Doris Brown was folding laundry on her sofa on an August day in 2017. She heard the sound of dripping water and thought she’d left the bathroom faucet running. She left to attend to the noise and when she came back to her place on the couch, the ceiling — over the very spot where she’d just been sitting — had caved in.
“That was scary,” she said. “I ran to the back and water was coming in. I wound up with three feet of water in my house. It really got me. It was devastating to me.”
Brown’s first call wasn’t to 911 or even FEMA. She stepped outside and hollered for her neighbors. Standing in the rubble of her own home and knowing that Hurricane Harvey had just hit Houston, Brown wanted to make sure the residents of Woodwick Street in northeast Houston’s Scenic Woods neighborhood were OK.
Brown doesn’t trust that city officials, who she says rarely pass through her neighborhood for photo opportunities when they’re running for office, will do anything to protect Scenic Woods. They’ve been diverting drainage funds for years and refusing to spend money to strengthen the most vulnerable neighborhoods, she said.
She has lived in her home for 58 years, moving there with her family when she was a teenager.
“I stayed here because I love my neighbors,” she said. “This is our little piece of heaven. I love the fact that we just don’t give up. There’s no sense in going anywhere else.”
But their little piece of heaven floods, even from just an average rain. Brown’s neighbors on Bigwood have a detention pond with cinder blocks in their front yard, courtesy of Mother Nature. Minor home repairs are overlooked and fencing has deteriorated. Many Scenic Woods residents are senior citizens who live alone.
The residents of some of the poorest neighborhoods in Houston are often the ones who are most affected by disasters. Their homes are old and small and weren’t built to withstand heavy rain, much less a hurricane. They can’t move their furniture upstairs when a downpour occurs because there is no upstairs. Many residents stay in their homes because they can’t afford to move.
When Harvey hit eight years ago, Brown later found out that a fire had started in the attic and her walls were covered in mold. She suffers from COPD and asthma and had trouble breathing. Once her neighbors helped move some things around, she called her son, who lives in Spring.
“For real, it did not enter my mind to call the City of Houston,” Brown said. “I called FEMA and I called Red Cross. I’m still waiting for the Red Cross.”
FEMA sent an inspector who appraised the home and asked Brown to pray with him.
“We prayed together and before he stepped over the threshold to leave my home, I received a text message telling me I’d been denied [assistance],” she said. “They also denied me in 2003. I was at my wits’ end because I could not afford insurance. I did not have insurance.”
So Brown moved in with her son. A few months later, through mutual friends at church, Brown was introduced to volunteers from Fifth Ward’s West Street Recovery. During the days-long storm, the group sent kayaks to rescue people from their homes and later incorporated as a nonprofit so they could apply for grants and accept tax-deductible donations.
“They came to help and they have stayed,” Brown said. “We was used to people telling us that they’d come back. [West Street Recovery] didn’t just come back, they came back the next day with their tools.”
The volunteers rebuilt Brown’s home and today she’s able to sit in her living room and fold laundry with the peace of mind that the roof might not cave in. But she’s well aware that the next big storm could happen again at any time.
The 75-year-old now works as a co-director for WSR, the nonprofit, and co-founded the member-based volunteer group Northeast Action Collective, known for wearing yellow T-shirts and storming City Hall to demand action. Their chants of “When the streets flood, we flood the streets” echoed on Bagby Street numerous times this budget season.
Brown says the residents of the northeast sector are “Houston strong,” but sometimes they get tired of being strong. With the probable dissolution of FEMA looming and a city deep in debt and unable to keep up with drainage projects that were identified in a needs assessment years ago, Houstonians are reconciled to the fact that they’re on their own when it comes to safeguarding their homes.
In the eight years since Harvey ravaged the Gulf Coast, destroying thousands of homes and racking up $1.25 billion in damages, the City of Houston still hasn’t proven it can withstand another tropical cyclone, Brown said.
“The federal and state governments have failed us. The City of Houston has failed us,” she said.
Reactive Rather Than Proactive
Northeast Action Collective members have spent the last several weeks creating “go bags” and installing generators for their medically compromised neighbors, but they also want elected officials to keep their promises and fix the drainage problems that have plagued the city for decades.
Advocates were removed from City Council chambers earlier this month for interrupting a meeting to shout their displeasure with Mayor John Whitmire’s $7 billion budget, which they say doesn’t do enough to address the drainage upgrades they were promised 15 years ago.
At the June 3 public hearing, Houstonians accused the City Council of betraying the residents by “illegally diverting drainage funds for over a decade” to supplement an $832 million police contract, among other things.
Alice Liu, a 26-year-old Rice University graduate, is a co-director of West Street Recovery and says the residents of Houston have a right to be protected by the government and a responsibility to fight for their neighbors.
