After Allen Field - The Margin

When Hurricane Beryl swept through Houston last summer, Dolores Mendoza felt relieved. The worst thing that happened to her and her family was that the power went out for a few days in the muggy heat. It was the first major storm they had experienced since Harris County purchased their old home, requiring Mendoza and her family to move to higher ground.

After Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic damage in the region in 2017, the County identified Mendoza’s old neighborhood, Allen Field, as one of seven that was “hopelessly deep” in the floodplains. The neighborhood, tucked away in the northeast corner of Harris County, was far removed from the skyscrapers downtown. Its cluster of modest homes backs up to Greens Bayou, a watershed that overflowed during Harvey.

Instead of building a dam, widening the bayou, or creating detention ponds, which might run over anyway, the County would offer to buy homes here—and then tear them down. The neighborhoods would then be left as green spaces or other flood control projects to absorb the rains of the next big storm. A voluntary buyout program has been run all over Harris County for decades. Residents could choose to stay or take the buyout. This time, however, the program was mandatory, and there was no choice to stay behind.

In Allen Field, Mendoza could list off the names of floods that devastated the neighborhood over and over again since she was a child. Each time, homes had to be gutted or repaired. So, after Harvey, the County spent nearly six years and over $200 million to purchase some 400 properties and find nearly 700 new residences outside of the floodplain.

For Mendoza, one of the biggest worries was breaking up her tight-knit extended family, who had all lived down the street or around the corner from each other in Allen Field for generations. “We could have been completely happy there forever,” Mendoza told me after Beryl. But Mendoza said the move took her to a different place in life. “Now I know what it is to not live in that area—I know what it is to be somewhere else.”

When Beryl hit, the Mendozas didn’t experience any flooding in their new suburb, some 20 miles away. None of her relatives had to be rescued from knee-deep water, and no one had to deal with gutting and rebuilding their houses after this hurricane, as they had done time and time again after previous storms inundated Allen Field.

Roxana Sibrian, a spokesperson for Harris County Housing and Community Development, said restrictions on development in floodplains came in the 1980s after much of the County was already developed.

Mendoza’s family—siblings, parents, and grandparents—are among a few hundred households Harris County relocated through the Post Disaster Relocation and Buyout Program—its first effort at what’s known as managed retreat. In vulnerable areas across the country, there is a growing recognition that local governments will have to assist entire communities and neighborhoods with moving out of harm’s way as climate change causes floods, fires, and other natural disasters to become more frequent and intense. Otherwise, people will be caught in a constant cycle of disaster and recovery, draining funds from programs like the National Flood Insurance Program.

In the initial years of the buyout program, which began in earnest in 2020, residents were skeptical that the County’s program could replace not just a house, but the lives they had spent decades building. As residents simultaneously navigated the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, they attended virtual town halls to learn whether they would have to take on new mortgages, higher taxes, or HOA fees after decades of owning their own property; others worried about finding property that would allow them to maintain their in-home businesses.

Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 50 inches of rain over Southeast Texas as it stalled over the region. It caused an estimated $150 billion in damages, making it one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history. Afterward, however, it presented Harris County with an opportunity to invest in resilience and mitigation programs, as it received millions of dollars in federal assistance.

The mandatory buyout program, funded primarily through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was not without its problems: questions still swirl around why some households were denied extra tax incentives for relocating within the county. Undocumented households were offered less and took inordinate risks to speak up for what they deserved. Some Houstonians lived through disasters on top of disasters: After Winter Storm Uri in 2021, families were left with damage from burst pipes that the county told them not to repair since they wouldn’t get extra funding to cover the costs before moving out. And relocation programs can rupture social ties and connections that are crucial to the well-being of communities—a side effect that’s rarely studied and hard to quantify.

When the next big storm hits, it’s unclear if places like Harris County, where recovery efforts are almost always layered on top of historic patterns of inequity, will be able to replicate ambitious projects like the mandatory home buyout program and improve upon the lessons they learned.

Equity, Extreme Weather, and a Second Trump Administration

Decades of government-sanctioned redlining have pushed communities of color deeper into the floodplain, closer to sources of pollution, or into substandard housing. Many communities still live with the compounding impacts of those decisions today. Race and poverty levels are still closely related to how different communities experience the same disasters.

A 2018 study from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy found that the Greens Bayou watershed, which runs through Allen Field, had only recently started to receive federal funding for flood control projects—despite a history of extensive flooding. The watershed had the highest concentration of poverty in the County, and flood control projects there stalled even after a separate, $2.5 billion county bond was passed in 2018 to address unequal flooding with new infrastructure investments. Meanwhile, projects in some of Houston’s wealthiest neighborhoods, like River Oaks, were already well underway.

