JUST IN: President Donald Trump will visit Texas Tuesday to review the state's recovery efforts. https://t.co/HQnpjJ3CfQ

— CBS New York (@CBSNewYork) August 27, 2017

This coming week will have a natural disaster that while unavoidable at one level, could have been addressed more specifically in terms of flood control infrastructure, that thing that Trump thinks he talks bigly about, except that things like gender-policed bathrooms and forced birthing are more important to Texas legislators.

Regional policy takes a back seat to what now seems quite universally devastating weather effects, while maintaining that ideological focus on the liar-in-chief. There is little attention to political ecology in states where scale trumps all. Even a city that has made some urban progress also has economic development problems that have disproportionate effects in terms of race/class.

(2015) Texas ranks among the worst of any state for flood-control spending. According to the Texas section of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the state is second only to Louisiana the U.S. in terms of dollars paid out in flood claims. The state does not require communities to enroll in the National Flood Insurance Program (a part of FEMA), even though Texas ranks second only to Florida in its number of total flood insurance policies across its communities."When the flood comes, it doesn't respect political boundaries,"

Wherever possible, the state leaves it to individual cities and counties to protect themselves against flooding. Texas requires cities and counties to meet the eligibility requirements for NFIP, but it does not require cities to enroll, as some states do. (Many Texas cities and counties are enrolled in the program.) More to the point, though: Texas doesn’t fund flood-control infrastructure directly. And Texas doesn’t have a statewide floodplain management plan.

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At the county level, commissioners have spent decades focusing on construction of the Grand Parkway without considering the long-term consequences of all that concrete and development on flooding.

Developers have recklessly paved wetlands and prairies, transforming a natural sponge into a runway for floodwaters on a path for downtown.

Want to know how bad it is? Over the past 40 years, rainfall in the Brays Bayou watershed has increased by 26 percent, according to Rice University hydrologist Phil Bedient. In the same time, runoff has skyrocketed by 204 percent. Only massive, proactive plans for water detention and widening waterways will accommodate this horizontal waterfall that we've built without regard for hydrology.

But don't expect any help out of Austin. The only waters that state leaders like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst seem to care about sits at the bottom of a toilet bowl. This Legislature doesn't have the focus or knowledge to create something like Harris County Flood Control District - let alone provide much-needed funding. Until they act, we remain without a comprehensive statewide floodplain management plan. Greater regional cooperation will have to be built from the bottom-up.

Like many large states, fear of central coordination of public responsibilities runs counter to folks more concerned about firearms open-carry, and the balkanization of funds and authorities exists in most institutions, whether it’s the textbook standards and the university system, or the questions surrounding relocated civil war monuments. Place becomes acutely important during weather disasters and is always about power first rather than people.

Houston’s literal rather than figurative swamp-like climate now converges as Trump prepares to do a celebrity drive-by. The differences of race/class/gender will be clear as the Texas legislators who voted against Hurricane Sandy relief now want support for Texas relief.

More than half of humanity now lives in urbanized areas (Heynen 2014). Researchers in urban political ecology (UPE) have argued that we are now in the "urban century." Of particular importance for UPE is the fact that the majority of the world's urbanized or developed areas are in coastal regions (Keil 2003;National Academy of Sciences 2006; United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction 2012).

In such areas, hazards including tropical storms, hurricanes, and floods all provide unwelcome reminders of nature's darkside.

UPE research has looked at a variety of water and water-infrastructure related issues in cities. Example include studies focused on access to water (Smith 2002; Swyngedouw 2009), water as an amenity, and an element of neighborhood identity (Hagerman 2007), and water as a locus for ports (Bunce and Desfor 2007).UPE has also investigated water as a destructive force in crises in Los Angeles (Davis 1998) and on the Mexican/US border (Collins 2010).

Traditional political ecology (PE) research has looked at large-scale infrastructure projects that have involved relocating local peoples (Colchester 1993; Griffiths 2005; Heminget al. 2001). Highways, ports, dams, airports, and other installations often require relocating communities involuntarily, and PE research has highlighted the resulting contention and protests against governments and other outsiders. This article brings together urban studies and PE in an urban political ecology framework by focusing on the relocation mandated by an urban water-control project.

