The Houston flooding isn’t even over yet, and planners are already blaming it on urban sprawl. That’s absurd: if 30 to 50 inches of rain fell on New York City, Los Angeles, or anywhere else over a weekend, they would have flooded too.
The Antiplanner is not an expert on hydrology, but I do know a couple of basic principles. First, the way to minimize flooding is to minimize the percentage of each acre of land that is rendered impermeable by development. Second, high-density development leads to a higher percentage of land that is impermeable. This means that sprawl is a natural defense against flooding.
Planners would like you to believe that concentrating development on a smaller land base, even if that land is made mostly impermeable, is better because more land is left permeable. But all that does is concentrate the flooding in the developed area.
For example, some high-density areas are 90 percent or more impermeable, while many suburbs are only about 10 percent impermeable. The difference between 0 percent and 10 percent is small enough that the development won’t contribute much to flooding. Thus, if all development were at low densities, the flood problem would be a lot smaller than if all were at high densities. Given that there are 4.5 million people in the Houston area, attempting to compact those people in a much smaller area would still leave hundreds of square miles of impermeable and flood-prone land.
This doesn’t mean that low-density development is immune to flooding. If it rains enough, the ground won’t be able to absorb it all no matter how much is permeable. Certainly some low lands are more susceptible to flooding. The question Houston will have to ask as it contemplates new flood-zone policies is: who is responsible for making land-use decisions in flood-prone areas: the landowners or some government overseer?
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In many parts of the United States, governments have attempted to limit development in flood zones. This takes away property rights from landowners and becomes an inviting tool for NIMBYs who want to stop development near their homes.
Houston has more-or-less decided that the decision to build should be between the landowner and their insurance company, if they have one. If someone wants a loan from a bank to build or buy a home or other structure in a flood-prone area, the bank will require them to get insurance. Thus, the only uninsured people will be those who own their properties without any mortgages. There may be a lot of people like that, but so long as they are aware of the risk, it should be their decision.
Of course, some will argue that now other people are forced to help pay for the rescue and care of flood victims and perhaps even help them rebuild, assuming Congress or the Texas legislature decides to provide flood relief. To account for this, I suggest that the city of Houston should, at most, require people who build on their own property in flood zones buy flood insurance.
One hundred and thirty years ago, President Grover Cleveland would have vetoed any attempt by Congress to provide federal aid to Texas flood victims. If members of Congress wanted to provide assistance, he would have said, they were welcome to do so out of their own pockets. But they did not have the constitutional right to provide that assistance out of other taxpayers’ pockets. That’s a useful attitude that we can learn from today.
I checked the article out. Several problems. It says the wetlands absorb the runoff/rainwater and that the loss of 30% of the wetlands is contributing to the flooding. Well, if the wetlands already have standing water like the swamps and bayous of Houston do, it won’t be absorbing any water, it might as well already be impervious ground cover. All runoff into standing water just raises the level of the standing water.
Another problem is the “belief” in 500 year floods. Houston hasn’t been inhabited for 1000 years so the 500 year flood predictions are not statistical at all. There may be math behind them on size, but the 500 year part is really a guess.
And of course, the whole threat of Houston being sited next to a “warming ocean”. Parts of Houston used to be sinking…. not the Gulf of Mexico rising. When global warming climatologists can predict weather well enough to schedule their conferences around blizzards maybe I’ll start listening to their claims. No hockey stick, bad science.
Finally, I do agree that if we moved everyone in Houston into multifamily housing in buildings big enough to require elevators and move all retail into buildings dense enough to require parking garages underneath, then the flood wouldn’t have been nearly this bad. But to do that, because of the expense of construction, everything would be smaller and who wants to live like that when you can go to any other city in Texas and own your own single family detached?
The article is a ridiculous critique, and an example of the kind of “top down” thinking associated with tyranny. The point of the government is to serve the people, the power of free market capitalism is to give the people what they are willing to pay for. The solution for Houston is more like the government providing flood mapping information to home purchasers, and increasing the code requirements for “slab above grade” requirements in new home construction.
I guess if Godzilla rose out of the Gulf of Mexico and attacked Houston maybe someone would admit that “Sprawl saved Houston” from being decimated by the monster.
The 1 in 100, 1 in 500 flood thing has never been correct. Humans can not properly assess the probability of rare events. Once you start going out that far, it’s a guess. It’s not an educated guess. Because if you were educated, if one understood rare events, they would know that no value should be made since it’s unknown.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/TAS.pdf
If everyone was forced to live in a small area, the potential for mass deaths increases substantially.
You would be foolish to assume that government planners know where everyone should live to avoid problems when a major storm strikes. During Sandy, large sections of NYC were underwater although they were designated by the federal government as being outside of any flood zone. And you can guarantee that no government planners or flood people lost their jobs or even received any punishment for people losing their homes or dying,
Since the federal government is spending many billions of dollars to REBUILD neighborhoods BELOW SEA LEVEL in New Orleans, I don’t see any fair arguments for any restrictions on Houston.
I have had hydrology courses and their is science and math behind the 100 year flood calculations once your have 20-50 years of data. Remember that even if Houston has 5 100-year floods in 10 years, many other areas of Texas haven’t had any 100 year floods in 100 years. A 500-year flood and 1000-year flood are just a planning number because those are just very rare catastrophic events that you can’t count on even having in recorded history.
Houston had so much rain that the permeability issue is irrelevant. That much water is not going to seep into the ground in hours or days.
Live on a house boat then, if in such a flood prone area :$