Racism Is Preventing People of Color in Houston from Rebuilding Post-Harvey

“Hurricanes don’t care if you’re rich, poor, white or black — but that doesn’t mean that every person is equally vulnerable to a storm.”

Excuse me for borrowing a lede from another journalist, in this case Jeremy Deaton in a 2017 story for Think Progress, but Deaton perfectly encapsulates what we are trying to do here at WMC Climate: tell the stories of how vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected by climate change.

And it’s not just in developing countries that people suffer excessively as the planet warms. Right here in the United States there is a stunning recent example of bigotry within the fight against climate change.

After Hurricane Harvey ravaged southeast Texas in 2017 — flooding about 100,000 homes with 30 inches of water and causing $16 billion in damage — the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) allocated billions of dollars to help recovery efforts in flooded areas, which were overwhelmingly inhabited by low-income Black and Latino residents. But the intentions of the grant were thwarted by the Texas state government.

The state instead chose to use this money only partly for the designated areas. It also selected its own preferred, less impacted neighborhoods to receive the funds — smaller areas that were farther inland, as far as 200 miles from the Gulf. These neighborhoods were predominantly wealthy and white.

HUD found that the Hurricane Harvey State Mitigation Competition, a state-run grant program meant to utilize the federal funds, had “discriminated on the basis of race and national origin through the use of scoring criteria that substantially disadvantaged Black and Hispanic residents.”

A March letter from HUD to the state reads: “The Department finds that the design and operation of the Competition discriminated on the basis of race and national origin. GLO utilized two scoring criteria that substantially and predictably disadvantaged minority residents, with particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents.” GLO is the Texas General Land Office’s design and operation of the Hurricane Harvey competition.

HUD concluded that the competition for grants “failed to comply” with its regulation that prohibits a recipient from utilizing criteria that has the effect of “subjecting persons to discrimination.”

The redistribution of money in this case reflects a long history of racism in the area, a history that made people of color more vulnerable to disasters in the first place.

Drainage in Houston's lower-income neighborhoods is insufficient when it comes to dealing with big storms, let alone one like Hurricane Harvey, which was a Category 4 storm. Inadequate open drainage ditches that date back to the 1930s, rather than modern piping and gutters, are predominant in the city’s majority minority communities. These areas contain 88 percent of Houston’s overall drainage ditch total, according to the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service.

“The city of Houston has been living on the cheap by never retroactively looking at these neighborhoods of color and addressing the infrastructure problems,” said John Henneberger, co-director of the service.

Infuriated as residents are — people who have lost everything and have not had the money to rebuild — there is little they can do at the moment. For now, the state is appealing to HUD to revisit its findings.