Stop Fighting Housing Development vs. Flood Control: Houston's Disaster vs. Jersey City's Success
From Chronic Flooding to Development Boom: One Suffered Fragmented Governance, One Integrated Governance, Both Proved YIMBYism Needs State Capacity
In 2025, when flooding across New York and New Jersey killed two people whose car was swept into Cedar Brook in Plainfield, Jersey City delivered a stark counterfactual. Areas that historically would have been "3-5 ft underwater" experienced "next to no flooding,". This wasn't luck. It was the result of a decade-long, $1.099 billion infrastructure program that treats development not as the enemy of flood control, but as its primary financing mechanism.
Jersey City's success stands out in a year that has been catastrophic for flooding nationwide. The July 4-7, 2025 Texas Hill Country floods killed at least 135 people, with the Guadalupe River rising 26 feet in just 45 minutes, making it the deadliest inland flooding event in the United States since 1976. The Northeast itself has been repeatedly battered, with Central Park recording its second-highest hourly rainfall total (2.07 inches) on July 14, and another major event on July 31 dropping up to 7 inches of rain in parts of New Jersey. Yet while other communities faced tragedy, Jersey City's infrastructure held.
Mayor Steven Fulop's assessment reveals the scope: "Post Sandy + Ida, our administration made a huge investment in flood mitigation - more than any city in NJ + it has worked." Fulop confirmed the city has "about a billion dollars' worth of sewer and infrastructure work that has started and is planned over the next couple of years around flood mitigation and sewer separation." The program combines federal compliance requirements under a consent decree, strategic regional partnerships, and most crucially, a development ordinance that makes every new building fund its own flood protection infrastructure.
The question this raises for urban developmen: does YIMBYism make cities less or more prone to flooding? Jersey City's experience suggests the answer depends entirely on how cities structure the relationship between development and infrastructure. The real divide may not be between pro-development and anti-development, but between those that use markets as tools, those who don’t want any markets, and those that let markets use them.
Learning from the YIMBYist Country in the Developed World
The debate over development and flood control often ignores international precedents that have already solved this puzzle. You've likely seen the story floating around on Facebook or YouTube about Fudai, Japan, which defended itself from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami thanks to a massive floodgate and seawall system championed by former Mayor Kotoku Wamura. Wamura faced criticism for the cost and perceived over-engineering, but years later that "over-engineering" proved to be exactly the right call. Fudai was largely untouched while other coastal towns were devastated.
Japan's approach, particularly in Tokyo, demonstrates that dense development and flood protection can coexist when properly integrated. The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, known as G-Cans, represents the world's largest underground flood diversion facility, built to protect Tokyo's dense urban core from overflowing rivers during typhoon seasons. Japan makes it relatively easy to build housing and development while taking its anti-floodingand anti-earthquake regulations far more seriously than most places in the United States. The key insight from Japan's model is that housing construction, infrastructure investment, and strict regulation work as complementary forces rather than competing priorities.
Houston's Cautionary Tale
The counterexample that haunts American urban planning discussions is Houston's catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The disaster caused $125 billion in damages according to NOAA, making it the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history after Katrina. This created a convenient but ultimately false narrative: that cities focused on building lots of housing inevitably sacrifice environmental protection and infrastructure planning. Houston became the poster child for this theory, despite the inconvenient truth that many NIMBY cities also flood, including the suburbs and exurb cities surrounding Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Houston's failure wasn't caused by building too much housing or building in floodplains, as Japan and other places with strong engineering and state capacity demonstrate. Development is manageable with proper stormwater management, elevation requirements, and infrastructure coordination. Houston's problem was treating development and environmental protection as separate issues entirely. Developers imposed single-family zoning through private deed restrictions but weren't required (or it wasn’t enforced) to implement stormwater management or coordinate with watershed planning, made worse with out of date floodmaps, until after Harvey where the City made reforms, it’s limited in enforcement especially in the officially unincorporated areas in and around the city. The city's fragmented governance across dozens of jurisdictions created coordination failures that left residents vulnerable. This does not even include all the zoning rich suburban cities and special incorporated areas that surrounds Houston and their own failures in dealing with the floods.
The 2025 Texas Hill Country disaster illustrates what happens when infrastructure fails to match development patterns. Despite being in "Flash Flood Alley," the Upper Guadalupe River Authority (which has zoning) had only five gauges on the river in Kerr County, when experts say that number should double or triple. The National Weather Service issued flood watches and warnings, but the lack of real-time infrastructure data meant communities had no or little warning before the river rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, ultimately killing 135 people.
