Houston communities chart their own path to flood resilience

Hurricane Harvey’s days-long deluge of Houston exposed more than the city's vulnerability to extreme weather. 

The unusually slow-moving 2017 storm hit hardest in communities historically excluded from decisions about how to protect themselves. Now, Stanford University researchers are working with those communities to tap into residents’ deep knowledge of their neighborhoods to inform engineering solutions. The team’s initial findings come at a good time to inform policy. This past October, Texans gave final approval for $1 billion in annual funding on water projects, such as flood control, for the next 20 years.

"Harvey sat there for days just dumping water,” said Elliott White Jr., an assistant professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “It provided a good starting place to think about what are alternative ways that we can address flooding issues."

Listening to communities

The project, funded by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment’s Environmental Venture Projects program, emerged from direct community connections. Khalid Osman, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, visited Houston as a graduate student to help with Harvey recovery, rebuilding outdoor classrooms, painting homes, and assembling first aid kits.

"I felt like all of those things were short term, acute solutions," Osman said. "How do we think about resilience in the long term?"

That question led to a partnership with Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston nonprofit. Together with civil and environmental engineering PhD student Clara Medina and community partners, the team spent two years engaging residents of the predominantly Black and Latinx communities of Northeast Houston and Baytown to understand their flooding experiences and visions for solutions.

The research focuses on nature-based approaches to managing stormwater, such as bioswales, rain gardens, and urban forests, which can complement traditional pumps and levees. These “green” solutions reduce flooding while providing co-benefits, such as improved air and water quality, cooler temperatures, and recreational spaces.

Through focus groups and surveys, the researchers documented a pattern: Wealthier neighborhoods tended to receive green infrastructure investments while lower-income communities continued to flood.

"There's an assumption from decision makers that low-income communities don't care because they're not vocal," Osman said. "Our results show these communities care about it. They want it. They see the benefits."

The research team’s initial findings, published in Environmental Research Letters in April 2025, revealed strong community support for green infrastructure alongside deep distrust of government based on past disinvestment. Residents described "drainage justice," or the need for equitable infrastructure in historically redlined neighborhoods. They detailed how, in some cases, one to two inches of rain could cause knee-high flooding in their homes, how aging systems failed repeatedly, and how they organized cleanups because the city didn’t maintain their neighborhoods.

A revealing moment for the researchers came during workshops the team led in which participants mapped green infrastructure options with a fictional budget. Rather than maximizing protection for their own properties, residents consistently chose configurations benefiting neighbors and shared spaces.

"We thought people would maximize flood benefits for themselves, but they were thinking about how it would help their neighbors," Medina said. “Historically marginalized communities often envision flood resilience as a matter of leaving no one behind, and people in those communities tend to be excited to share access to improved infrastructure.”

A different kind of engineering

This approach, which scholars call community-based participatory research, is common in public health but rare in environmental engineering. It requires time, building trust, and letting community partners shape research questions. In addition to Bayou City Waterkeeper, various local churches and civic organizations, spread word of the study, connected longtime residents with the researchers and shared the project’s progress at monthly group meetings.

"Finding resources for this type of research is a challenge outside of foundation funding," Osman said. “It is even tougher in the current political environment – the removal of EPA community funding stripped so many hopeful communities of funding that would've resulted in real change.”

For White, whose background is in wetland ecology, the approach has been transformational. "The power of being in the room and people telling you these are my problems, versus me assuming what their problems are – those have been the most powerful things."

The team prioritized accessibility: holding focus groups at local community centers, providing transportation and childcare, translating materials into Spanish, and developing free, bilingual online dashboards where residents can access survey data. These dashboards will allow research to continue after the Stanford team closes out its project. By educating residents on how to use Stanford-backed data that they helped create, the project increased the likelihood of residents having a greater stake in and influence on relevant decision-making.

"I was impressed by the vision communities have," Osman said. "We often assume when people are not civically engaged, they don't care. These workshops flipped that on its head."

Scaling solutions

With support from the Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, the team is now working with Stanford's Natural Capital Alliance to adapt modeling tools so communities can visualize green infrastructure impacts in their neighborhoods, and potentially use the visualizations to advocate for more investment. This expanded work aims to build on strong existing collaborations with Bayou City Waterkeeper, and improve nature-based urban planning and policymaking in different regions of Texas.

“When given opportunity and support, marginalized communities have sophisticated environmental knowledge and clear visions for solutions,” Osman said. “What they've lacked isn't interest or expertise. It's a seat at the table when decisions are made.”

White and Osman are also center fellows (by courtesy) at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.Civil and environmental engineering is a joint department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Stanford School of Engineering.Co-authors of the Environmental Research Letters study also include Samyukta Shrivatsa, a Phd student in civil and environmental engineering; Mavis Stone, a PhD student in Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability; Diana Moanga, a lecturer in the Earth Systems Program at the Doerr School of Sustainability; and Mashal Awais, Alenka Cardenas, Kourtney Revels, and Yudith Nieto of Bayou City Waterkeeper.