard, examines the broken buyout process for flooded homes in Houston floodways. The study also makes recommendations to improve the process. But they won’t revolutionize it. And that may be what this process needs.
The merit in this study is that it takes a holistic view of buyouts and examines them as one of many alternatives available to flood victims living in floodways. From the public’s perspective, buyouts have unquestionable and compelling safety and financial benefits.
Buyouts produce $7 in benefits for every $1 invested. And they take people out of harm’s way.
Speedier Options Available to People In Time of Need
But the process is slow. People have options. And, according to the study, they almost always prefer those other options. In fact, the rate of buyouts is so slow that it will take the City 60 years to meet its 10-year objective, claim the authors.
The paper cited one property that had been repaired a record 40 times. So why is it so difficult to get people to move out of a floodway into housing that won’t jeopardize their lives or lungs?
Vilay and Pollman examine the reasons. The incentives, they say, all favor rebuilding or selling to developers rather than accepting government buyouts.
Tax-subsidized National Flood Insurance Policy premiums remain affordable, offset risk, and usually reimburse homeowners within 60 days after a storm.
Selling to a developer/investor can happen within days or weeks.
Consummating a buyout through the maze of Federal, State, County and Local government agencies can take years.
Federal funding is slow, inflexible, and extremely complex to manage effectively and efficiently.
At the current closing rate, it would take nearly 60 years to buy out the 7,000 habitable structures in Houston floodways, says the study. But Houston-area realtors sell that many homes in a typical MONTH, according to the Greater Houston Partnership! Even in the middle of a pandemic.
“This is a No Brainer”
So one of the big reasons people are reluctant to be bought out is speed. Their lives have just been destroyed in a flood. They need a place to live. Then along comes the government saying, “Let me buy you out. I’ll get you your money in 2-3 years. Or you can just repair your home for the fortieth time and we’ll pay for it immediately.” This is a no-brainer, say the authors.
How hard are buyouts? The authors claim that “As of January 2020, HCFCD has used $3 million out of a $10 million bucket of federal funding allocated to the City for flood events that occurred in 2015.”
Barriers Beyond Slowness
But degree of difficulty and process slowness aren’t the only reasons people shun buyouts.
People get attached to neighbors and neighborhoods.
They may have family living nearby.
There may be a shortage of affordable housing elsewhere.
Alternative housing may be farther from their work.
They may want to stay within a school system.
Goals: Slow Inflow, Speed Outflow
The authors define two goals. They say we need to:
All of these recommendations are solid and, to a large degree, self-explanatory. They are hard to quibble with if you are trying to improve a process.
Incremental Improvements vs. New Concept
The authors never really address, however, whether incremental improvements will achieve the stated goals. Or whether we need to nuke the process and start over with a revolutionary, new concept.
As I read this study, I kept wondering what Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk would recommend. That’s a pretty steep burden to impose on grad students. But we shouldn’t forget that Fred Smith had the idea for Fedex while still a student at Yale.
Each of those people made the world a better place by designing new products or services that leapfrogged incremental improvements in existing systems and made the old way obsolete.
Inside-the-Box Thinking for an Outside-the-Box Problem
Insi-e the-box thinking will certainly produce incremental improvements. But in the estimated time it will take government to buy out 7,000 homes, Houston realtors will sell more than 5 million. That’s 70,000% better. Which would you rather have in your employ?
So I would ask these questions. What if you:
Privatized this process?
Offered flood victims an “instantaneous home SWAP” as they were ripping out sheetrock?
Made flood insurance reflect its true cost?
If ever there was a need for “business process re-engineering,” this is it.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/14/2020 with appreciation and admiration for Erica Vilay and Phil Pollman
1050 Days since Hurricane Harvey
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20200627-RJR_0059-1.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=18001200adminadmin2020-07-14 18:18:182020-07-14 20:23:45New Harvard Study Examines Barriers to Buyouts; Will Process Improvements Be Enough?
