The dirty side of Nicholas – Flooding Brays Bayou

I went online to see which side of Tropical Depression Nicholas was going to hit Houston on. As of this moment, it looks that it will be to the west of Houston, which places us on the “Dirty side” of the storm.

Will part of our neighborhood flood again, only time will tell, but Braeburn Glen is uniquely situated. See the map below as to why our neighborhood and a few surrounding neighborhoods are prone to flooding.

The red lines indicate stormwater from the north side of Brays Bayou that is diverted to Brays. The neighborhoods to the north of the Glen all the way to Westpark don’t flood thanks to us flooding. For another article, the desire to stop street flooding by increasing the size of the storm sewers would be devesting for those of us that live along Brays Bayou.

What we have is a lot of water converging on a small area that encompasses the Glen. The line on the south side is Keegans Bayou. The county and the city promised that they would help prevent flooding. They may have good intentions, but they certainly have not kept their promise. All this water is the reason that Meyerland also floods quite often.

Those two green spaces are Golf Courses. They would make excellent areas for retention ponds and parks a la Arthur Storey Park. But the Harris County Commissioners and the Mayor of Houston are still dealing with intent. From a very recent article in the Houston Chronicle. Mayor Turner had the following to say,

In the four years since Hurricane Harvey, I’m proud to say the city has invested $780 million in infrastructure repairs from local funding for fully completed projects. More than just rebuilding the properties that were destroyed, the funds are directed towards communities and people. We’re improving local drainage infrastructure, creating new regional detention areas and investing more than $500 million in capital improvement projects that focus on drainage. We are investing $50 million in state grant funds, supplementing over $120 million of previous federal and state grant funds, for additional dredging of Lake Houston. We have dedicated $34.7 million to projects identified as a priority by our Storm Water Action Team, with 142 total projects constructed by the end of this fiscal year. The city has acquired ten properties totaling 357.6 acres of new detention at the cost of $70.5 million. Additionally, the city has elevated more than 260 homes since Harvey through FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance program, and many more homes are planned as annual funding becomes available.

Source

Harris County Commissioners also promised us flood relief, but the money always seems to go to the rich areas first.

The map implied that construction had started on projects that the County did not have enough money to finish, especially the ones in yellow and red below. Source

We have several people that have lived here in Braeburn Glen since it was created. One lady moved into the neighborhood, and that year, 1958, her house flooded. She was telling me that they had to go out by boat. In 2017 during Hurricane Harvey, she was also taken out by boat. But she told me that she would not move. I go by her house several times a week to make sure that everything is fine. She has my phone number in case she needs help.

Below is a map indicating how high Brays Bayou has gotten over the years. Source

I live on the south side of Brays Bayou, and Harvey was the first time that my house flooded. I got about ten inches of water. Ten inches of water can cause a lot of damage.

The northside of Brays Bayou in Braeburn Glen flooded three times in two years.

Memorial Day Flood

The Houston City Council approved Wednesday an agreement with the Harris County Flood Control District to provide it with up to $10.6 million in federal funding it has at its disposal so that the District buys out about 57 houses that were flooded during the Memorial Day flood of 2015.

The homes are located in the neighborhoods of Braeburn Glen, Glenburnie and Cashiola, and Langwood.

Source

Deja Vu All Over Again – 2016 Flood

Yesterday, floods proved to be déjà vu all over again for too many of our neighborhoods in Southwest Houston. I was fortunate enough to be able to drive around Monday to assess damage and speak with a few constituents.

Unfortunately, our neighbors in Larkwood, Bonham Acres, Braeburn Valley, Braeburn Glen, and Braeburn Valley West, too many of whom were impacted by the Memorial Day 2015 floods, got a double dose of it this time. While we can’t control the weather, we can help each other recover.

The City of Houston has set up houstonrecovers.org as ground central for finding answers to any questions regarding flooding, permitting, volunteering, and other information regarding the flood.

Source

Houston to fund buyouts in three neighborhoods – Hurricane Harvey

The city typically leaves buyouts to the Harris County Flood Control District and, in fact, the measure approved by the council would send $10.7 million to the district to pay for the purchases, estimated at about $175,000 per property.

