The Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium has released its second report. This one addresses the City’s dwindling supply of affordable, multi-family housing, 26 percent of which lie within a currently mapped floodplain and are vulnerable to future flood events. 

Like the group’s first report which addressed the causes of flooding watershed by watershed throughout Houston, this is a true work of scholarship. Major contributors to the report include the University of Houston’s Community Design Resource Center, Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation Houston. The Cullen Foundation generously funded the report. Other major sponsors of the Consortium include the Houston Endowment,  Kinder Foundation, and  The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation.

Major Findings about Multi-family Housing

The report found:

• 165,000 multi-family units are vulnerable to flooding
• More than 475,000 people who live in these units often face multiple vulnerabilities.
• 45% of all households in Harris County are renters
• 57% of all households in the City of Houston rent
• Half of the renter households in Harris County spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing 
• The rising prices of rental units, coupled with the low incomes of many renting households, makes the search for safe and affordable housing a major challenge for many of Houston’s most vulnerable residents
  
• Between 1990 and 2017, 1,850 multi-family units were lost each year through demolition 
• Demolitions, renovations, and redevelopment of older apartment buildings are replacing lower-priced units with higher-priced ones 
• Updated floodplain maps will likely bring tens of thousands more of the region’s residents into areas of elevated risk
• The bulk of the new multi-family construction in the city and county is being built with higher-income renters in mind 
• Half of all affordable multi-family units are at risk of losing their affordability through the expiration of existing subsidies, demotion or upgrades.

Organized to Give Insight into Strategies

The combined risks of flooding and the accelerating loss of affordable multi-family housing across the City of Houston and Harris County point to the need to understand and consider strategies to address this crisis. The authors break it down into four major sections:

• Introduction and overview
• Risks and opportunities
• An overview of the study areas and case studies highlighting solutions that have helped in other parts of the country
• Policy and action considerations

Partial List of Policy Recommendations

In the policy and action considerations section, the report makes many recommendations to protect and support vulnerable families. Below, a partial list:

• Establish a housing trust fund for housing recovery
• Inventory available developable land outside of the floodway
• Establish a privately-funded strike fund to assist affordable housing developers and preserve existing affordable housing
• Establish a Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program to limit floodplain development
• Leverage Local housing Authority’s tax-exempt status to initiate projects
• Encourage limited equity cooperatives as an alternative for multi-family residences in need of repair or under bad ownership
• Encourage transit oriented development
• Create Opportunity Zones outside of floodplains.
• Encourage a community land trust model
• Bolster incentives to encourage development outside the floodplain
• Creating an eviction protection program.
• Expanding the number of housing choice vouchers and preventing discrimination against users. 
• Alerting residents of flood risk. 
• Implementing a more streamlined system of inspection and permitting that prioritizes rehabilitation of multi-family units. 

For More Information

The 108-page report is richly illustrated with maps and charts that give both policy makers and concerned residents hard information with which to build sound policy. It contains so much meat, it’s hard to summarize.

This is not light reading, but it will help illustrate the problems that half the people in the City and County face.

To download and read the full text, click here. Warning: 50 meg PDF.

One Wish…Rely Less on Statistics

My one wish after reading this? The authors should have used more photography to illustrate the problems; they over-rely on statistics in my opinion. Having done a fair amount of documentary photography myself, I understand how difficult this is. But until people have actually seen the living conditions many are forced to endure, they won’t truly understand the problem.

Years ago, I studied poverty in a Chicago neighborhood called Uptown from 1973-1977 – between the two OPEC oil embargoes. I was trying to understand the effect they had on people. Forty years later, I can’t remember a single statistic from those days. But I can’t forget the image below. This young, shoeless boy was fishing through trash cans looking for soda bottles to redeem so that he could get money to eat. To encourage recycling, soda bottles had a nickel deposit in those days. Behind him: the affordable multi-family housing where he lived.

Posted by Bob Rehak on March 31, 2019

579 Days since Hurricane Harvey