One of former Houston mayor Sylvester Turner’s last acts while in office involved joining northeast Houston residents and community partners to officially launch Houston’s first Resilience Hub at the Kashmere Gardens Multi-Service Center – a first step in implementing the City’s Resilience Hub Network Master Plan. The Resilience Hub will support residents before, during, or after a disruption and in their daily lives.
WHAT ARE RESILIENCE HUBS?
According to the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability, Houston Resilience Hubs are “trusted community-serving facilities that work together to provide vital resources and services to residents during non-emergency “blue sky” days, as well as before and after major weather events, extended power outages, and other emergency scenarios.
“City-owned multi-service and community centers, as well as other community facilities such as churches and schools, function as a network to coordinate communication, distribute resources, and promote social equity while providing a safe haven for citizens to stay connected, recover from a crisis, or receive basic daily provisions.
MASTER PLAN
The City of Houston’s Resilience Hub Master Plan supports the retrofit of existing City of Houston community centers and multi-service centers and the construction of new facilities to maximize Resilience Hub operations. Together, these facilities and the organizations they host create a safety net of resilience in Houston’s neighborhoods to meet the needs of residents – particularly those in areas that face a high level of everyday community stressors such as food insecurity and disaster shocks such as flooding or loss of power.
THE NEED
And Houstonians know a thing or two about floods. Hurricane Harvey alone inundated the Bayou City with 50-plus inches of rain in 2017 and impacted more than 300,000 housing units. More homes flooded in Houston during Hurricane Harvey than in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or New York City during Hurricane Sandy.
In April 2016, the Tax Day Flood brought 10-20 inches of rain down upon the north and west sides of the Houston metro area, inundating freeways, vehicles, homes and buildings. More than 1,800 water rescues were performed, and the resulting damage cost $2.7 billion, according to NOAA.
The year before, on Memorial Day 2015, most of Houston’s freeways and many homes across the city flooded. That event’s flooding was said to have been the worst Houston experienced since Tropical Storm Allison (2001).
And that’s just floods.
In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered a major power crisis, which came about during three severe winter storms sweeping across the United States on February 10–11, 13–17, and 15–20. Known as “the Great Texas Freeze” and “Snovid 2021,” Winter Storm Uri (its “government name) triggered the worst energy infrastructure failure in Texas state history, leading to shortages of water, food, and heat. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power, some for several days. Somewhere between 250 and 700 people were killed directly or indirectly as a result of the crisis.
So, there’s no doubt a huge need for what these panned hubs can provide.
KASHMERE GARDENS THE FIRST
The City of Houston published its Resilience Hub Network Master Plan in 2023 and opened its first one, the Kashmere Gardens Resilience Hub, last month. The facility boasts a solar carport for energy resilience, a vegetated swale for flood resilience, and community gardens and refrigerators to expand the community center’s food pantry with fresh food and vegetables.
Once a resilience hub pilot, the Kashmere Gardens Multi-Service Center has become what some tout as “a stellar example of retrofitting existing City-owned facilities.”
Through the partnership of Resilient Cities Catalyst and the Northeast Houston Redevelopment Council, community members identified potential programming services needed to build community resilience and cohesion.
“In the process of implementation of the resilience hubs, the themes of coordination, collaboration, and partnership have underlined this work – city departments, external partners, and community coming together to find creative solutions for implementation,” said Priya Zachariah, the Chief Resilience and Sustainability Officer for the City of Houston.
To that end, Shell USA, Inc. donated $500,000 for the solar carport, one of the major retrofits on-site, and the City of Houston’s General Services Department (GSD) undertook the design and construction. And the master plan must be more than a “pretty face,” as national eyes are now on it.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) are looking to designate the City of Houston as the first US Resilience Hub of the UNDRR’s “Making Cities Resilient 2030 initiative.”
COMPONENTS
While some cities view hubs as places where community members go during disasters, others focus primarily on community preparedness and seek to serve communities primarily during steady-state functions.
Hubs across the nation also differ in the strength of emergency management roles.
The Houston Resilience Hub Network will strike a balance between all of these differing hub criteria to provide a collaborative and transformative suite of facilities that maximize impact across a large geographic region.
The plan and development resources can be found on houstonresiliencehubs.org.