I focus on Houston, a large coastal city well known for its significant social inequalities and vulnerability to flood risk. Specifically, I take up the case of Project Hunting, a large-scale flood-control project that requires relocating some residents of Kashmere Gardens, a largely minority community. To government and other outsiders, Project Hunting will help protect Kashmere Gardens, but the prospect of forced relocation has caused others to question who will benefit and who will suffer.

The public agency in charge of the relocation effort (Harris County Flood Control District) initially sought to relocate 800 households. Through a community planning process and with some community input,the public agency reduced the number of relocated households to 40.

The agency has promised the relocated households market prices for their homes and money to cover moving costs. A spokesperson for the agency also said, "We promise they'll be made whole again" (Moran 2010).

Reducing the number of relocated households so much is a substantial move toward maintaining the community, but there are still many households that want to stay. These households cannot be 'made whole' after receiving compensation.

As in any relocation project, residents are attached to place, an attachment that financial compensation may or may not adequately offset.

While wholeness certainly involves accounting for households' financial problems, it also means considering their attachment to place and the potential for differential treatment of different parts of a community.

[...]

The United Nations now insists infrastructure projects abide by the following standards:

• Infrastructure project sponsors and project managers should allow affected communities to participate in critical relocation and implementation decisions (e.g., site selection,identification of basic needs, settlement planning, and housing designs)
• Communication between affected communities and state actors should be frequent and transparent, and mechanisms to resolve grievances need to be effective (Lynn, Who defines 'whole'? Journal of Political Ecology Vol.24, 2017, 954)
• Social, environmental, and hazard-risk assessments must confirm that risk cannot be mitigated in the old location, and state actors must assure the community that the relocation site is suitable
• Governments must adequately fund relocation and attempt to assuage its economic impacts over a reasonable period
• Lastly, project feasibility analysis must show that emotional, spiritual, and cultural attachment to the old site is not excessively high. (Jha, Miner and Stanton-Geddes 2013; World Bank 2010)

jpe.library.arizona.edu/...

flooded nursing home, Houston...

As if we might expect such a malevolent administration to care that the most vulnerable will feel the effects of the flood the most.

“...the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”

To Trump and his followers, it doesn’t matter if we can’t believe the President as long as they ensure we can’t believe anyone else, either.

Sure, the apotheosis of all this will make traditional governance—passing laws, making treaties, regulating in the public interest—impossible.

But the people in charge will be able to do all kinds of other stuff while no one’s watching, or while no one can see.

• They can change regulations to make them more favorable to allies and donors.
• They can figure out how to suppress their opponents’ voters.
• They can embed moneymaking enterprises into governance.

The tsunami of lies will recede, leaving behind only the swamp.

Trump's lying is all id https://t.co/0WHDhVFHBb

— WIRED (@WIRED) July 9, 2017

Things will only change when we foment political change at all levels and reverse what has been more clearly a slide to authoritarianism. Surprisingly, public works are seen as private works in the current climate, even as a more socialized approach to infrastructure, energy, and environment is essential.

(May)

The president’s budget proposal sets aside just $200 billion for infrastructure over the next 10 years while vowing to meet Trump’s much higher target by incentivizing private development and clearing the way for projects that the Obama administration nixed over environmental concerns, most notably the Keystone XL pipeline. Yet the White House simultaneously called for slashing the budget for existing infrastructure programs at the Department of Transportation (by more than 12 percent) and the Army Corps of Engineers (by more than 16 percent), which Democrats said would cancel out the impact of Trump’s promised investment.

The Trump Administration has declared this week “Infrastructure Week,” and today the President is expected to portray his agenda as a major new investment in revamping the nation’s roads, bridges, tunnels, and railways. Yet despite calling for a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, the President hasn’t explained how the $200 billion in new, undefined spending in his budget would achieve that goal. And a closer look at that budget reveals that it would actually weaken federal support for infrastructure by reducing Highway Trust Fund spending, cutting other infrastructure such as mass transit, prioritizing private investment, and shifting costs to states and localities…

That outcome reflects the fiscal priorities at the core of the budget. To present lower deficits while cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, the budget must cut domestic spending across the board – including in infrastructure. How roads, bridges, and railways get funded becomes a problem for states and cities to solve. Despite the rhetoric of “Infrastructure Week,” the end result would be a major step backwards in rebuilding the infrastructure we need.

.cbpp.org/...