Tucked in the southwest corner of Houston, between the Sam Houston Tollway, I-69, and West Bellfort, sits Ruffino Hills, a former landfill that closed in the 1980s. The property was later redeveloped into a golf course during the 1990s. It currently sits unused despite very public promises from city officials to turn the property into a regional detention pond. 

On Dec. 7, 2022, the Houston City Council voted to approve the purchase of 73.081 acres of Ruffino Hills from West Houston Place, a city of about 15,000 residents that is located within the inner loop of Houston and formerly used the municipal landfill site. 

Ahead of the vote, then-Mayor Sylvester Turner discussed in a City Council meeting the significance of the purchase, which his administration pursued for seven years. The Ruffino Hills land to be purchased was part of a larger effort with the Harris County Flood Control District, which included the West Keegans Bayou Improvement District, with both projects aiming to improve flood control measures and reduce flood damage in the region. 

“I want to highlight—even before we vote on this—that when it comes to flood mitigation, this is a major project,” said Turner, who died in March. “This is very important to the city of Houston, and to the future of flood mitigation.” 

The purchase of Ruffino Hills totaled $10.5 million, and the measure passed without any further discussion at the meeting. Despite the project’s stated importance, movement on Ruffino Hills is at a standstill. Even the city of Houston’s press release about the purchase of the land currently leads to an error page. 

Houston, which sprawls across 22 bayou systems and waterways, is affected by a combination of risk factors that increase the likelihood of flooding. This includes natural geography, poor development, and escalating climate disasters, causing a perilous flooding problem so devastating that some neighborhoods in the city transform into ghost towns because of the conditions caused by repeated flooding. 

Almost eight years post-Hurricane Harvey, the Harris County Flood Control District has only completed 43 of the 181 projects attached to a $2.5 billion bond measure. The listed city flood mitigation and detention projects are also still in various stages of development and construction. 

Stormwater detention basins are a primary means to reduce the impact of flooding. Designed to manage runoff by storing stormwater and gradually releasing it until it is completely drained, they provide a tangible solution. Houstonians, who are all too aware of the impact of catastrophic flooding events, have said that without significant changes in the city that include the use of stormwater detention basins, the extreme risk of flooding remains a continued threat to their safety. 

“That’s a misallocation of funding, when you think about it,” said Kourtney Revels, a local resident and member of the local environmental group Northeast Action Collective (NAC), referencing the increased costs of stalled projects. “We paid for that. The taxpayers paid for it. For the project to be stalled out, that money could have gone somewhere else.” 

As a group of community members from Houston’s historic Fifth Ward in Northeast Houston, NAC has firsthand experience with the Sisyphean task of advocating for drainage and flood mitigation investment in areas where communities need it most. 

The slow grind of bureaucracy 

As Turner noted in the city council meeting when the purchase of Ruffino Hills was announced, the property took years to acquire, and acquiring the land was just the first step in a long, overwhelmingly bureaucratic process. 

In an interview with Prism, Houston City Council Member Edward Pollard summarized the timeline and process for a flood mitigation project to move toward completion, which includes getting approval from the city, securing funding, project design, project bids, and finally construction. He estimated that each of the steps takes almost a year to complete, with bigger projects taking longer. Pollard noted one primary flood mitigation and infrastructure improvement project in the district that was approved around 2021. “We’re sitting on 2025, and I think we’re just in the design phase,” the council member explained. 

Revels said the lag is a result of the city “being too spread out, trying to do too much when there should be a specific focus on areas that have historically flooded.” 

The city of Houston first submitted paperwork to process and excavate waste, a process known as landfill mining, from Ruffino Hills back in May 2023. However, Erin Jones, the communications director and public information officer for Houston Public Works, told Prism in March that the city’s application “is still in the review process” with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).”

In an email, a TCEQ spokesperson confirmed what Jones said, writing that the agency has not made a final decision on the application. Without its approval, the city of Houston cannot move forward with the design and construction of the stormwater detention pond.

In an earlier email, Jones told Prism, “Normally, responses to applications take place within six months after an application is submitted. The TCEQ made changes to the process, which affected the review of applications. We’re in communication with the TCEQ and hope to hear back from them soon.” Without clarity from any institution, it is impossible to parse out where bureaucratic changes end and legitimate safety questions begin. 

During the public comment period for the proposed landfill mining, Latrice Babin, executive director of Harris County Pollution Control, and Elita Castleberry, a solid waste specialist, submitted a letter outlining significant recommendations for the project. They expressed concern that the proposed excavation didn’t go far enough to successfully and thoroughly analyze the area’s “hazardous constituents.” It is unclear whether communications about these concerns occurred between county and city officials. 

