So this past Friday I attended the weekly luncheon of the Houston Property Rights Association. Boy am I glad I did because I discovered that there is a big Houston related issue which has flown completely under the media and blogosphere radar. The speakers at the luncheon were a 50 something school administrator named Nancy Wilcox and a naturalized American citizen named Brigit Green, both of whom are members of a group calling itself the Floodway Coalition of Houston. And what, pray tell, was their talk about? It was about how the City of Houston has trashed the property rights of those who live in and around bayous.
Flooding of course is a big issue in Houston and along the Gulf Coast. We have a so called flood control district, but in fact people should be well aware that man cannot often control floods! Translation: Buy yourself Go* Da**** some flood insurance!
More to the point, according to the group's website, on October 1, 2006, a revision to the City of Houston code chapter 19 section 43, which deals with floodways, was put into effect. Briefly, there is a difference between a flood plain and a floodway. The flood plain is where water accumulates and there are five recognized different kinds of flooding. Meanwhile, a floodway is the course and direction in which the water takes on its way to reaching bayous or flood plains. Got it?
Now then. Essentially, the revised ordinance says that areas which have been designated as floodways (and according to Ms. Wilcox and Green not all bayous and floodways in the City have been designated as such - which they noted lends quite a bit of capriciousness to the ordinance) are now subject to general prohibitions on new development, in particular low rise or low density development. This is all in the name of the Greater Good of course. The restrictions on development also include prohibitions on damage repairs (not including general maintenance by the way) to structures which exceed 50 percent of the value of the property and structure (a so called 50 percent substantial damage clause). So if your house catches on fire, then tough luck. You won't be able to rebuild if the damage is greater than 50 percent of the value of your property. This is particularly onerous since it is quite forseeable that housing and buildings along flood ways might at some point fall into a dilapidated slum type state and owners will not be able to do anything about them. That in turn leads to the specter of plunging property values, indeed some appraisers have told Floodway Coalition members that the revised ordinance could wipe out up to 95 percent of the value of affected properties.
So what's the point of all of this? The City would probably say that this is in the name of the Greater Good. The conspiracy theory says however that the City wants to let these areas slum out, then acquire land nearby floodways at bargain basement prices. In turn, those areas could be used for detention basins, parkland, or better yet high density real estate redevelopment. Indeed one of the positions of the coalition is that some of their members do not necessarily mind having their land acquired if this is indeed in the Greater Good. They just want to get bought out at values which their property was valued at before the ordinance went into effect in October 2006. And by the way, the ordinance was passed with no public input.
Enough for now. Here is a link to the Tropical Storm Allison Recovery Project. Here is a link to a Houston Chronicle story dated June 16, 2007 saying that new flood maps go into effect on June 18, 2007.
The Floodway Coalition has already spent some $3,500 in sending postcards to some 7,000 property owners who happen to live or own property near bayous. They also have had to raise money for appraisers and lawyers. They essentially hope to force the City politically into revisiting the ordinance to get compromises which are much more property rights friendly - and don't forget that we received the news that Governor Rick Perry vetoed HB 2006 which would have strengthened property rights in Texas. If you would like to know more about this group, contribute time or money to their cause, or have one of their members come speak to your group in much greater detail than I am going into here, then visit their website and send them an email.
Wizard.