In a court document filed today, Perry Homes LLC has answered Elm Grove flood victims and says the damages suffered by flood victims were their own fault.
Last month, lawyers for flood victims named Perry Homes LLC as an additional defendant. (Previously, only Perry’s subsidiaries and contractors had been named as defendants.)
Perry Homes is asking the Court to enter a judgment and let the Plaintiffs take nothing. The company claims plaintiffs’ allegations are not true and has issued a general denial.
In addition, Perry claims that:
Plaintiffs’ damages are a result of pre-existing conditions.
Damages resulted from an act of God.
Damages resulted from independent causes for which Defendant is not legally responsible
Damages were caused by acts, omissions, or negligence of third parties over which Defendant had no control
Plaintiffs shared the fault and therefore Perry shouldn’t be held wholly responsible.
Plaintiffs claims should be barred because Perry acted with care and complied with all laws.
Plaintiffs’ claims should be barred because plaintiffs somehow failed to mitigate their own damages (presumably decades before the damages occurred).
Plaintiffs have not fulfilled all conditions necessary to maintain the lawsuit.
Plaintiffs’ recovery, if any, should be subject to the one-satisfaction rule. (Under Texas law, the one-satisfaction rule states that a plaintiffs can only recover damages once. For instance they can’t recover total damages from Perry and then again from LJA Engineering, which was also named as an additional defendant).
Plaintiffs’ claim for pre-judgment interest is limited by the dates and amounts set forth in Chapter 304 of the Texas Finance Code. (The law specifies that the prejudgment interest rate is equal to the post-judgment interest rate applicable at the time of judgment. It also specifies that interest may not compound and when interest charges may start.)
Again, even if they are at fault, Perry should not be fined for exemplary or punitive damages. Exemplary and punitive damages, they claim, violate:
The Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution
Article 1, Sections 3 and 19 of the Texas Constitution
Due process and equal protection under the law
In regard to the last point, Perry Homes makes no mention of the laws that allow exemplary or punitive damages. Nor do they reference cases that point to standards of proof for exemplary or punitive damages.
Pleads “Further and In the Alternative” Thirteen Times
The lack of specificity in Perry Homes’ filing makes it difficult to decipher what the claims actually mean. However, Perry uses the phrase, “Pleading further, and in the alternative, and without waiving the foregoing…” 13 times. Basically that means, “If the judge or jury won’t buy X, we still reserve the right to plead Y.”
This is more than a shotgun defense; it’s a blunderbuss defense. But why would lawyers who get paid $1000/hour want to get to the point, tip their hand, or limit their client’s options?
Victim Blaming At Its Finest
There’s an undercurrent of victim blaming in much of Perry Homes’ points.
Perry subsidiaries have previously claimed that many Elm Grove homes were in the floodplain. Claiming victims should have somehow prevented flooding in homes that were built 40 years earlier – when they never flooded until Perry clearcut land immediately upstream from them – is the height of chutzpah.
I use that term in the sense of “brazenness” or “audacity.”
It’s like pleading that the shooting victim was at fault because he failed to get out of the way of the gunshot.
It ignores the fact that someone pulled a trigger. Collectively, Perry, its subsidiaries and contractors violated Section 9.2 of the Montgomery County Drainage Criteria Manual.
Section 9.2 states that “Pursuant to the official policy for Montgomery County, development will not be allowed in a manner which will increase the frequency or severity of flooding in areas that are currently subject to flooding or which will cause areas to flood which were not previously subject to flooding.”
Perry Homes’ victim blaming shows how Perry now thinks. Their bizarre logic – and the hollow claim that they followed all laws – explain a lot about why Elm Grove flooded. Perry today is a far cry from the company that Bob Perry founded in 1968.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/13/2020
1049 Days since Hurricane Harvey and 298 since Imelda
The thoughts expressed in this post represent opinions on matters of public concern and safety. They are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the Anti-SLAPP Statute of the Great State of Texas.
