In Billy Guevara's neighborhood on the northeast side of Houston, people get nervous when it rains. Old ditches strain under the deluge of a Gulf storm, and mud and water fill the streets. Guevara, a writer who is blind, once had a seeing-eye dog that would navigate around the ankle-deep puddles and lingering muck. "It became unsafe because I ended up having to walk almost in the middle of the street," he said. "It stays there for days."
Guevara is a member of the Northeast Action Collective, a community group pushing the city and Harris County for equitable investments in flood control. He says drainage in his neighborhood of Lakewood is outdated: "It cannot handle the type of rain that we see now." When Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, homes across many of northeast Houston's Black and Hispanic neighborhoods flooded, swamped under 30 inches of rain in what was the country's costliest disaster that year. Under the rush of water, one of the walls in Guevara's home began to bulge out.
