I
love cities. Despite their acres of shopping malls with identical
stores and their generic skyscrapers erected by banks and insurance
companies and their strangulated networks of traffic-choked
expressways, there are glimpses of genuine individuality if you
bother to scrape beneath the surface.
That's
right. Even in our hyper-homogenized culture, cities still
possess a unique character. But rest assured developers are seeking
to eradicate this even as we speak.
Houston
was a city that, for bad or for good, possessed a distinct
personality. It was the epitome of wide open, free-market capitalism.
The city father's hearty embrace of such made it a place adored by
developers, who could build with abandon and not worry about the
nagging minutia of building codes and zoning restrictions.
This
made Houston a roaring economic engine, and its growth into one of
the nation's largest cities was spectacular. In the four decades
measured between the nineteen-fifty and nineteen-eighty censuses, Houston
averaged a 43.3% annual population growth and nearly tripled
in size.
While
that growth proved unsustainable, Houston continues to grow at a
rate well above average.
Of
course, there was a downside. A developer's dream is
an urban planner's nightmare. Building without regard to the natural
configurations of the land and a citizenries needs is a dangerous proposition. It leads to a low
quality of life on many fronts.
By
paving over, well, everything, Houston was a nightmare waiting
to happen. However nice sparkling skyscrapers, luxury condos and
sprawling retail centers are, they ignore one essential question:
where does the water go when it rains?
And
in Houston, ignoring such a question is equivalent to ignoring the
perils of snow or cold in Minneapolis. Already
the site of multiple municipal floods, Houston got hit by a storm
system in August which yielded an unimaginable amount of rain. You know the
rest of the story.
Yes.
To those of you who embrace the small government-big business ethos,
you are correct. Even a well-planned network of sewers, retention
ponds, spillways, etc. couldn't have handled the fifty inches of rain
that fell in Houston within a matter of hours. It was positively
Biblical.
But
now we know what happens when we don't even try, don't we? Now we
know what an environmental crisis is, don't we? Now we know what
upending hundreds of thousands of lives in an enormous city looks
like, don't we?
Let
me ask you this: what costs more—implementing critical
infrastructure that acknowledges a region's natural proclivities or
cleaning up after a Harvey-scaled disaster that requires billions and
billions of dollars in government aid?
Like
you, I'm thrilled the developers and those who enabled them made
out like bandits. But the reality is that this is a Texas-sized
version of the 2008 Wall Street fiasco, where the public gets to bear
the clean up costs of private recklessness and business-friendly
irresponsibility.
And
the story doesn't end there.
This
is Trumpland, people. This is a portent. Our so-called President
wants to roll back all manner of regulation and is in the process of
neutering the EPA. Should that come to pass, we could all be Houston.
Let
me ask you another question: how many Harveys can we afford? How many
Harveys do we pay for before people begin to complain? Before people
become immune to the suffering and fractured lives and create a
Facebook-based backlash?
Yes,
regulations and codes can be irritating. But if we even need
the lesson, Houston is it. This is what happens when we build only
with an eye for development and ignore virtually everything else.
Nature
will not be denied. None of us can say we weren't warned.
