Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017 – eight years ago now – in Houston. Torrential rain poured down on the Bayou City, leading to catastrophic flooding. At least 100 people died.
Much talk followed about development in floodplains and how to keep people safe. But today in the Houston area, one out of every five homes is being built in a flood-prone area.
A Houston Chronicle analysis found five companies have each built more than 700 homes in official flood zones.
Caroline Ghisolfi, the deputy data editor for the Houston Chronicle, said she identified 65,000 properties in floodplains across Harris, Montgomery, Fort Bend, Galveston, and Brazoria counties.
“When we zoom in to just residential — multifamily homes, single-family homes — we have over 57,000 properties. And that’s since 2017, so in the last seven years,” she said. “Half of those are in a 100-year floodplain or in floodways. That means that they have a 1% chance of flooding in a year, or they directly touch rivers, bayous and the adjacent land that really is where the water flows most strongly during storms.”
Ghisolfi said a very small group of homebuilders is leading the way.
“A few names stood out. Lennar Homes, about 1,400 properties since 2017, a fourth of all of the new construction that they did happened in floodplains in these high-risk areas,” she said. “Meritage Homes, we found about 850 of their properties. D.R. Horton. Some of these names might sound familiar, and that’s because they are some of the largest builders in the U.S.”
Yilun Cheng, an investigative reporter at the Chronicle, said one issue is that development restrictions in Texas related to flooding are often inconsistent.
“There usually are some restrictions on where you can build and what mitigation measures you’d have to implement to make sure the development doesn’t worsen flooding in downstream neighborhoods,” she said. “But experts said these rules are based on outdated data and need to be stricter. Another problem is Texas doesn’t have a statewide flood building code. So it’s really up to each city or county to decide on their own regulations. Some are strict, others not too much.”
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This patchwork of regulations has really left large parts of the Houston region exposed, Cheng said.
“Another problem is floodwater doesn’t follow city or county lines,” she said. “So if you have a lot of floodplain construction happening in Montgomery County, for example, which we do, that can cause flooding in Harris County as well.”
There are rules about what developers must disclose to homebuyers when it comes to flood risk. But Cheng said there are limitations to those disclosures, too.
“Families who buy into these neighborhoods could potentially face rising insurance costs, sinking property values, and just the constant worry that their biggest investment might go underwater in the next big storm,” she said.
“In Texas, sellers are required to disclose flood risk, but the problem is if you’re an investor flipping a house, and you’ve only owned the house for a short amount of time, you’re only required to tell the buyers what you know during that short amount of time. So it’s really hard for buyers to piece together the full flood.”
However, Cheng said one problem is the Houston area has a lot of land in high-risk flood zones.
“In the Houston region, we’re simply running out of easy, dry land to build on. And the demand for housing keeps climbing. So developers are being pushed further out, and much of that land happens to be flood-prone,” she said. “And then there’s also the cultural piece. Texas has a very strong private property ethos. People don’t like the idea of the government telling them what they can or can’t do with their land.”
Ghisolfi said this trend of development in flood zones has been steady since Harvey in 2017.
“We don’t see a diminishing number of these homes propping up in high-risk areas. What that means is that big storms like Hurricane Harvey aren’t discouraging this development,” she said. “Storms really are intensifying in strength and in frequency, and yet we are not changing our patterns. We are not changing in the way that we are approaching this problem. And that is reason for concern.”
