Watershed Texas

Midtown Square development on West Gray, Houston. This development doesn’t flood, and it doesn’t contribute to flooding. It is a high-interaction neighborhood that builds social capital. (Google Map)

The impacts of Harvey still have our full attention.  We are all agreed—we don’t want to live through another Harvey.  We want to be so much better prepared for the next one. In that case, we better hope the next big one isn’t coming our way anytime soon.

“Do something!” seems to be the watchword of the day. The question is whether or not we will do the right thing. We are clearly taking some good steps in the right direction, but I fear we may lack the necessary organizing principles to build a Houston that is resilient for the next 100 years and beyond.

I suggest two watchwords that could lay the foundations for a robust resilience: watersheds and walkability. Watersheds are the template upon which we build. We must understand both the limitations and the advantages of our watersheds.  Walkability builds the social capital that provides the glue for strong communities. Both the city we build and the watershed we build it on must be healthy in every way if we are to remain vibrant into the next century.

A watershed is a piece of land that drains through a common outlet. Watersheds form the basis of any kind of sustainable resource management.  We all live downstream!

The watersheds that we build on provide us with free services—services we can’t live without. Healthy prairies and forests and their wetlands absorb an incredible amount of rainwater, enough to make a difference even in serious storms.

Our watersheds also clean and purify our water. No prairies, no wetlands: no fish. Its that simple. Pavement does not detain stormwater, and neither does it clean it. What happens in the Galveston Bay watershed most emphatically does not stay in the watershed. Every year the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez-worth of oil and grease from our cars runs off into the Bay. Wetlands can help clean that up.

Lets not forget our floodplains, also part of our watersheds. We have been endowed with a natural system that could easily absorb most if not all of a Harvey. But we have chosen to build in these most valuable of areas. It will take us a long time to undo the damage—a hurt  that will continue to occur with each new large storm because people are still in harms way. Over the long run, however, say 50 years, we could reclaim all of our floodplain endowment. And what an endowment those large green spaces would be. The only hazards would be located in the golf courses we could build there.

Harvey hopefully hit home the lesson that we need to build on higher ground.  But is there enough higher ground, within Houston or Harris County, to accommodate another 4 million people? Not to mention the people we need to buy out of the floodplains. Absolutely there is enough land, especially if we can build things just a wee bit closer together. Close enough so that we can walk from one place to another. Close enough so that we could take care of many if not most of our errands without driving. Just building all new homes in Houston on 50’ x 100’ lots, about 8 homes to the acre, could easily save over 200 square miles of prairies or farmland over the next 30 years, versus what the suburban standard of 4 homes to the acre would consume.

Two hundred square miles of prairies that soak up a lot of water could be very significant in a large storm. Building things just a little bit closer together could reduce a whole lot of future flooding.

Building a little bit closer together, however, has benefits that go way beyond saving unpaved watersheds, important though that is. When things are closer together, people tend to walk more, particularly if there are good sidewalks and safe crossings. And when people get out and walk, perhaps to the corner store for quart of milk, then they are liable to run into their neighbors. The more neighbors know each other, then the more there is of that secret ingredient of “deep” resilience: social capital. Social capital refers to the networks of bonds and linkages that bind a community together.  Neighborhoods with strong bonds rely on each other. You know who is well and who is not, and who might need assistance during a catastrophe. Walkability is an important precursor to social cohesion.

Now Houston already has a pretty big store of social capital—we saw that in spades during Harvey.  People were helping each other whether they knew each other or not. But we could use a lot more of this social glue. We are increasingly diverse, but unfortunately we are also an increasingly unequal community. We segregate into neighborhoods defined by economic class as well as race. If we are not careful, we might watch what social capital we have slip away.

We know how to build streets and neighborhoods where there is greater interaction. We need that interaction both within and between neighborhoods. That interaction requires some density, but more importantly, it requires opportunities for interaction. For that we need a fine-grained distribution of civic spaces, including parks, in all our neighborhoods. We are sorely lacking in that regard.

A healthy city, then,  fosters health in the hinterland watersheds, and vice-versa. If we foment interaction in our city, we save prairies, forests, and wetlands.  In turn, those natural areas sustain us—clean air and clean water.  A healthy city means that we have the wide-open spaces that define Texans to the core—close by, where we can enjoy them in all their glory.

Unfortunately, we are not doing a good job of building small-footprint, high-interaction, compact communities.  We are consuming our hinterlands at an increasing pace –Harvey has not had much of an effect in that department. There are only so many high-quality prairies and forests left. We continue to build insular low-interaction communities that will determine our course for many years.

I fear the watchwords we will be remembered by will be wasted opportunity.