Houston has not had any in-house staff devoted to the issue in recent memory, but Hurricane Harvey has spurred city officials to acknowledge the need to remove more flood-prone residences from harm’s way, leading to Wednesday’s vote to fund voluntary buyouts in three working-class neighborhoods. Harris County Commissioners Court approved the deal earlier this month.

…

The dollars approved by the council Wednesday are federal funds the city received after two floods in 2015, and are earmarked for areas that suffered in those storms, Turner said. City data show each area also suffered significant damage during Harvey.

The neighborhoods are:

Braeburn Glen, which sits on the northern bank of Brays Bayou between the Southwest Freeway to the west and South Gessner to the east. The city estimates nearly 400 homes there flooded when Harvey hit.

Source

For some, buyouts are a lifeline, but for others, they represent a loss of community and limited options to move on.

In the days and weeks after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston, 4,000 people signed up to have their homes bought out by Harris County. Of those 4,000, approximately 1,000 met the Harris County Flood Control District’s eligibility requirements. Now, nearly one year later, only a dozen or so have actually finished the long and arduous process.

If the buyout process seems complicated, it’s because it is. Most post-disaster buyouts are funded by grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that start trickling down from the federal government in the months and even years after a natural disaster like Harvey. Most homeowners don’t see the money until 12-24 months after they volunteer for a buyout program.

During those months, homeowners eligible for buyouts are shuffled between agencies such as the HCFCD, Harris County Community Services Department and the Real Property Division of the county’s Engineering Department. To be eligible, a homeowner must have flood insurance and live in an area that’s “hopelessly deep” in the floodplain; the source of flooding must be a bayou or one of its tributaries. Buyouts are used when other methods of flood mitigation — say, infrastructure improvements or elevating houses — aren’t possible or cost effective. Post-Harvey, the myriad of agencies involved have designated 70 priority areas, including Greenspoint, Northeast Houston, Independence Heights, Inwood and Braeburn Glen.

A barrage of inspectors, appraisers and other county employees go through every house to verify eligibility, income and pre-storm home value. According to data from ProPublica, buyouts from Hurricanes Ike and Rita were still happening six years after the storms.

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But for low-income minority communities, which historically struggle more to recover from disasters, buyouts can be especially promising — and especially difficult to execute.

In Independence Heights, for example, community organizers are encouraging their neighbors to resist buyout offers. As the first African-American founded city in Texas, which was later annexed by the City of Houston, many homeowners here value historical preservation and property ownership above the county’s cost-benefit analysis. Though the area has flooded multiple times in the past decade, only a dozen homes have been bought out by the Flood Control District since 2002.

Housing advocates and experts say that a truly equitable buyout plan involves a lot more than just a pre-storm value offer. They want to see financial incentives, an increase in affordable housing stock and cultural sensitivity.

Financially, Harris County’s buyout program had been steadily improving. An analysis of the ProPublica data and historic home values from Zillow shows that houses in the zip code most frequently bought out after Tropical Storm Allison were purchased for nearly $15,000 less than the median home value in that area. After Hurricane Ike, houses in that same zip code were purchased for $31,000 more than the neighborhood’s median home value.

HCFCD offers homeowners up to $31,000 on top of pre-storm home value to cover the cost of a comparable home in a nicer, less flood-prone area;

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“You’re letting people lay slabs of concrete in certain places but now you want to make our neighborhood green space?” said Tanya Debose, who heads the Independence Heights Redevelopment Council. “So where are these people going to live? The amount of money you’re going to give them isn’t going to be enough to buy a home within the city limits and not owe anything on it, like they do now.”

The median purchase price of those twelve homes previously bought out in Independence Heights is less than $74,000.

When asked if there was any sort of buyout program that could be effective and sensitive in neighborhoods like Independence Heights, Debose gave a firm no. She views it as “the easy way out” — it’s cost effective for the county to buy out lower-priced properties, but it can come at the expense of homeowners often with nowhere else to go.

Source

Stop the buyouts in Braeburn Glen and buy those two golf courses

Not only will it help Braeburn Glen but many of the neighborhoods downstream.

FEMA Interactive map, flood zones