3of4Parkside at Memorial, a complex of apartments & townhomes in the Energy Corridor, flooded with over 5 feet of water after the Barker and Addicks Reservoirs were released. Community Manager Lori Smith recently won a Harvey’s Heroes Award from Houston Apartment Association for keeping all of her residents safe and informed.Photo: Parkside at Memorial

4of4Parkside at Memorial, a complex of apartments & townhomes in the Energy Corridor, flooded with over 5 feet of water after the Barker and Addicks Reservoirs were released. Community Manager Lori Smith recently won a Harvey’s Heroes Award from Houston Apartment Association for keeping all of her residents safe and informed.Photo: Parkside at Memorial

A new study is raising concerns that restrictions on new construction put in place after Hurricane Harvey could leave low-income residents with fewer choices for affordable housing.

More than 475,000 people in Harris County live in multifamily units at risk of flooding, according to the study released Thursday by the Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium. The group includes the University of Houston, the Kinder Institute and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, among others. Even without the flooding risk, units are becoming less and less affordable.

“The issue of flooding and the issue of affordable housing are very connected,” said Christof Spieler, the consortium’s project manager. "We have a lot of Houstonians who are in the difficult position where the housing they can afford is the housing that puts them at risk of flooding.”

In Harris County, 26 percent of all multifamily units — buildings with two or more units — are currently located within a flood-risk area. After Harvey, Houston leaders passed an ordinance known as Chapter 19 that requires elevation for rebuilding in the flood plain. The down side, according to the consortium, is that this requirement may lead to the loss of affordable multifamily units in the floodplain.

“Chapter 19 has the best interests of people in mind, but I just don’t think that we really thought through the potential impact on multifamily units,” said study co-author Susan Rogers, the director of the University of Houston’s Community Design Resource Center. “I don’t think any of us want to encourage apartment owners to continue to renovate and put people in (apartments) clueless of what could happen to them.”

While most of the multifamily units in Houston that are being rebuilt were permitted before the ordinance took effect, researchers heard through focus groups that property owners are worried about what will happen after the next storm.

“If you’re trying to keep affordable units, but safe and not-falling-apart units, you don’t want reputable property owners to either go bankrupt and abandon their properties to the kind of ‘owner of last resort’ who will potentially not bring things back up to where they should be,” said Kyle Shelton, director of strategic partnerships at Rice University’s Kinder Institute and another of the study’s lead authors.

The lack of affordable housing units isn’t a new problem in Houston. Last year’s Hurricane Harvey, which followed major flooding incidents the previous two years, just exacerbated it. From 2000 to 2014, the study found, the number of extremely low-income renters in Harris County rose by 37 percent. But the number of suitable, affordable units available to these renters rose by only 18 percent.

Houston is a city of renters. Within the city limits, 57 percent of households — just over 478,000 — rent. The availability of low-income housing hasn’t kept up with the population. As of 2017, 335,000 of the affordable multifamily housing units in Harris County were at risk of becoming unaffordable.

Compared to other major metro areas, Harris County, which includes most of the city of Houston, lags in the share of families receiving public assistance, the study found. One in 17 Harris County households get some form of housing assistance, compared to one of every six in New York City and one of seven in Fulton County, Ga., which includes Atlanta.

Of the units that public subsidies are making affordable, about 11,000 could slip outside that range by 2023 with subsidies expiring.

Meantime, the demand for affordable housing remains high. One in every 11 Harris County households making less than $20,000 a year is “cost-burdened” — meaning the household spends more than 30 percent of income on housing.

“It’s an important contradiction to the narrative that Houston is affordable for everyone,” said Shelton. “Rents are going up across the board.”

Unlike some East Coast cities, Houston and many other Texas cities didn’t push to have affordable housing developments following World War II, contributing to today’s lack of available subsidized housing units. Instead, Spieler said, the city relied on the market to provide housing and has never had a comprehensive affordable housing plan.

“Renters in Houston have absolutely no power,” Rogers said. “There’s no guarantee that rents won’t increase outside of your reach.”

The study zeroed in on several Houston neighborhoods, including Gulfton (a neighborhood selected to be part of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Complete Communities initiative). In Gulfton, more than half of residents were “cost-burdened.” Multifamily units make up 94 percent of all area housing. The fair market rent for a one-bedroom in Gulfton, the study found, is $1,040 per month — twice what the average family in the neighborhood can afford.

“There’s a tipping point where the land becomes so valuable that demolition and redevelopment are triggered,” Rogers said. “We’re worried Gulfton may be at that point.”

In Gulfton, families need to make an average of $7.50 more per hour to afford fair market rent. In Greenspoint, another focus area, families need an average of $7 more per hour.

The study’s authors offered several solutions to the lack of affordable housing, including increasing the number of housing units, offering incentives to developers for building affordable units, streamlining multifamily permitting and creating an eviction protection program.

With federal block grants, Shelton said, the city could offer incentives to developers in the bidding process by adding points for building outside the floodplain and within reachable public transit — or any other priority area that helps low-income families.

Alternately, he said, the city could address the growing gap between rent and income by approving a minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and Texas is not among the 30-some states that have a minimum wage higher than that level.

“It’s not just building our way out of the issue,” he said. “It’s increasing income in ways that allow people to afford more units without spending more than 30 percent of their income.”

The city could also create a housing trust fund, as many cities have long done, to buy out private multifamily properties at risk of being sold. It’s not the most politically palatable option, Rogers acknowledged, but one that might be necessary.

Said Shelton: “We will likely not solve it all by the next storm, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the long-term view.”

Mayor Sylvester Turner issued a press release in response to the study's findings.

"I have made affordable housing a priority during my time as mayor and I will continue to do so," the mayor wrote in the release." Many of the recommendations cited in the report are already being implemented in some form, from building more affordable housing to creating land trusts to ensure long term affordability."

Sarah Smith is a reporter on the metro desk covering housing, homelessness, mental health and poverty.

Before joining the Chronicle, she worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she investigated sexual abuse and cover-ups in the independent fundamental Baptist movement. She was also a fellow at ProPublica, where she wrote a piece on mental illness and criminal justice in Mississippi. Another ProPublica story of hers about domestic violence victims in Connecticut getting arrested for calling the police led to a change in the state’s law.