Sprawl Causes Flooding
Any news about Harvey that doesn’t mention climate change, or news about the flooding in Houston that doesn’t mention sprawl and city planning, has utterly failed to explain these events.
Half the lessons from my Sustainable Urbanism class (at the top school in the US for sustainable architecture) and all of my other studies on hydrology became super relevant this week. I thought I’d share my recently-gained expertise on this subject. Please bring up sprawl and climate change in every discussion you have with anyone about these events.
What we are seeing is a direct result of sprawl, building boom towns in flood plains, and other bad city planning (this link is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what happened to Houston and how our lifestyles are creating this event and future global disasters). Houston has replaced flood-mitigating wetlands with flood-exacerbating impermeable surfaces.
Houston shouldn’t rebuild; it should relocate about half its population. The people of Houston don’t deserve this, but the city planners and developers who ignored decades of warnings and scientific studies sure do. This is precisely why I’m studying what I’m studying, and why I want to devote my career to sprawl repair.
Fighting sprawl not only makes our cities and our property safer from floods, but also reduces commutes and traffic, reduces the cost of infrastructure and hence lowers taxes, makes our neighborhoods more pleasant and our communities stronger, allows for more beautiful natural areas for our enjoyment and for ecosystem services, and reduces climate change. The only downside is that we can’t have as large of lawns as we’d like or houses as far apart as we’d prefer, but it turns out that we shouldn’t want such big car-oriented lots for our houses anyway because more compact mixed-use neighborhoods reduce the alienation that comes from having neighbors that you merely drive in parallel with instead of knowing them as friends.

Sprawl makes our cities more vulnerable to extreme weather, and also makes that extreme weather more likely. Global warming greatly exacerbated the hurricane. Higher water levels and warmer water increase the range, duration, and water content of hurricanes.
Like other major disasters caused by anthropogenic climate change and environmental destruction, the most vulnerable are the most effected and the least responsible.

The US is one of the places best able to provide disaster relief for itself. Elsewhere, climate-change-caused events like Harvey create region-wide instability and war.

Droughts and famine in Syria lead to a government unable to oppose ISIS and a populace so desperate that some were willing to believe ISIS propaganda.

The people fleeing climate disasters and the resulting violence are going to go somewhere, and a border wall will no more stop them than levees stop a hurricane. The current refugee crisis is merely a preview of what’s coming.

Please reduce your fossil fuel use and car use. Insist that parking and roads be priced in accordance with demand so that we can reduce unused impermeable surfaces and so we can end the unfair subsidy by those of us who don’t use them. Demand transit oriented development and human scale design for your city. Use and demand the cheaper and flood-preventing green infrastructure such as on-site stormwater management. Please urge others to do the same.
Our conveniences are killing people and destroying places, and this is just the preview. There’s no avoiding catastrophe at this point, but an ouce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so it is a moral imperative that we act. Please do what you can, which I guarantee is more than you think and more than you’re comfortable doing.
