When floodwaters rise in Houston, they rarely recede at the same pace for everyone.
In historically Black and Latino neighborhoods, storms leave behind more than water damage, compounded by decades of disinvestment.
That reality was the focus of Communities First: Flooding, Resilience and Environmental Justice, a community conversation hosted by Harris County Precinct One with Dr. Robert Bullard, the “father of environmental justice,” at the center of the dialogue.
The gathering, moderated by Sonny Messiah-Jiles, CEO and publisher of the Houston Defender, underscored what Bullard has argued for more than 40 years: Environmental justice is about equal protection.
“Environmental justice embraces the principle that all people in communities are entitled to equal protection of our environment: Housing, energy, health, transportation, basic human rights, civil rights laws,” Bullard said. “It’s not rocket science. It’s not magic. The quest for environmental justice is basically ensuring that all communities enjoy the good stuff and don’t get more than their fair share of the bad stuff.”
The legacy of inequity
Bullard traced the roots of Houston’s environmental challenges back to racial redlining. In the 1930s, federal maps designated Black neighborhoods as risky investments, shutting them out of loans and infrastructure upgrades.
Those same areas later became prime sites for landfills, highways and industrial facilities.
“This was not random,” Bullard said. “From the 1930s up to 1978, 82% of all the garbage dumped in Houston was dumped on Black people. We went to court…we lost the case even with all that data, but we didn’t lose the legal theory of citing waste facilities that followed a pattern of discriminatory land use patterns.”
That historic pattern was evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. While white households in affluent neighborhoods received an average of $60,000 in FEMA aid, Black residents in low-income communities received an average of $84, according to Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis’ office. Nearly one in three Black Houstonians reported their quality of life was worse a year after Harvey.
Community voices at the event echoed that reality. Rosa Sobhani described watching water rise to her neighbors’ walls, with families unable to recover for years.
“Who’s burdened the most?” Sobhani said. “Of course, it’s the Black community. The people who can’t rebuild quickly. I was a part of Rebuild Houston and we were still going into homes and trying to help fix them up. The mold, the mildew is still there. They have no one, ’cause if you are in a poor area, you don’t have the finances.”
Equity vs. cost-benefit
At the heart of Harris County’s resilience debate lies a technical but consequential question: Should dollars follow property values or community need?
Traditionally, flood control projects were evaluated by cost-benefit ratio, which favors wealthier neighborhoods with higher-value homes. Bullard explained how this formula ensures that west-side homes worth $800,000 receive priority, while east-side homes valued at $80,000 are overlooked, even if the flood damage is devastating.
After Harvey, Ellis pushed for a different approach: An equity framework. That policy aims to prioritize projects in historically neglected neighborhoods most at risk of flooding, regardless of property values. It also incorporates health, social vulnerability and resilience outcomes into funding decisions.
But implementing that shift has been bumpy. Harris County voters approved a $2.5 billion flood bond in 2018, yet many projects have stalled or been paused due to funding shortfalls.
According to county data, 203 projects have been completed, with a total expenditure of $811 million. Still, at least $450 million more is needed to finish critical projects.
Community leadership and advocacy
Grassroots leaders attending the forum made clear that resilience cannot be achieved without organized community power.
Debra Walker, president of the Sunnyside Community Redevelopment Organization, said funding inequities are glaring.
“Funding is an issue in our community because we are always the last ones to get the funding,” Walker said. “We have so much bad infrastructure in our community. Work needs to be done in order to make our community more sustainable and resilient.”
Residents argued that resilience requires more than drainage projects. They called for emergency preparedness resources, better infrastructure planning and meaningful participation in decisions. As Sobhani put it plainly: “Stop talking and start providing the materials and the means.”
Bullard urged attendees to view resilience as a relay race, where each generation must carry the baton forward. He stressed the need for partnerships between communities and universities, investments in young people and long-term funding.
“We need our centers, our consortium and community-based organizations, our networks endowed so that we don’t have to chase dollars every grant-making cycle,” Bullard said. “We have to fight like hell to get the money back, the federal dollars tax dollars that we pay, taxes that we earn.”
A call to action
Participants at the forum were encouraged to use the county’s new online flood bond dashboard to track projects in their neighborhoods and to show up at Commissioners Court and flood control meetings.
For Cecelia Fontenot, a South Park resident and community organizer, the issue was blunt.
“Nobody cares,” she said of officials’ response to flooding. “The people with authority to fix this do not care.”
Bullard framed the fight ahead as both moral and practical.
Without intentional equity, he warned, disasters only deepen inequality.
“And when money comes down to fix the problems, white communities end up wealthier and Black communities and communities of color end up worse off,” he said. “The pattern that we have to break when it comes to who gets that money and why so man dollars or that bypass communities. That’s the challenge.”
