HOUSTON: FLOODING

Houston's freeways are not only monuments to white supremacism, they are also environmental disasters. As demonstrated by the flooding from Hurricane Harvey in 2017, freeways and urban sprawl have limited the city’s natural drainage capacity. The reason is simple: When concrete is poured over green space, the city loses capacity to absorb water. As hurricanes get more severe and more frequent due to climate change, flooding events like Harvey will happen more and more often.

From @natgeo: “When Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas in 2017, the neighborhood that suffered the worst flood damage was a section of southwest Houston where 49% of the residents are nonwhite.

When Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana in 2005, the damage was the most extensive in the region’s African American neighborhoods. Of the seven ZIP codes that suffered the costliest flood damage from Katrina, four of them had populations that were at least 75% black, government records show.

Flooding in the U.S. disproportionately harms African American neighborhoods. The concentration of flood damage in urban areas with large black populations may contrast to images of hurricanes hitting affluent coastal areas and riverine floods swamping rural, largely white communities.

But urban flooding and its disproportionate impact on minorities and low-income residents are becoming a growing concern as climate change intensifies floods. At the same time, urban development is creating more impervious surfaces in cities, and aging municipal sewer systems are overwhelmed by the increasing water.”