It rained four days in Kenwood last week, and dark clouds always make residents wary.

The neighborhood along Greens Bayou in northeast Houston saw Hurricane Harveys floodwaters top street signs three years ago. And there have been three floods since then.

Most of Kenwood, a working class, mostly Latino neighborhood, is so deep in the 100-year floodplain that Harris County engineers have concluded no flood control project could protect it from a strong storm. Instead, the county began a voluntary buyout program in Kenwood and seven other vulnerable areas two years ago, but found few takers. Under pressure to spend federal Harvey recovery aid more quickly, the county this summer chose to make the buyouts mandatory.

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The extraordinary step only underscores that, more than three years after Harvey rolled ashore as the worst rainstorm in continental U.S. history and amid a record-setting Atlantic hurricane season progress toward reducing Houstons greatest vulnerability has been painfully slow and piecemeal at best.

Some of the Houston regions largest flood control efforts after Hurricane Harvey will be funded mostly with federal or state recovery aid. They include:

Four projects totaling $280 million, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency footing half the bill and city and county agencies paying most of the other half: A large city-county detention basin planned on a defunct golf course in Inwood (expected to start construction next year); flood gates for the Lake Houston dam (now being designed); the North Canal, a project that would reduce the flood risk in downtown and along much of lower White Oak Bayou (beginning design soon); and detention basins in the Memorial City area.

The city and county have until Oct. 28 to apply to the Texas General Land Office for pieces of the $4.3 billion in flood control funds Congress approved for Texas.

City and county officials are awaiting word on applications they filed with the Texas Water Development Board, which is weighing which projects will get pieces of a $793 million flood control fund the Legislature created last year.

Voters passed a $2.5 billion bond two years ago, giving the county a huge injection of funding to tackle nearly 200 flood control projects. Those projects take time, often years, to complete, however. And county officials concede the cost to fully protect against 100-year storms is more than 10 times higher than what voters approved.

City Hall lacks a comparable cash infusion and so mostly is waiting on the slow-motion arrival of federal aid. Meanwhile, its voter-approved street and drainage program has been shorted by more than $260 million over the last six years, money that has been used on other city services.

The city and county did update their floodplain building standards in the months after the storm, but City Council has yet to follow Commissioners Courts lead in strengthening storm water detention rules.

Folks are definitely still quite dissatisfied with the level of flood protection thats been provided thus far from the city and the county, said Chrishelle Palay, director of Houston Organizing Movement for Equity. When it comes to historically underserved communities of color, those are the communities where the infrastructure has been disinvested, both from street flooding and from watershed protection.

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The Houston regions most readily available defense against future floods is the $2.5 billion county bond.

To date, the county Flood Control District has begun work on 144 of its 188 planned bond projects, but only 18 have reached the construction stage, said Deputy Executive Director Matt Zeve. A dozen projects the district funded with other revenues also have been completed since Harvey, removing an estimated 5,000 homes from the 100-year floodplain.

The bond funds are helping to accelerate long-planned projects and start new ones, Zeve said, but large infrastructure improvements cannot be engineered and built overnight.

There are places in Harris County that are right where they were three years ago, but there are several areas where weve completed projects or are constructing projects right now, and those areas will have a lower risk of flooding in a future storm event, Zeve said. Its not as fast as everyone wants, but we do feel like were making good progress on major flood damage reduction projects all over Harris County, with more to come.

Home buyouts, though some take a year to complete, move the fastest, making the 560 repeatedly flooded homes the county has bought since Harvey among the few tangible signs of progress the city and county have made toward reducing flood risk since the storm.

Even this seemingly simple task, however, can be an arduous process fraught with difficulties and heartache for residents.

Kenwood resident Gloria Diaz said she understands why the buyouts are necessary and has no objection to moving.

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She and her husband Jos live on Darjean Street in a trailer on stilts, where she stays home to raise their three children. The couple, however, have an informal rent-to-buy agreement with the owner, meaning they would not necessarily receive the check Harris County plans to cut for the property.

Were worried, because I dont know how much money theyll pay, or whether it will cover moving, Gloria Diaz said. Its too much stress.