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Elm-Grove-9.19_68.jpg?fit=1500%2C1000&ssl=110001500adminadmin2020-07-13 16:51:432020-07-13 18:49:45Perry Homes Blames Elm Grove Flood Victims
Worth Fighting For
Almost 40 years ago, when I moved to Houston, I fell in love with the extraordinary beauty of this City. And nowhere in Houston is more beautiful than the Lake Houston Area. The pictures below show why it’s worth fighting for.
Nature in the Lake Houston Area isn’t a place you go to visit. You don’t have to drive or fly to it. It’s all around you. Step out your back door and you’re already there. You’re breathing it. You’re being it.
Harvey Was an Eye Opener
Right up until Hurricane Harvey, I felt, on balance, this was the most perfect place in America to raise my family. Houston offers career opportunities found in few other cities. And the Lake Houston Area, in particular, offers the things my family and I value.
Harvey didn’t change my mind about those things. But it did open my eyes to some things I should have paid closer attention to. All around us, that perfect environment was quietly and steadily being eroded for decades.
It’s not gone. But it is threatened. Every day. More than a thousand other posts on this web site amply chronicle those threats. I won’t dwell on them here. Nor will I dwell on how “the greatest flood ever” kept being replaced by the new “greatest flood ever.”
What We Need to Fight For
I would like, instead, to share several images that show it’s not too late to preserve what we have. But to do that, we have to fight for it.
We need to fight for:
Why We Need to Fight
I took all of the pictures below in the last three months. They show what we need to save. All were shot inside America’s fourth largest city, which makes them even more unique.
Please join the fight. There’s another legislative session starting in six months.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/15/2020
1051 Days since Hurricane Harvey
New Harvard Study Examines Barriers to Buyouts; Will Process Improvements Be Enough?
How do we break the process of building in floodways and then repairing flooded homes with taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance as many as forty times?
A 66-page study by Erica Vilay and Phil Pollman, two candidates for Masters Degrees in Public Policy from Harvard, examines the broken buyout process for flooded homes in Houston floodways. The study also makes recommendations to improve the process. But they won’t revolutionize it. And that may be what this process needs.
Study Expressly Prepared for City of Houston
Prepared for the City of Houston’s Offices of Recovery and Resilience, the paper is titled “Floodway Buyout Strategy for a Resilient Houston: A Systems Approach for Breaking the Dangerous and Expensive Cycle of Rebuilding in the Floodway.”
The merit in this study is that it takes a holistic view of buyouts and examines them as one of many alternatives available to flood victims living in floodways. From the public’s perspective, buyouts have unquestionable and compelling safety and financial benefits.
Speedier Options Available to People In Time of Need
But the process is slow. People have options. And, according to the study, they almost always prefer those other options. In fact, the rate of buyouts is so slow that it will take the City 60 years to meet its 10-year objective, claim the authors.
Incentives Favor Rebuilding, Not Buyouts
Vilay and Pollman examine the reasons. The incentives, they say, all favor rebuilding or selling to developers rather than accepting government buyouts.
“This is a No Brainer”
So one of the big reasons people are reluctant to be bought out is speed. Their lives have just been destroyed in a flood. They need a place to live. Then along comes the government saying, “Let me buy you out. I’ll get you your money in 2-3 years. Or you can just repair your home for the fortieth time and we’ll pay for it immediately.” This is a no-brainer, say the authors.
How hard are buyouts? The authors claim that “As of January 2020, HCFCD has used $3 million out of a $10 million bucket of federal funding allocated to the City for flood events that occurred in 2015.”
Barriers Beyond Slowness
But degree of difficulty and process slowness aren’t the only reasons people shun buyouts.
Goals: Slow Inflow, Speed Outflow
The authors define two goals. They say we need to:
Process Improvement Recommendations
They then turn their attention to solving these problems and present 13 “sequenced” recommendations. See below.
