Houston-you do not have a planning problem (Sugar Land, Katy: how much, homes)

[bu2]

https://www.city-journal.org/html/do...ong-15604.html

Last August, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, causing massive flooding in the Houston area and likely becoming one of the most expensive disasters (current estimate: $81.5 billion) in U.S. history. In the aftermath, Houstonians rallied to rebuild and look after one another, but they did so with the echoes of a persistent chorus of criticism ringing in their ears: Houston, critics said, was partially to blame for what had happened.
Though some of the New York Times’s coverage, notably by Emily Badger, was fair-minded, much of it was full of selective reporting and bias. According to Michael Kimmelman, Houston struggled because it is not properly zoned and because it lacks the planning that one associates with cities like New York. “The very forces that pushed the city forward are threatening its way of life,” Kimmelman wrote. Kimmelman blames Houston’s notorious “sprawl,” underwritten, as one urbanist historian tells him, by “decentralization and anti-statism.”
The Times has a selective memory. New York is certainly zoned and planned, but it suffered $19 billion in damage from Superstorm Sandy, which dropped only a half-inch of rain. But Sandy’s storm surge flooded 51 square miles of New York and inundated 300,000 homes and 23,400 businesses—estimates that exclude the much-larger impacted area in the suburbs of New York City. “‘Smart growth’ plans didn’t prevent that,” noted the Wall Street Journal.
Higher density and zoning don’t guarantee a resilient infrastructure. New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was both dense and zoned, but this did not protect the city from devastation. In September, Hurricane Irma did considerable damage around residential towers and in downtown Miami. As Houston mayor Sylvester Turner put it: “Zoning wouldn’t have changed anything. We would have been a city with zoning that flooded....”

Article goes on to discuss what Houston has done to correct from various previous disasters.

[Dopo]

Wow, what a bunch of BS

Of course it's the city's fault for bad planning
now ..... anybody that thinks that zoning is the only thing a city does when it comes to "city planning" is an idiot.


https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...-flood/538251/

One problem is that people care about flooding, because it’s dramatic and catastrophic. They don’t care about stormwater management, which is where the real issue lies. Even if it takes weeks or months, after Harvey subsides, public interest will decay too. Debo notes that traffic policy is an easier urban planning problem for ordinary folk, because it happens every day.

So does stormwater—it just isn’t treated that way. Instead of looking for holistic answers, site-specific ones must be pursued instead. Rather than putting a straight channel through a subdivision, for example, Debo suggests designing one to meander through it, to decrease the velocity of the water as it exits.

The hardest part of managing urban flooding is reconciling it with Americans’ insistence that they can and should be able to live, work, and play anywhere. Waterborne transit was a key driver of urban development, and it’s inevitable that cities have grown where flooding is prevalent. But there are some regions that just shouldn’t become cities. “Parts of Houston in the floodway, parts of New Orleans submerged during Katrina, parts of Florida—these places never should have been developed in the first place,” Debo concludes. Add sea-level rise and climate-change superstorms, and something has to give.

[turf3]

The whole "Oh my god, Houston doesn't have zoning, those crazy Texans, it's the Wild West, pig farms next to million dollar mansions" is in my opinion largely a media construction of Easterners and Californians who are always ready to find something about Texas to exclaim or tut-tut about.

First of all, although there is not the classic "zoning", there are land use regulations.

Second, market forces prevent the "junkyard next to million dollar mansions" from happening - and furthermore, even though there is not city zoning, developments are completely free to, and do, impose restrictive covenants on which uses and types of construction are allowed.

Third, there are "anomalous" land uses all over the country that have either been grandfathered in, or allowed by variances. I live in a very upscale suburb where there's one guy who has a junkyard; and whenever the neighbors complain about it he points out that according to the grandfathered rules of his ownership, he has the right to put in a pig farm at any time - at which point the complaints about the junkyard end.

[ParaguaneroSwag]

All the great cities (New York City, Chicago, etc) were built without zoning and zoning wasn’t placed until after the city was already built. That’s the exact route Houston is going

[DTXman34]

Originally Posted by ParaguaneroSwag

All the great cities (New York City, Chicago, etc) were built without zoning and zoning wasn’t placed until after the city was already built. That’s the exact route Houston is going

They still had some form of planning. They didn't have insane land use regulations mandating a giant parking lot in front of a building or building setbacks from the sidewalk or street. Houston would look like those cities if it wasn't for the massive social engineering experiment that dehumanized our cities and made us slaves to a machine (aka car).

[ftbend06]

Lack of zoning is not responsible for what happened and planning doesn’t always mean zoning. I disagree with some points above about the market taking care of zoning, though. Someone bump this thread in 20 years to compare Sugar Land to unincorporated Houston/Katy area. That’s another debate. The market does take care of zoning issues most of the time but not always. It’s a matter of how much protection you want to have as a property owner. That is an individual thing and opinions vary.

There could have been some better planning but this was also an unheard of event. If something could have been better planned, it’s not building in the floodplain, building higher above the base flood elevation (or above the 500 yr flood elevation) and being more conservative about not having all these levee districts which are of course subject to failure in a 1000 year event because they are not designed for that.

But if you did all that there would not be near as many people here because it would be more expensive to build. BUT, cheap is also expensive. Pick your poison.

[Texyn]

This article has it all wrong. The argument isn't that more efficient planning would have prevented the flood and any associated effects, just that the impacts would have been much less severe. One aspect of this planning as it pertains to Houston would be urban high density, which Dopo alluded to; the environment the city was built in was never conducive to autocentric suburban sprawl.

At the same time, many of the outsiders that comment about Houston's flooding issues often aren't versed with the city's landscape and geography. And it shows.

[MLSFan]

they didn't pray hard enough for the hurricane to hit miami

[Dopo]

Perry’s pray-a-thon for rain, burned down the lost woods in Bastrop

[bu2]

Originally Posted by Texyn

This article has it all wrong. The argument isn't that more efficient planning would have prevented the flood and any associated effects, just that the impacts would have been much less severe. One aspect of this planning as it pertains to Houston would be urban high density, which Dopo alluded to; the environment the city was built in was never conducive to autocentric suburban sprawl.

At the same time, many of the outsiders that comment about Houston's flooding issues often aren't versed with the city's landscape and geography. And it shows.

Then why did NYC have worse flooding with Sandy despite a fraction of the rain Houston had?

And the article pointed out all that Houston has done to control flooding.