The arrival of Hurricane Beryl, which impacted southeastern Texas a month after a damaging derecho and heavy rain had already brought destructive winds and flooding to the Houston area, added urgency to ongoing efforts to increase equitable funding for flood mitigation infrastructure. Community advocates in Northeast Houston, including several NLIHC partners and members of the NLIHC-led Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC), have long pushed for such investments.
In an article in the Houston Chronicle, Dana Jones, whose house had continued to flood due to inadequate wastewater infrastructure in her neighborhood, explained that “at this point we’re just busy trying to survive… For years we’ve been talking to our leaders, talking to public works, talking to FEMA – it’s exhausting. It feels like we’ve been fighting for so long, and the city just doesn’t want to do anything.” Jones is a member of the Northeast Action Collective (NAC), which works with DHRC partners West Street Recovery and NLIHC state partner Texas Housers. Jones attended NLIHC’s DHR convening in Washington, D.C., last month.
Jones’s neighborhood has a series of roadside ditches that are meant to control flood water during heavy rains. While more affluent and majority white neighborhoods receive upgraded infrastructure, 80% of open ditch drainage systems in Houston are located in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods. West Street Recovery and NAC successfully pushed for the city to approve $20 million in 2023 and 2024 for drainage ditch widening and other improvements. “The main source of drainage infrastructure and equity in Houston comes from the difference in maintenance between open ditches and underground drainage,” said Alice Liu, co-director of communications, organizing and disaster preparedness for West Street Recovery in an article in Houston Landing. “The divide in the drainage system falls overwhelmingly along racial and class lines here.”
Despite this funding, changes have been slow to occur. In Dana Jones’s neighborhood, efforts to widen drainage ditches were impeded by Hurricane Beryl and indecision over ownership of the ditches. “For a while, the county and the city were arguing over whose responsibility it was,” Jones told the Houston Chronicle. “The city finally said they’d come out to deepen the ditches outside my house, but that was the week of the hurricane. I haven’t heard anything since.”
In the meantime, community organizations like West Street and NAC are working to at least meet the critical needs of neighborhood residents after disasters. The groups have organized a series of resiliency hubs throughout several neighborhoods for residents to find resources and assistance during times of need. These hubs were activated in response to Hurricane Beryl and offer a range of supplies, from first aid kits to batteries. In the week after the hurricane, one resident who hosts a resilience hub in her backyard said there was a steady stream of neighbors visiting to access assistance. “Community members have been calling me all day for supplies,” Johnson said. “I just say we have it here, you can come here. We have snacks, we have water, we have air conditioning. Take a second.”
NLIHC and the DHRC will continue to work to assist low-income households in Houston as they recover from Hurricane Beryl.
More information on NLIHC’s Disaster Housing Recovery, Research, and Resilience work is available here.