Then there is the ongoing issue of expense. Pollard said the projected cost of the full remediation of hazardous material is $100 million. According to David Hawes, executive director of the Southwest Houston Redevelopment Authority, Ruffino Hills was a project that seemed particularly important to Houston’s chief recovery officer and “flood czar,” Stephen Costello. However, Costello left current Mayor John Whitmire’s administration in June 2024, just months after Whitmire took office. 

“Ever since he left, we have not seen as much proactive engagement on that project,” Pollard said.

The slow grind of bureaucracy, coupled with the departure of agency officials, not only stalls individual environmental projects, but in some cases, entirely halts a previous administration’s environmental efforts.   

More recently, the new administration completely reshaped its environmental plan. In February, the city council voted unanimously “to rename the Office of Resilience and Sustainability to the Office of Recovery and Resiliency and move it to the Mayor’s office.” In a strong mayor system, which Houston has, this kind of transition consolidates even more power under the mayor instead of leaving this essential environmental work under the jurisdiction of the Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department. Meanwhile, the website of the new office remains under construction. 

Engage Houston, a city website that serves as a public information database for Public Works projects, has also been down for months, displaying a page that says it’s “under construction.” “Whatever is happening, it doesn’t seem to me that things are even being stalled. It seems that things are happening. They’re moving, but there’s no transparency around the areas of priority,” said Revels, reflecting on the city’s current flood mitigation efforts. 

Despite the city passing a $20 million budget amendment for local drainage, NAC did not see the money in the second year. 

“It’s been hard to identify where that money really went, and it’s hard to get anybody to be able to sufficiently answer our questions,” Revels said. The absence of accessible information on key government websites makes the city’s environmental efforts even more opaque.  

When asked to comment on the city’s stymied flood mitigation efforts, the Harris County Flood Control District’s chief external affairs officer, Emily Woodell, would only say that the initiative “currently rests with the City of Houston.”

The lack of public information—and agencies’ efforts to punt responsibility elsewhere—has long been a cause for concern for local residents. NAC complained back in 2019 that county commissioners and Harris County Flood Control weren’t doing enough to prevent flooding in its neighborhoods or improve the public engagement process.

“The county and city must coordinate not just with each other, but with residents, who are the best source of information about the problems affecting their community,” read a statement from NAC in 2019 to the Harris County Commissioners Court. “If there are gaps between the county and city’s complementary roles, they must be identified and closed. The burden cannot be on residents to fill these gaps.”

Revels remains adamant that the city of Houston “needs a comprehensive plan.” NAC has advocated for a stormwater master plan, and Revels said it’s not unusual for community organizations to identify and bring projects to the city’s attention. “That means the city isn’t able to do an accurate assessment of its own drainage and flood mitigation system,” she said. 

The Ruffino Stormwater Detention Project joins other projects stuck in limbo, with little clarity about the project’s timeline, cost, or path forward. 

“Nobody’s in charge” 

Houstonians often orient themselves around disasters, referencing their move to the city or a certain neighborhood in relation to a particular storm or flood event. Allison, Ike, and Harvey are household names.

Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas in August 2017, dropping unprecedented rainfall and causing catastrophic flooding. According to the Harvey Data Project, more than a quarter of Houston households faced some stormwater impact, totaling $16 billion in residential damages. At the time, then-chief recovery officer Costello called the storm a “biblical event.” 

In the two years preceding Harvey, four federally declared flooding disasters impacted Houston, totaling $684 million in residential damages. The inability to fully recover from one flooding event before another hits only exacerbates recovery time and costs. 

In the wake of Harvey, University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment professor Philip R. Berke wrote about the many reasons Houston is vulnerable to “devastating floods,” which he said stem from urban sprawl, loss of habitat, and the disconnect between flood mitigation and freeway expansion.

But flooding is a longstanding issue in the region. Efforts to bypass natural flooding began with Houston’s earliest settlers, who attempted to “drain the land” to supplant the natural habitat for agricultural and timber production. 

By the turn of the 20th century, an inaugural drainage district was created in the Brays Bayou watershed, and the Harris County Flood Control District began later in 1937, precipitated by a flood event in December 1935 that caused Buffalo Bayou to rise 52 feet above normal levels. The outcry from locals and the efforts of multiple governmental entities to mitigate flooding appear like an endless loop throughout Houston’s history, repeating and increasing in frequency as climate change and development exacerbate the original risks that were natural to the land. 

Instead of course correcting, 2018 findings from the U.S. National Science Foundation made it clear that, in many cases, Houston’s flooding is a choice. 

“The perception among city officials and community leaders alike is that this situation is due to many institutionalized relationships between the real estate development sector, city government, and the Harris County Flood Control Commission,” according to the findings. “These developments have altered watersheds and the landscape in ways that make both new and existing developments more likely to flood.”

