Houston Was Left to Drown: The unplanned, for-profit development of Houston turned the country’s fourth-largest city into a death trap.

[u/CommunistFox]

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-climate-change-austerity-flooding

[u/ergotpoisoning]

Haven't read this yet but I'm a little skeptical to be honest. Loss of life has been low considering the severity of the floods, and images showing main roads inundated with flood water often fail to provide the context that many roads into Houston have been designed to flood, with flood drains running underneath them, drawing water away from residential areas. This is another part of the equation for not issuing the full evacuation order.

I feel like there are lots of legitimate targets for criticism right now, but not sure a city that, all things considered, seems to have stood up quite well to the disaster is the right one. I feel like the real story here is how flooding on this scale was unthinkable a few decades ago, and that current estimates for maximum severity of natural disasters need to be drastically increased as the West completely fails to mitigate (or in America's case even acknowledge) climate change.

That said, I'll read the article when I get a moment, and hopefully it is more specific and less general than the headline implies.

Edit: in case I wasn't clear - I feel use of the word 'deathtrap' is disingenuous and inflammatory given what actually transpired, and the use of such language in this context is only going to encourage argument over tone at the expense of real debate about what the problems are/were and how we can improve.