Doris Brown’s home in Scenic Woods, a neighborhood in northeast Houston, flooded four years ago during Hurricane Harvey when water rose over the banks of Halls Bayou. In the aftermath, local officials promised to build much-needed flood control infrastructure in the neighborhood, but the projects didn’t get built in time to stop Brown’s house from flooding again two years later in 2019, during Tropical Storm Imelda. In 2020, she finally finished repairing her home from Harvey damage, but this spring, when heavy rains hung over the city, it flooded again. Now, if a hurricane forms in the Gulf of Mexico and barrels towards Texas, Brown’s home, and others in her neighborhood, will likely flood for the fourth time. No new flood control projects have been built along the bayou since Harvey hit in 2017.
The Harris County Flood Control District (HCFCD) has been promising detention ponds and drainage improvement projects since 2019, when voters approved a historic $2.5 billion bond fund to build such infrastructure. The county adopted equity principles that suggested that low-income neighborhoods, which have been under-resourced for decades, should be prioritized in funding distribution. Districts along Halls Bayou, some of Houston’s poorest neighborhoods and predominantly Black and Latinx, lack even the most basic infrastructure: Instead of concrete culverts, they have grassy ditches to funnel rainwater into storm sewers. The ditches often become clogged, causing streets to flood during heavy rainstorms. When residents call 311, no one comes out to clear the ditches. A few years ago, tired of waiting for someone else to clean up the mess, Brown co-founded an advocacy group called Northeast Action Collective and volunteers from the group clean out the ditches themselves. “They took our tax money,” Brown says. “But the city never had enough money for our neighborhood.”
Along Halls Bayou, HCFCD faces a $272 million shortfall for the projects it was supposed to build with the bond money from local taxes. Despite the equity principles adopted by the county, most of the bond money has already been spent in wealthier parts of the city, like River Oaks, where million-dollar homes overlook Buffalo Bayou. To make up for the deficit, Harris County banked on money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): a $4.3 billion federal fund created in 2018 for disaster recovery, including mitigation projects, for areas affected by Hurricane Harvey. HCFCD’s projects were eligible for some of that money, and the state’s General Land Office (GLO) was charged with distributing those funds. But by and large, those funds never made it to low-income communities of color that needed it most.