Even if the countys bond projects were all done, thousands of homes still would be at risk of flooding from inadequate drainage on city streets.

Most of Houstons drainage improvements since Harvey have been those that come when a beat-up street is rebuilt with new, larger drainage pipes underneath.

The projects that represent the citys biggest flood control effort post-Harvey those funded with federal recovery aid are inching closer to reality, but none has begun construction.

Houston Public Works has used its own funds to complete or start construction on 44 drainage projects since Harvey, though engineering had begun before the storm on all but three of those. Design work started after Harvey on another 22 projects that have yet to begin construction.

Most of the projects Houston Public Works lists as flood mitigation efforts work that goes beyond a series of rebuilt pipes or ditches are individual bridge replacements over Brays Bayou as part of a partnership with the Flood Control District to complete long-delayed Project Brays.

Houston also has finished 153 minor projects since Harvey to fix pipes or clear ditches to reduce the flood risk block by block or street by street. Another 64 such efforts, which average about $190,000 per job, are under construction.

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Complicating its drainage efforts is the fact that, for six years, Houston mayors have transferred less than the full amount of property taxes envisioned in the charter amendment that formed the citys street and drainage repair program a decade ago. Mayor Sylvester Turner, who is being sued by two engineers who led the 2010 referendum drive over the issue, has defended his interpretation of the charter language that has allowed him to short the program by an estimated $263 million over five years, arguing that any other reading would cripple city services the dollars are funding instead.

The city still has a lot of challenges with our infrastructure, and in areas that flooded during Harvey, some of those areas might continue to flood and some of those areas wont, said the citys chief recovery officer, Steve Costello.

Still, Costello noted the city has acquired land for future detention basins, including 23 acres in southwest Houston last winter, and is in negotiations for other sites near Kingwood and along Buffalo Bayou.

City council this month also voted to acquire three tracts for a detention basin in the Westbury neighborhood, at Fondren and West Bellfort, and to complete engineering on a storm sewer project on the neighborhoods eastern edge, where residents have flooded repeatedly.

After a lot of years of hearing promises that something would be done to mitigate the flooding along Willow Waterhole Bayou, that those promises have now been funded is always a good thing to hear, said Westbury civic leader Becky Edmondson. Were ecstatic. The two of those should make a big difference.

Harveys devastation in August 2017 put pressure on elected officials to take immediate action to reduce future flooding. One of the few steps leaders could take immediately was to strengthen development regulations.

Harris County approved stricter floodplain development rules that December; City Council followed on a narrow vote the following April. Both required new homes to sit higher off the ground and applied those elevation rules to a larger area.

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Other changes have come more slowly.

Though they were vocal proponents of the flood bond, Houston-area developers quietly lobbied Harris County not to require new projects to set aside more space for water storage. Commissioners Court did it anyway this past summer at the recommendation of Flood Control District leaders.

The county essentially forced the 34 cities within its borders to update their building rules, too, threatening to withhold flood bond money if they did not.

The city of Houston, however, has yet to update its detention rules. The city is planning to do so by the end of this year, Costello said, but meetings of a drainage task force have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Were going to use the countys detention requirement as the floor, he said. I think thats where the city is headed.

Some residents are perplexed that while local governments are making development in flood-prone areas more difficult, they have not stopped approving permits there.

A quarter-mile east of the planned Westbury detention basin, Edmondson said residents have learned that a developer plans to pave a site on the south bank of Willow Waterhole Bayou and build a gas station and convenience store. The site is fully within the floodplain, Zeve said.

Heres the city spending all this money buying up property to try to mitigate flooding, and on the other hand you have another city department thats just approving these projects because they meet the rules, Edmondson said.

The city and county are sending mixed messages by continuing to allow development in the floodplain, said Jim Blackburn, director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center at Rice University. Blackburn said doing so repeats the sins of the past at a time when there is far more evidence of their consequences.

I think many of the projects that are being allowed will end up being bought out, Blackburn said. We have to have more room for water in this community.

mike.morris@chron.com

zach.despart@chron.com

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Progress on post-Harvey flood control efforts remain slow. Heres why - Houston Chronicle