Until the buyouts, Allen Field’s main form of flood control was grassy, overgrown ditches like the ones throughout the Houston area, which drew complaints from residents who said the County didn’t maintain them. As storms have become more intense with climate change, ditches have become less effective at funneling floodwaters into the bayous.

“Historically, poor communities are often living in conditions of general government disinvestment, or poverty that results in not being able to maintain a baseline level of functional and livable homes,” says Alice Liu, the Co-Director of Communications, Organizing and Disaster Preparedness with West Street Recovery, a disaster recovery nonprofit that serves Northeast Houston. FEMA aid often comes with strings attached: a homeowner can’t use aid from today’s disaster to pay for damages caused by last year’s hurricane. “You’ll see the cumulative impacts of three or four major storms in the course of a decade—all those damages stack up, and people aren’t able to fully recover.”

In the four predominantly Black and Hispanic, low-income ZIP Codes that West Street works in, FEMA denied 75% of all aid applications. Four years after Harvey, West Street published a report interviewing 21 survivors of Hurricane Harvey. Only six said they had fully recovered from the storm; almost all said they had depleted most of their savings but still lived in damaged homes. Research from Texas Housers, a fair housing nonprofit, also showed that FEMA was more likely to approve applications from higher-income households. Only 10 percent of applicants making over $70,000 a year were denied aid.

Only recently, advocates say, has any progress been made in creating policies that reduce inequalities already baked into the status quo. Just three years ago, for example, FEMA removed documentation requirements for people living in what’s known as “heirs’ property”—a home or parcel of land that has been passed down without clear titles or deeds for generations. That policy had kept many families in rural, Southern Black communities from receiving aid. More than one-third of Black-owned land in the South is passed down informally, making the documentation policy inherently exclusionary.

“There are many ways in which HUD, FEMA, and other agencies were trying to be more attentive to equity in disaster recovery, but there are still a lot of shortfalls,” says Alessandra Jerolleman, the director of research at the Center for Environment, Land and Law, at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. “I don’t want to paint what we had as a panacea– what we had needed a lot of work.”

In the last days of the Biden administration, HUD released new guidelines for its Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery that called for greater attention to equity in recovery. Fair housing advocates have been calling for such guidelines for years. The notice kicked in as nearly $12 billion in aid was finalized, including recovery funds for Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which devastated parts of North Carolina and Florida, respectively, in 2024. The guidelines instruct local and state governments to create citizen advisory groups that represent local demographics, for example, ensuring greater public engagement.

The win was short-lived, and President Donald Trump’s new HUD Secretary, Scott Turner, repealed the rules in March. The agency deleted references to civil rights data and fair housing, and a section requiring language translation and interpretation during public comment meetings.

Earlier that month, Turner also took issue with the City of Asheville’s action plan for distributing federal relief dollars from Hurricane Helene. Turner blasted the city for prioritizing assistance to “minority and women-owned businesses” and said that his department would not approve the plan as it was written.

Under Trump’s second term, his administration wasted no time in targeting equity and justice related policies. On his first day in office, the president signed an executive order calling for the elimination of all environmental justice positions in the federal government and completely terminating equity-related grants, plans, and programs developed in recent years. Soon after, environmental justice databases and tools began disappearing from government websites. His administration has also canceled grant funding and fired federal employees who are responsible for running public assistance programs.

Trump has been making due on what’s outlined in Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto published a year before the election. Conservative leaders from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, and former and current Trump officials outlined a plan to curb civil liberties and slash federal jobs, with the aim of privatizing many functions of the federal government, ranging from weather forecasting to the National Flood Insurance Program.

Within Trump’s first 100 days, hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who track hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and issue life-saving warnings and alerts, have been unceremoniously fired. The National Storm Prediction Center, which tracks thunderstorms and tornadoes across the country, is also reportedly in the administration’s crosshairs.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan slashed funding for public sector jobs and social safety net programs like Social Security, and gutted agencies like the EPA—also in line with policy guidelines written by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. By the end of his administration, income inequality had grown, and environmental and climate policy faced setbacks.

“I don’t think that (local governments) need to do the Trump administration’s job for them,” said Zoe Middleton, a former Harris County staffer and currently an associate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She worries that some local governments may preemptively decide to drop equity principles in the future, instead of risking the ire of the new administration, as Asheville’s leaders inadvertently did. “Regardless of the chilling effect at the federal level, [counties] have the obligation to their constituents and residents to run programs as efficiently and equitably as possible.”

Disaster Justice

Today, as the mandatory buyout program wraps up, residents who experienced repeat flooding made worse by climate change are now on safer ground. Some families were able to put down payments on a home after years of renting; others now have more value in their new property and live on safer streets. But it took community organizing efforts to pressure the County to truly care for everyone.