A prime example is the flooding in the subdivisions built upon the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs. After more than 5,000 of the region’s 14,000 homes flooded due to Hurricane Harvey, Houston and Harris County officials publicly blamed Congress and each other. Phil Bedient, a professor of engineering at Rice University, told ProPublica in 2017 that the flooding should be treated as a regional problem. But instead, “the city doesn’t talk to the county. The county certainly doesn’t know how to deal with the Corps of Engineers,” and “nobody’s in charge.”

To Revels, it’s clear that management responsibilities between the city and the county overlap, necessitating that the two entities work together. “Everybody has a responsibility, but getting the county or the city to assert that role is the more difficult part,” Revels said.

“Bottomland” 

For local residents who want accountability and to see city officials make tangible efforts to mitigate flooding, it is difficult to untangle the myriad of governmental authorities, potential revenue streams, and compounded outcomes from almost two centuries of development. No one knows this better than the region’s Indigenous and Black communities, whose histories in the region also illustrate histories of harm and environmental racism.

The ancient, sacred site of the Atakapa Ishak people, Bear Creek Mound, was located at the headwaters of Buffalo Bayou in what is now known as Houston. Though now bulldozed, the site used to be 40 feet high and 600 feet long. Mary Leblanc, a member of the Akokisa clan, told the Texas Observer in 2021 how this Indigenous community, whose history in the region dates back thousands of years, managed flooding. 

“The top of that mound was the place of refuge to which people went in times of floods or hurricanes. The flood waters never reached the top, and people could camp up there and be safe,” Leblanc said. 

Coinciding with the Texas Declaration of Independence, the Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen, known as the Allen brothers, later established Houston in August 1836 on a 6,642-acre parcel of land along the Buffalo Bayou. Fourteen years later, along Brays Bayou, the area known as Riceville was founded by Leonard Rice. The community is one of 13 Freedom Colonies in Harris County, founded by formerly enslaved people who settled these colonies during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras following Emancipation.

“Often, all that people could afford was what people call ‘bottomland’ or flood-prone land. Many [freedom colonies] were unmapped. Some people never declared their land ownership, so it was never part of the public record … and [there is a lack of] access to the communities—knowing where they are, as well as those communities being able to access the support that they need to prosper,” said Andrea Roberts, who has a doctorate of philosophy in community and regional planning, during a 2022 speech. Roberts is a descendant of an original Riceville community member, and she is the founder of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, an organization dedicated to preserving the heritage of Texas’ historic African American settlements.

Middle-class suburbs eventually overtook Riceville, now considered part of Houston’s District J and Harris County’s 1st and 4th Precincts. According to the Texas State Historical Association, “as late as 1982, the [Riceville] community had no city services, no public water facilities, and no sanitary sewer.” The Riceville Cemetery is visible from the Keegans Bayou Trail, and just south is Ruffino Hills. 

“The rain came, and I couldn’t do shit about it”

On May 16, 2024, a surprise derecho tore through Houston with winds upward of 100 mph, killing eight people, shattering windows downtown, and becoming one of 11 nationwide billion-dollar weather events in the first five months of 2024. Hundreds of thousands of people were without power for days, and elderly Houston residents found themselves stuck in particularly deplorable conditions. Then Hurricane Beryl hit less than two months later. 

Jim Blackburn, a Rice University professor and co-director of the university’s Severe Storm Prevention, Education, and Evacuation from Disaster Center, told the Houston Landing last year, “We were prepared for a flood, but we got Uri. We were prepared for a flood or Uri, then we got a derecho. These curveballs keep coming. It’s sort of like the new norm is curveballs.”

With worsening climate change and weather conditions, Revels told Prism that it’s now not uncommon “to see people not be able to recover.”

As climate disasters such as North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles wildfires continue an exponentially destructive path through the country, communities are faced with navigating both recovery and mitigation. For cities such as Houston that have already experienced unprecedented disasters like Hurricane Harvey, the lack of movement on Ruffino Hills leaves residents without much protection against the severe and inevitable risks of future flooding. 

The aftermath of the next storm will call into question what could have and should have been done. Media and governmental officials will once again try to parse out whether flooding is the result of poor development, lack of mitigation, or simply unavoidable. The reactionary approach is unsustainable, and so, too, is the demand that Houston residents remain resilient. 

Houston Poet Laureate Aris Kian co-wrote a response poem to Hurricane Beryl with more than 70 Houstonians called “Tired of #HoustonStrong”: 

the rain came and I couldn’t do shit
about it. streets painted with brown bayou’s
unrelenting flood—water rising even after the rain
is gone. concrete wet with the resilience
we mucked out after the last storm.

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor