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Building Regulation Passed by City Council

4,158 Views | 57 Replies | Last: 5 yr ago by Diggity
AG1904
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AG
Does anyone know where I can read the actual regulations that were passed by city council today? None of the news outlets I've read so far link to the document.
bigjag19
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AG
I'm against it.
sts7049
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AG
http://abc13.com/new-rules-for-houston-buildings-to-meet-500-year-floodplains/3301062/

don't think you looked very hard
Diggity
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AG
It's going to kill new construction in the 500 year.

Not very well thought out.

His 84% quote is meaningless because the vast majority of those homes were built in the 50's and 60's.
aggiedent
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AG
Houston has been long overdue for some common sense building regulations that protect homeowners. Now we need some effort in building a 3rd reservoir and protecting the eastern edge of the Katy Prairie from development. All the county commissioners say they support those things........but talk is cheap in Houston.
aggiedent
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AG
No........it's not going to kill development in the 500 year plain.
Diggity
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AG
It's going to add roughly $30K to homes built there.

Why would a builder choose to mess with that if they can build outside the 500?
combat wombat™
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AG
Gentrification? I'm thinking of desirable areas that are closer in to town... where property values are high. If I wanted to live in a specific area and had to buy a lot with a tear down on it, I'd be happy to pay an extra $30,000 to make sure my house didn't flood in the future.
Diggity
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AG
If people were willing to pay the extra cost for pier and beam, it wouldn't be an issue.

History has shown that most buyers will not pay significantly extra for things they cannot see.

I could see the argument that land prices in those areas will just have to fall accordingly.

I guess we'll see what happens.
stroodles
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AG
Just wait until flood control redefines what a 100 and 500 year event are.
MemorialTXAg
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So what's going to happen in 100? Someone will figure out where a hypothetical 500 is and you have to be 2ft above that?
Diggity
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AG
I don't think anything has changed with the 100.
Diggity
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AG
agreed. which is another reason why they didn't need to rush into this.
MemorialTXAg
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Some reports suggest that 100 would have to also adjust to 2ft above a (hypothetical?) 500. Apparently in some instances that's as high as 8ft.
MemorialTXAg
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Looks like the city really thought this through. Least qualified knee jerking at its finest.
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Liquid Wrench
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Diggity said:

agreed. which is another reason why they didn't need to rush into this.
I thought there might be enough councilman raising objections to put the brakes on this. The Chronicle did a little hitjob suggesting that councilmen were only raising objections because homebuilders make campaign donations, I hope that didn't affect the vote. This could have some serious unintended consequences in lower-end neighborhoods.
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Al Bula
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AG
MemorialTXAg
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jayelbee said:

I couldn't quickly find something with 100 year elevations vs 500 year at different points, but here's a good map to see how much more area gets added when you go from 100-500. Generally speaking, the larger the area of 500 year vs 100 year, the bigger change in flood elevation.

White Oak through GOOF and buffalo bayou from downtown out to about Voss only add a few houses on each street. Probably less than 6" difference.

http://www.harriscountyfemt.org


Cool, thanks for the explanation. Would be interesting to see what the elevation difference is between current 100 vs 500 across Houston. Are there plans to redraw the BFEs as a result of the last 3 years?
FarmerJohn
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AG
Quote:

Mayor Turner proposed the changes to the city code, known as chapter 19, a few weeks after Harris County officials approved similar changes that stiffen the rules for building in areas that flood.
Looks like it's not just the city. The last three years we've had flooding in the 500 year flood plain. Every year I find myself tearing out dry wall in homes that have never flooded before. I don't see how anyone can think those maps are accurate but who knows when they will be revised. We can't wait any longer. You can always change the law again if they ever update the 100 year flood to where the 500 is today. Either way the homes need to be raised. If we are being honest, we did this to ourselves.
Diggity
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AG
This is for new construction.

The silly thing is you can still rebuild below the 100 year as long as you don't spend more than 50% of pre-flood value. That's a much bigger issue to me.
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94chem
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I moved from 73' in the 100 year plain in KW to 58' in the 500 year plain in Kingwood, 2 miles away. The 100 year home didn't flood, and the 500 year did. I have no clue what the flood maps will look like when they redraw this mess, and I couldn't understand the wording of the proposal when I read it. It looked like both zones were requiring the same amount of elevation increase relative to the plain boundary elevation. Okayyyy...
94chem
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Diggity said:

This is for new construction.

The silly thing is you can still rebuild below the 100 year as long as you don't spend more than 50% of pre-flood value. That's a much bigger issue to me.


Whatever "pre flood value" means...and whatever "rebuild cost" means...and whatever "100 year" means.
MemorialTXAg
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Is flood insurance mandatory in Harris for new mortgages regardless of BFE level after Harvey?
94chem
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#YESSIR! said:

Is flood insurance mandatory in Harris for new mortgages regardless of BFE level after Harvey?