All of these recommendations are solid and, to a large degree, self-explanatory. They are hard to quibble with if you are trying to improve a process.
Incremental Improvements vs. New Concept
The authors never really address, however, whether incremental improvements will achieve the stated goals. Or whether we need to nuke the process and start over with a revolutionary, new concept.
As I read this study, I kept wondering what Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk would recommend. That’s a pretty steep burden to impose on grad students. But we shouldn’t forget that Fred Smith had the idea for Fedex while still a student at Yale.
Each of those people made the world a better place by designing new products or services that leapfrogged incremental improvements in existing systems and made the old way obsolete.
Inside-the-Box Thinking for an Outside-the-Box Problem
Insi-e the-box thinking will certainly produce incremental improvements. But in the estimated time it will take government to buy out 7,000 homes, Houston realtors will sell more than 5 million. That’s 70,000% better. Which would you rather have in your employ?
So I would ask these questions. What if you:
If ever there was a need for “business process re-engineering,” this is it.
To read the complete Harvard study, click here.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/14/2020 with appreciation and admiration for Erica Vilay and Phil Pollman
1050 Days since Hurricane Harvey
Perry Homes Blames Elm Grove Flood Victims
In a court document filed today, Perry Homes LLC has answered Elm Grove flood victims and says the damages suffered by flood victims were their own fault.
Last month, lawyers for flood victims named Perry Homes LLC as an additional defendant. (Previously, only Perry’s subsidiaries and contractors had been named as defendants.)
Today, Perry Homes filed its “original answer” to the defendants’ claims in Harris County’s 234th Judicial District Court. Perry’s answer is anything but original. Not one of the twenty “cut and paste” defenses mentions anything specific to the case. And many blame the victims for their own damages.
Perry Homes Asserts Claims Not True
Perry Homes is asking the Court to enter a judgment and let the Plaintiffs take nothing. The company claims plaintiffs’ allegations are not true and has issued a general denial.
In addition, Perry claims that:
In regard to the last point, Perry Homes makes no mention of the laws that allow exemplary or punitive damages. Nor do they reference cases that point to standards of proof for exemplary or punitive damages.
For the complete text of Perry Homes’ “Original Answer,” click here.
Pleads “Further and In the Alternative” Thirteen Times
The lack of specificity in Perry Homes’ filing makes it difficult to decipher what the claims actually mean. However, Perry uses the phrase, “Pleading further, and in the alternative, and without waiving the foregoing…” 13 times. Basically that means, “If the judge or jury won’t buy X, we still reserve the right to plead Y.”
This is more than a shotgun defense; it’s a blunderbuss defense. But why would lawyers who get paid $1000/hour want to get to the point, tip their hand, or limit their client’s options?
Victim Blaming At Its Finest
There’s an undercurrent of victim blaming in much of Perry Homes’ points.
Perry subsidiaries have previously claimed that many Elm Grove homes were in the floodplain. Claiming victims should have somehow prevented flooding in homes that were built 40 years earlier – when they never flooded until Perry clearcut land immediately upstream from them – is the height of chutzpah.
I use that term in the sense of “brazenness” or “audacity.”
It ignores the fact that someone pulled a trigger. Collectively, Perry, its subsidiaries and contractors violated Section 9.2 of the Montgomery County Drainage Criteria Manual.
Section 9.2 states that “Pursuant to the official policy for Montgomery County, development will not be allowed in a manner which will increase the frequency or severity of flooding in areas that are currently subject to flooding or which will cause areas to flood which were not previously subject to flooding.”
Perry Homes’ victim blaming shows how Perry now thinks. Their bizarre logic – and the hollow claim that they followed all laws – explain a lot about why Elm Grove flooded. Perry today is a far cry from the company that Bob Perry founded in 1968.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/13/2020
1049 Days since Hurricane Harvey and 298 since Imelda
The thoughts expressed in this post represent opinions on matters of public concern and safety. They are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the Anti-SLAPP Statute of the Great State of Texas.