Texas Housers is proud to announce the release of “Drainage Study Mid-Point Report,” a collaborative project featuring the work of Texas Housers, Northeast Action Collective, and West Street Recovery.
In our experience, meaningful change happens when collective efforts center the voices of affected people. Thanks to the financial support of Healthy Gulf through CEER, we have embarked on an endeavor to understand city drainage spending and advocate for better infrastructure of underserved communities.
Texas Housers and West Street Recovery staff have been collaborating partners around disaster recovery and drainage justice issues since West Street’s formation following Hurricane Harvey. Housers’ research work in disaster recovery dates back to Hurricanes Rita and Ike. Northeast Action Collective is a grass-roots, community-led organization whose mission is to gain drainage equity in the northeast of Houston.
The initial goal of this project was to collectively work toward understanding the City of Houston’s drainage spending and infrastructure planning to equip the community with the necessary data and knowledge to talk to local leadership about ensuring crucial and equitable planning and spending drainage funds in disinvested neighborhoods which often flood due to historic lack of maintenance and improvements in their area. However, we quickly realized that there were many deficiencies in the City’s own drainage assessment methods, and that it was necessary to pivot the methods of the project.
The purpose of this mid-point report is to record what has been learned by the study group, what challenges we have identified in our approach, and what new questions have emerged about how the City operates and how Houston’s drainage infrastructure is developed, assessed, and maintained.
We hope that this community-led project can be replicated in other regions to assess their own drainage infrastructure and to pressure their governments to do the same work to better fund flood reduction efforts.
Read the full report below:
WSR-Texas-Housers-Mid-Point-Report