“Disaster response, disaster preparedness, flood mitigation, and climate resilience, it’s something that every single person living in this city has a stake in,” she said. “This budget is continuing to delay what everyone knows needs to happen in order for this city to even be liveable in 30 years. We’re on the front lines.”
District C Council Member Abbie Kamin, who represents Meyerland, Montrose, The Heights and Fourth Ward, said millions of dollars worth of flood mitigation and drainage projects have been identified, and as residents wait for construction to start, the price tags go up. District C is the most repetitively flooded area in Houston, if not the region, she said.
The Montrose Boulevard Corridor project, advertised as an upgrade of stormwater infrastructure to reduce flooding, protect properties, and keep streets accessible during heavy rains, was delayed over a year at the cost of several million dollars, Kamin said.
“We almost lost the drainage component of it,” she said. “The first phase is now moving forward but the rest of the project is unclear.”
West of Scenic Woods in the Greater Heights area, Shady Acres’ Turkey Gully, which Kamin refers to as her “cornerstone flood mitigation project,” was supposed to reduce home and street flooding by diverting water to White Oak Bayou. About $15 million was set aside by the City of Houston but it’s been delayed repeatedly.
“It’s completely in the floodplain,” Kamin said. “Turkey Gully is this little gully that gets bigger and bigger as it cuts through the neighborhood and goes farther south from 610. There has been so much development built in this area that you can’t widen the gully now. We have to find a way to convey that water elsewhere because the area floods.”
The project would remove 240 homes and businesses from the 10-year floodplain, she said.
“It was shovel-ready,” Kamin said, noting that the infrastructure was in place and funding was designated. “All it needed was to be permitted. There is a cost to that, both in taxpayer dollars and in time that we no longer have. We cannot, as the fourth largest city, one of the largest economic hubs in the world, with a population of our size, focus only on reaction. We must prevent it.”
Each of Houston’s 16 council members could name projects in their respective districts that would improve drainage but haven’t been greenlit for a slew of reasons, including lack of funding, what critics say is an arbitrary prioritization matrix designed by the Public Works department, and a lack of will from previous city administrations.
And even if a home doesn’t flood every time it rains, its inhabitants are still going to lose money from lost wages and other inconveniences caused by prolonged power outages, Brown says. During last year’s Hurricane Beryl, nearly 80 percent of Houstonians had to throw away hundreds of dollars’ worth of food per household, according to a survey conducted by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
Brown didn’t have much home damage during Beryl but was “a prisoner in [her] own home” because of all the downed trees.
State and local governments have the authority to strengthen building codes, pass legislation to harden the grid, bury power lines and allocate dollars to fix Houston’s dismal drainage situation. They haven’t done that, Kamin said.
“I’m very pleased to see that we’re getting additional generators with some of the [Community Development Block Grant] funds, but when we haven’t strengthened the buildings themselves that are supposed to be that place of refuge, if the roof is blown off, what good does a generator do?” Kamin asked.
“I’m fully aware of how important it is to have backup generation and power, but at the same time, we need to also be looking forward to the other risks and extremes that increasing storms pose. The Big One may not be a Harvey.”
The 2024 derecho brought hurricane-force winds for only 15 minutes but some residents are still cleaning up the damage.
“What would it look like to have a Category 4, Category 5, dirty-side direct hit and the impact be wind?” Kamin said. “Can our buildings and our homes sustain that level for that long?”
About $119 million in federal grants for Texas public health departments was slashed by the federal government this year, including allocations for emergency preparedness. President Donald Trump has said he’ll start phasing out FEMA after the current hurricane season, and Houstonians are terrified that the next big storm could leave them homeless.
Bills intended to harden the Texas power grid and create accountability were left on the floor when the Texas legislative session ended June 2.
Houston senators Carol Alvarado and Molly Cook joined other Texas legislators in filing dozens of bills that would have strengthened the power grid, increased accountability for electric companies and required backup generators in low-income and senior housing facilities. What Texas ended up with was stiffer penalties for those who assault utility workers on the job.
Houstonians have said they don’t trust CenterPoint Energy’s ability to prepare for a disaster and they’re not even sure what the governor-appointed Public Utility Commission does. The Kinder Institute for Urban Research survey found that less than one-fifth of residents surveyed trust the disaster preparedness of electric utility companies such as CenterPoint.
After last year’s Beryl and derecho, CenterPoint responded to criticism by adding more dispatchers, promising to bury 400 miles of power lines and donating generators to senior facilities and community centers in its 12-county service region. The utility company reported earlier this year that it completed those initiatives ahead of hurricane season and recently reached a settlement agreement with Houston-area cities to spend $3.2 billion over the next several years on a systemwide resiliency plan.
