Why You See So Many Raised Homes in Houston

When Julia and James Long Meyerland home flooded for the third time with Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the couple considered moving away, but something held them back. Even though they had owned the house for less than a decade, the connection ran deep.

Julia, now an architect at 514 Design, had visited the house designed in 1965 by Hy Applebaum for her parents’ friends throughout her childhood. When her owners were ready to sell in 2008, they called her first. It suffered minor flooding in 2015 and 2016; the Longs cleaned up and left. The decision was more significant in 2017, after having more than 2 feet of floodwater and dealing with updated city code requiring all new construction to be raised 5 feet off the ground.

Chuck and Connie Broskoski faced a similar dilemma for their Braeswood Place home, a cozy midcentury ranch located a block from Braes Bayou. He nearly drowned in Hurricane Harvey, with 6 to 8 feet of floodwater causing extensive damage. The city’s new building codes for Houston’s 100- and 500-year flood plains meant the Broskoskis would have to rebuild any home 7 feet, 7 inches off the ground.

Given the depth of the flood, Connie wasn’t surprised by the new elevation requirements, but Chuck was hesitant about what to do next. “All we saw was people just lifting their houses off the ground, and that’s not what we wanted.” I couldn’t imagine ours could be totally different,” Chuck says. “Initially, we thought we would sell the lot.”

The Memorial Day and Tax Day rainstorms in 2015 and 2016, respectively, caused a lot of damage, but were child’s play compared to Hurricane Harvey, which in 2017 hovered over the region for three days, dumping about 50 inches of rain. Cities and counties have sprung into action with new drainage work, ranging from the $131 million North Canal Project and the $80 million Inwood Forest Stormwater Detention Pond to more extensive efforts. creative spaces where public green spaces also serve as rainwater basins. The Willow Waterhole Greenway can hold 600 million gallons of water, while Exploration Green in Clear Lake can hold 500 million gallons.

However, immediate efforts focused on building codes for 100- and 500-year floodplains, expanding both and requiring new construction to be built higher than the ground. Since Harvey, the city of Houston has required new homes built in the 500-year floodplain to be at least 2 feet above the floodplain. The height off the ground a house should be built varies, as the elevation of each house may differ. In many neighborhoods that have experienced flooding, it is not uncommon to see homes raised 4 to 10 feet.

The Broskoskis’ house had to be 7 feet, 7 inches off the ground, and they ended up with an 8-foot-high, unair-conditioned main floor that they use as a two-car garage, with a workshop. for Connie and a home gym for Chuck.

“The flooding really destroyed Meyerland’s beautiful atmosphere, its 1960s-designed homes, and its many beautiful mature oak trees. Now the houses are taller than the oak trees,” explains Julia Long. “It’s definitely different. We always thought we would move into one of the smaller houses in Meyerland when we were done raising our kids. Now that’s no longer a possibility…there aren’t many of these houses left.

These new municipal codes, along with homeowners’ fear of flooding, sparked a post-hurricane construction wave that radically changed Houston’s architectural image.

Not all of the homes in Meyerland, Bellaire and the Braeswood Place area — three neighborhoods that were extensively flooded — are considered midcentury gems, but they were all part of the rush to build new housing after the Second World War. It was at this time that modern architecture in America began to supplant the traditional lines of the Beaux Arts era and owners hired local architects such as Howard Barnstone, William Jenkins, Burdette Keeland, Lars Bang, Lucian Hood, Fred MacKie and Karl Kamrath. Most were one-story homes with 1,500 to 2,500 square feet of living space that hugged the ground and reflected the landscape around it.

By the 21st century, however, many of them had become demolitions, and Hurricane Harvey accelerated new construction in many neighborhoods, replacing smaller homes with double- or triple-size homes that devoured ordinary land. “Even the two-story houses from before (the hurricane) are dwarfed by what has come back. It’s a shocking transition,” says Anne Eamon, who with her husband, Mark Schatz, is principal at architecture studio M+A.

The same is true for Houston’s sprawling suburbs, and it’s likely to continue, since the long and arduous process of getting money from FEMA for the Harvey floods is still underway.

“In the neighborhoods we’re talking about, most of the original stock was typical of its era, building products, and that satisfied the majority of the market,” says Steve Curry, principal at Curry Boudreaux Architects. “Overall, the real estate products currently sold on the market are standard products and they are very similar. The obvious difference is in scale, vertical scale differences and volumetric differences. They leave no room for trees and are built up to the maximum lot line. There are several examples of people buying two lots and building a giant house on it.

These high bases also make a new home cost more. Rame and Russell Hruska, of Intexure Architects and Aura Prefab, said that for one of their clients, the difference between concrete blocks and poured concrete for the raised base was $100,000. Adding a stucco finish to the base for a more seamless appearance would cost an additional $6 to $8 per square foot, or potentially tens of thousands of dollars.

Making these very tall houses less threatening requires creative thinking. Long, who chose to raise her existing home, which alone cost $300,000, used a concrete base, added brick details and planted fig ivy to grow on it. To avoid a massive staircase, she created a few concrete and brick slabs that guests climb before reaching a smaller staircase. In the end, it’s a good look.

For the Broskoskis, the Hruskas designed a beautiful wooden garage door on one end and planted pink grasses to create a meadow look on the other. It’s a visual trick to give everyone passing by more to see than a concrete wall. Schatz noted that architects have a creative toolbox for making these taller homes more modest, but builders working from their own design plans often think differently.

“They are aiming for new greatness; it’s like having a circular driveway and the height of your house off the ground has become a new status symbol,” says Schatz. “I see this as very problematic, from an aesthetic and social point of view. There hasn’t been a lot of critical thinking about how we build. We will accumulate in the air, but we do not think about how we accumulate in the air.