No, but part of FIP's debt is that they haven't marketed policies to low risk homeowners. Realtors and builders could be incentivized to sell the policies.
26.2
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Maybe we should kill development in the places that flooded each of the last three years.
MemorialTXAg
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26.2 said:

Maybe we should kill development in the places that flooded each of the last three years.


Good thing you aren't on the city council.
TXTransplant
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94chem said:

#YESSIR! said:

Is flood insurance mandatory in Harris for new mortgages regardless of BFE level after Harvey?


No, but part of FIP's debt is that they haven't marketed policies to low risk homeowners. Realtors and builders could be incentivized to sell the policies.


This. I think every homeowner in Harris Co should have a flood policy, unless you live in a high rise. The NFIP is pretty much broke; more people need to be paying in. If a $450/year policy breaks the bank, then you can't afford to own a house.

However, I personally know people who have been questioned by their insurance agent when they've tried to buy a flood policy that's not required by the mortgage co. Along the lines of "Are you sure you want this? It's not required." And they are conservative because they don't want to be accused of pushing policies that aren't required onto their customers. Not to mention, developers and realtors love to tout "flood insurance not required" as a selling feature.

I just got my NFIP renewal a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised that the premium hadn't increased. But I'm afraid over the next few years that's exactly what's going to happen - those of us who are doing the right thing even though it's not "required" are going to be penalized in the form of higher premiums.

There are houses in my neighborhood that flooded (some twice) that still aren't in a zone where flood insurance is required. The mortgage companies need to take a hard look at this, too, and adjust their requirements on those properties.
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26.2
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#YESSIR! said:

26.2 said:

Maybe we should kill development in the places that flooded each of the last three years.


Good thing you aren't on the city council.


I don't huff enough paint to be on city council.

We've got two options going forward:

1. Stop bailing out flooded areas (not gunna happen).
2. Make everyone pay to fix the houses that flood every year, like the poster above said.

I'd like to reduce the cost of option 2 as much as possible. I don't care how it impacts up and coming neighborhoods. If the gov is incentivizing people to build and buy in dumb places, we should stop that.
CDUB98
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AG
Diggity said:

This is for new construction.

The silly thing is you can still rebuild below the 100 year as long as you don't spend more than 50% of pre-flood value. That's a much bigger issue to me.


It's a great way to make sure gentrification doesn't happen and keeps the po' 'hoods, po'.
TXTransplant
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jayelbee said:

NFIP won't have to do anything about these homes. They'll get remapped into the 100 year when we come back around to update the maps.

I suspect that there will be several thousand structures added to the flood plain when it's remapped. Harvey will probably also shake out to be a 300-400 year event in the new scale.


I'm curious to see how that shakes out in my area (unincorporated Harris Co.). None of the houses that flooded were in the 100 year flood plain, and some weren't even in the 500 (although, looking at the current flood maps, the boundary lines are somewhat of a head-scratcher).

There has also been some digging done into the developer and the MUD when it comes to the adequacy if the drainage. I think some people believe the flooding could have been prevented had the drainage been done correctly in the first place (IIRC, a FOI request may have uncovered emails that suggested it was not, and the developer and MUD were aware of the issues).
schmellba99
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AG
jayelbee said:

#YESSIR! said:

So what's going to happen in 100? Someone will figure out where a hypothetical 500 is and you have to be 2ft above that?

The 500 year BFE is the same at any given distance down a creek/river/bayou. What changes is the boundary of what's considered floodway, 100 year floodplain, and 500 year floodplain.

For example (this is all made up for simplicity sake) if you're 1 mile west of beltway 8 on buffalo bayou. The 100 year BFE is 68' and the 500 year is 70'. It doesn't matter if your 50 feet from the edge of the bayou or 5000 feet, the 500 year flood elevation is still 70'. Now if you go 2 miles up buffalo bayou west from the beltway, it might be 71' and 74'.

To set the boundaries, they basically connect all of the dots where the ground elevation matches the 100 year or 500 year BFE and everything with a lower elevation is considered flood plain.

As far as the impact of building to 500 year vs 100 year, for the most part it's pretty minimal unless you're in one of the reservoirs. Because the amount of rain doesn't linearly translate to the frequency of the storm (500 year storm isn't 5x as much rain as 100 year) and because it takes more and more water to fill up the next incremental inch of depth in a watershed, the difference in a lot of places is only a few inches.
It's minimal with new construction, because it's easy to import fill or otherwise alter subgrade to meet elevation requirements.

With existing structures, most of the time it's not particularly easy. Raising a house with a slab on grade 2 additional feet isn't something you just come in and do. In addition to the physical components of actually elevating an existing structure, you have to look at what changes doing so will have on the topography immediately around the area, plus the cumulative changes from everybody having to do it. What started out as raising up 2 feet may become 4 or 5 feet when you start looking at the larger geographic impacts.

And as long as developments continue to be approved without actual regional impact studies, we will never really have more than a half assed guess as to what the flooding lines of demarcation will be because each time we change an area in a vacuum without looking at the regional impacts, everything changes.
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