Since Harvey, Houston has invested more than $2.3 million into the fire department’s training and swift-water rescue equipment. Again, though, that’s a reactive measure, Kamin says, and residents feel like not enough is being done to mitigate the impacts of the next storm.
“Houstonians look out for one another,” Kamin said. “Unfortunately, our district has had far too much practice with this. A lot of our residents know what to do to muck and gut their homes. We know how to stand up our food and supply distributions. They know how to respond, but they shouldn’t have to.”
The Drainage Fund That’s Been Abandoned Since 2010
Voters signaled their frustration with Houston’s drainage system long before Harvey when they approved a 2010 charter amendment that was supposed to deliver millions annually into a fund solely designated for street repairs and drainage upgrades. It didn’t happen, and the city got sued in 2019 by two engineers, Bob Jones and Allen Watson.
Instead of acquiescing and making the drainage fund whole, Houston appealed the lawsuit but the Texas Supreme Court declined to hear it. A settlement agreement with the engineers was announced in April, just prior to budget adoption.
The engineers agreed to let the city replenish the fund incrementally over the next three budget cycles rather than pay it out immediately in a lump sum of about $100 million. The payment plan will cost the city $16 million in the 2025-26 fiscal year.
“They need to put the whole $100 million back into the fund for drainage, and they need to come out and do something with this infrastructure that is tore up from the floor up. It’s antiquated,” Brown said.
The council spent hours debating the drainage issue this month, with many elected officials offering potential solutions to fix problems before more destruction occurs.
Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who represents Brown’s Scenic Woods neighborhood, offered two budget amendments that were approved. One would flag $25 million from the city’s Dedicated Drainage and Street Repair Fund for the “most critical drainage projects” in Houston, most of which are in the northeast part of the city. A second Jackson amendment called for $20 million to be allocated within the drainage fund to salvage ditches in disrepair.
Jackson has been in office since 2020 and has introduced flood mitigation projects every budget cycle, she said. “Improving flooding infrastructure for our district is my priority,” she said. “And we’ve made great gains, from having the city take over the upkeep of our open ditches to directing tens of millions of dollars for projects in our district.”
City officials said at the June 4 meeting there’s about $300 million in the drainage fund that hasn’t been spent.
“I understand the frustration of our residents that the city abandoned ditches years ago and [the re-establishment program] was only restored last year,” Mayor Whitmire said at the time.
Public Works is scheduled to review its priority projects at the council’s Service Delivery Committee in August, because elected officials still don’t know how the projects are selected and why some have been on a list for years with no start date.
“We have no clarity, no ranking,” Kamin said. “We’re seeing projects pop up that are now new priorities. For example, the mayor got a traffic safety signal put in entering his neighborhood but that wasn’t on the list that we were given at the beginning of the year for all the safety crossings.”
When under fire for the mess that has been made of the drainage fund, Whitmire has repeatedly pointed out that there’s new leadership in the Public Works department, shifting blame to previous directors and mayoral administrations.
Randy Macchi was appointed as the new Public Works director in November 2024 after former director Carol Haddock resigned, or by some accounts, was forced out. During Haddock’s tenure, Public Works maintenance manager Patrece Lee was charged with awarding millions in contracts to family members in exchange for kickbacks. Lee is serving a 10-year prison sentence for bribery.
Funding the Past But Not the Future: A City on Borrowed Time
Houston is poised to receive about $314.6 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to support long-term recovery efforts following qualifying major disasters that occurred in 2023 or 2024, such as Hurricane Beryl and the derecho, contingent on a plan that the city must submit for approval by HUD.
A 101-page plan on how the funds could be dispersed was unveiled recently and the city has been hosting virtual workshops to hear public feedback. The funding is designed to address remaining needs after all other assistance has been exhausted, according to the report.
Housing is the largest unmet need, according to the report, with over $229 million in estimated post-disaster housing repair, reconstruction, and personal property lost in the 2024 storms. But there are also $135 million in public infrastructure damages, with nearly $7.65 million in unmet needs, especially in the areas of emergency power resiliency and debris management.
In the Economic Development category, the report states that “power outages have caused significant disruptions in various industries, especially small businesses. An unmet need of over $186 million has been calculated from [Small Business Administration] data.”
Houston residents said they wanted a large portion, if not all, of the federal funds to go toward housing, and Mayor Whitmire announced last week that he plans to dedicate $50 million for home repairs and other housing needs. Brown says, again, that’s not enough. The city can spend $832 million on a police contract but can’t provide safety and security for its residents? she asked.
“What about the safety of the people?” she said. “What about the elderly that can’t catch their METRO bus because they’ve got to wade through water? Public safety was the platform that [Whitmire] ran on. Safety for the people is not one-size-fits-all. A police car can’t stop a flood.”
Kamin said that while city leaders address the fallout from previous storms, they’ve also got to start planning for the future.
“We are on borrowed time,” she said. “We need to make sure Houston families and businesses have the tools they need not just to ride out the storm but to recover. We cannot necessarily rely on Trump’s FEMA.”
West Street Recovery has researched flood-resilient design to reduce initial damage and speed up recovery time after a home has flooded. Standard residential home design and materials are poorly adapted to Houston’s humid, flood-prone environment, the members say on their website.
“For example, drywall and traditional insulation rapidly spread moisture and mold easily,” the website states. “In response, we have successfully tested out low-cost, sustainable materials and strategies including metal kitchen cabinets, muck-ready walls, and no-drywall external insulation.”
But why are Houstonians having to take matters into their own hands? Because the city won’t do it for them, they say.
Kamin raised concerns throughout the budget process about the city’s “rainy day fund,” originally designated to be $20 million per year or 1 percent of the general fund surplus. She proposed earlier this month a budget amendment to increase the fund to $25 million with a stipulation that when dollars are drawn down, the fund be replenished within one year.
“When the city set this [fund], we weren’t seeing back-to-back extreme weather events,” Kamin said. “We’ve had 10 federally declared disasters in the last nine years and that does not include heat waves, Winter Storm Enzo and other events that don’t qualify. We’re not fully prepared for the extreme weather and storms that are coming.”
Emergency response allocations are not budgeted for each department, she added.
“We rely heavily either on fund balance for immediate response or federal and state reimbursement to recoup costs,” Kamin said.
“FEMA is a mess,” she added. “[National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and [the National Weather Service] have been gutted. We cannot count on all of the reimbursements that we previously relied on, and we can’t rely on them expeditiously. It is taking longer. We know the storms are coming.
“We do not have the infrastructure in place right now to protect homes and businesses from the Big One and our housing codes do not protect against Cat 4 or 5 storms.”
Whitmire verbally committed to increasing the fund to $25 million in the 2026 fiscal year but said a policy discussion needs to be held at the committee level to make changes to how the fund is used. Kamin agreed “under protest” and withdrew the budget amendment.
Whitmire’s $7 billion budget was approved 14-3 with council members Kamin, Tiffany Thomas and Edward Pollard voting against it. Pollard said his concern was that the budget has more expenditures than revenues and a potential $500 million deficit in five years. Thomas has repeatedly expressed concerns about drainage issues and overspending. And we know where Kamin stands.
“Extreme weather events are coming, they are more frequent, and they are more severe,” Kamin said when rejecting Whitmire’s budget. “Whether intentionally or in a state of denial, we are not recognizing the realities of climate change. Department heads have testified that we will respond as needed regardless of whether we will get reimbursed by the state or federal government, and that is absolutely the right response, but there is nothing in this budget that accounts for that.
“I’ve never voted no on a budget, but I feel obligated to vote no on this one. I hope your administration will not seek retribution against the district and our residents.”
Liu said the public opposition to the budget gave leverage to the three council members who voted against it.
“Voting no was taking a stand and showing that they are willing to actually support their constituents,” she said. “We’ve been showing up and giving public comments for years. Our goal [at the June 3 meeting] was to register public dissent in a way that would be the most visible. We wanted to make sure it was registered in the media that there were 60 people in the room. We’re tired and we’re through asking nicely.”
More Storms Are Coming
NOAA is predicting at least three major Atlantic hurricanes this season, which started June 1 and ends in November. But Brown and the members of West Street Recovery don’t spend a lot of time looking at weather models. They know it’s going to rain and flood and they know they’ll have to help each other just like they do every year.
West Street Recovery has established seven community “hub houses” in northeast Houston and one in southeast Houston that can be emergency resource, evacuation, and distribution centers during disasters or power outages. They’re about to add eight more, Brown said.
Brown’s home is a hub house where people go during an outage to charge their phones and get some AC when it’s hot or heat when it’s cold. She also puts together “go bags” that include batteries, bug spray, water, fans and other essentials.
“The goal of the hub house system is to meet a critical gap in the sparse official government-run shelters and emergency protocols in Houston,” the West Street Recovery website states.
The neighborhood captains who operate hub houses have rosters so they know who has medication that needs to be refrigerated and who is bedridden. Liu and Brown said West Street Recovery doesn’t want to take the place of city services and they’d like to serve as a model for other neighborhoods that want to build their own social and physical infrastructure.
“If we don’t help our neighbors, it won’t get done,” Brown said. “We can’t depend on anyone else. This is taxation without representation.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
