According to Texas officials, Hurricane Harvey destroyed an estimated 800 homes in Houston alone and severely damaged another 119,000. However you cut it, the city will change over the coming years: If you’re a Bayou City urbanist, the wave of rebuilding could be good news, as the city’s new housing could encourage more dense building patterns and stoke greater interest in car-lite living.
As I have previously written, the city’s lack of zoning and pro-YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) development culture should be a huge asset in this rebuilding process: Unlike in many coastal cities, it’s relatively easy to add more housing to existing urban neighborhoods in Houston. This could help keep the city affordable in the aftermath of Harvey without encouraging further development in flooding-prone and environmentally sensitive wetlands. But if planners and policymakers aren’t careful, a host of current policies might force this new development to fall back into Houston’s old, sprawling ways. Here are three policies city officials could adopt to cultivate a gradual embrace of urbanism post-Harvey.