Harris County’s mandatory buyout program didn’t initially account for the costs of relocating undocumented or mixed-status families. Undocumented residents can access public shelters and aid distribution during crises, but have almost always been shut out of direct federal aid for home repairs through FEMA. Local funds, or philanthropic funds, can close the gap.

In the Greens Road Mobile Home Community in northern Harris County, undocumented residents were offered pennies on the dollar for mobile homes that they owned outright. Additionally, county staff didn’t always provide Spanish-speaking residents with resources in their language—including complicated legal documents that would be hard for native English speakers to follow, for example.

“We started hearing things like, ‘The cost of living has gone up, and we’re not going to be able to buy a new home with the little bit of money we’re getting,’’” says Damaris Gonzalez, the lead immigration organizer with the Texas Organizing Project. “People were receiving $5,000 for their trailers. They were crying because they didn’t know what to do or where they were going to live.”

Gonzalez worked with the community in Greens Road, mobilizing people to testify at the County Commissioners Court about their experiences. Some shared their experiences, in Spanish, of their fears of being left homeless and feeling disrespected by the county’s employees as the process moved forward; others recounted that they hadn’t been informed that they could have qualified for extra funding to move out and now found themselves in debt after accepting low-ball offers.

Eventually, the County Commissioners Court unanimously approved an additional $7.7 million in local funding to support undocumented or mixed-status families. Now, former clients eagerly invite Gonzalez to come to their new houses in areas that no longer flood. “That’s when you realize the work you’re putting in is worth it in the end, because people are in better conditions.”

Harris County’s mandatory buyout program revealed some hard truths about the County’s ability to serve residents equally. Sibrian, the Housing and Community Development spokesperson, said that in the future, the county would recommend increasing public awareness campaigns and language access.

Nevertheless, undocumented families took a risk in speaking up for a fair deal. “We still have rights, and we are still human beings,” Gonzalez says. “It was a really hard conversation, but we were sure we were going to win something.”

Under Trump, the fear of retaliation and deportation may be heightened, discouraging people from publicly protesting or speaking up as they did during the buyout. Project 2025 calls for FEMA to collaborate with immigration enforcement to ensure that non-citizens don’t receive a penny of aid.

A 2024 literature review authored by researchers at Tulane University and Loyola found that disaster justice research has widely established that the disaster recovery process is difficult for people to navigate and that people of color, those with disabilities, and non-English speakers often face barriers to aid. But the research also found a case study suggesting that when communities can mobilize, as Greens Road did, they’re much more likely to win more resources for a fair recovery.

Just a year later, researchers like Jerolleman, who advised and co-wrote the paper, are concerned about the future of equity-based disaster research, which often relies on data and documents provided directly from federal agencies.

“We’re seeing less access to data around decisions that FEMA is making— and that makes it more difficult to hold agencies accountable, and get a good picture of what’s happening,” said Jerolleman, who advised the study. “If it was murky before, it’s going to be impossible to say what tomorrow will bring, much less the next hurricane season.”

As government services are gutted, a negative feedback loop seems likely: with fewer scientists tracking storms, severe weather forecasts and warnings may become less reliable. That puts more people in harm’s way and in need of aid when the storm is over. Vulnerable communities may be left further behind as federal policy turns away from equity and justice principles. And the ability to track those unequal paths may become obscured if federal agencies stop collecting such data altogether, or refuse to make it public.

“Disaster recovery is slow, and the effects of disasters are compounding with increasing extreme weather,” Middleton said. “The federal government should be helping to stand up effective and impactful programs quickly, instead of delaying them to fulfill a hateful agenda.”

At the bare minimum, Middleton says, local governments should stick to a long-standing rule that 70 percent of recovery funds go to low to moderate-income neighborhoods, building up infrastructure and repairing homes in the places where there’s the most need. And local governments can marshal funding to fill in the gaps.

For Mendoza and her family, navigating the buyout process was no easy feat, even in less hostile political circumstances: from navigating virtual town halls during the chaotic, early days of the pandemic, to being caught off guard by the level of aid that residents qualified for based on opaque factors. “The point in my life I’m at now, I know what it means to not live in Allen Field—it was too far gone,” she said. “It turned out to be a positive thing for us, but with the program they presented at the very beginning, without us pushing back, we would have been worse off.”

Mendoza and her sisters now live in the same neighborhood in a Houston suburb and send their kids to the same school. They go to the same neighborhood park to play basketball with other neighborhood kids.

“Then my mom said, ‘Well, if y’all are there, then I’m going to go ahead and go there too,’” Mendoza says with a laugh. She doesn’t see her grandmother and great aunt as often as she would like these days—they relocated about 25 minutes away. Her dad and uncles also live on the opposite end of town.

“But no one is completely isolated. Everyone has somebody around the corner.” 

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