During Hurricane Harvey, communication between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Harris County Flood Control District, and the public was dangerously slow, leaving residents unaware of impending flooding from reservoir releases. This is a coordination & regulation failure, not zoning being lax.
These coordination failures extend deep into Houston's approach to flood control projects. The 2018 flood bond program, approved by 85% of voters after Harvey, has spent only 30% of its funds after seven years while facing a $1.3 billion budget shortfall. Houston's infrastructure programs operate on ineffective timescales that leave residents vulnerable for decades. Project Brays, a half-billion-dollar bayou improvement program, required 40 years from conception to completion while residents endured repeated flooding from Tropical Storm Allison, Hurricane Harvey, and other major events.
In addition to the courts being a problem with what the city does with unincorporated areas on the issue of flood and water control, state agencies like TxDOT expanded highway capacity, creating more impermeable surface areas and complicating infrastructure and flooding projects in Houston and other cities. While TxDOT does include flood measures into the highways they build, these measures don't necessarily protect the surrounding areas despite best efforts. The state-level departments added to the problem by undermining any coordinated flood management or infrastructure Houston might have attempted.
The difference between Houston and Jersey City is simple: Houston has a fragmented approach complicated by state and local conflicts, while Jersey City has an integrated approach with effective coordination across government levels, at least regarding flooding.
Background on Jersey City
Jersey City's approach began with recognizing that sustainable growth requires systematic infrastructure investment backed by predictable, long-term funding commitments. The city operates under a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency committing the Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority to resolving Clean Water Act violations by investing in repairs and upgrades to reduce Combined Sewer Overflow discharges by an estimated 370 million gallons per year. The total cost of this work is projected at approximately $1.099 billion over a ten-year period, representing one of the most significant environmental infrastructure investments in New Jersey.
Combined Sewer Overflow events discharge untreated sewage directly into the Hudson River, Hackensack River, and Newark Bay, creating public health hazards and environmental contamination that affect the entire regional ecosystem. The 370 million gallon annual reduction represents the equivalent of removing approximately 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of contaminated water from local waterways each year.
Pump Stations
Jersey City's network of high-capacity wet-weather pump stations represents a fundamental shift from passive, gravity-based drainage to active water management systems. The Sip Avenue Pump Station represents what city officials identify as their greatest infrastructure success. The intersection of Sip Avenue and West Side Avenue was historically the worst flooding location in the entire city. The area was served by a combined sewer line over 75 years old that could not handle the volume of waste and runoff flowing through it. During high tides, the entire section would become submerged, rendering it unable to drain until the tide receded.
The Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority combined a new $4 million stormwater pump station designed to pump stormwater over high tide with a major sewer replacement project. This dual intervention has been transformative, with the city experiencing only minimal, localized flooding during significant peak rainfall events since completion in 2023.
Sewer System Expansion
Beyond pump stations, Jersey City's legacy sewer system faced fundamental capacity limitations. Much of the network, with pipes dating back over a century, was physically too small to convey the volume of stormwater runoff generated by a modern, dense urban environment.
The Sip Avenue project involved a $14 million investment to replace a deteriorating and collapsing brick combined sewer line with a modern, much larger 72-inch pipe. This was an emergency-driven necessity, prompted by multiple sinkhole collapses in 2022 that threatened to sever other major utilities.
Sewer separation provides an even more fundamental solution by removing stormwater from the sanitary system entirely. The Princeton Avenue "minor sewer separation" project eliminated severe and persistent flooding that had reportedly damaged building foundations and repeatedly inundated a dozen row houses.
In the area around Enos Jones Park, the city installed a new storm line within the park itself, successfully separating storm flow from adjacent row homes while significantly decreasing flooding on Brunswick Street.
Infrastructure Investment
Optimization on Monmouth Street involved reconstructing a large netting facility and reconfiguring existing sewer chambers. This re-engineering resulted in significantly higher hydraulic conductivity, eliminating consistent flooding. This infrastructure improvement was so effective that it unlocked the area for new development, with hundreds of residential units subsequently built alongside the location.
Regional Partnerships and Leverage
Jersey City's coastal defense strategy shows how municipal leadership can leverage regional partnerships to achieve infrastructure improvements beyond any single city's financial capacity.
Hurricane Sandy exposed the Long Slip Canal as a major vulnerability. This 2,000-foot-long former barge canal acted as a conduit funneling surge waters from the Hudson River directly into the heart of regional transit infrastructure.
The solution, led by NJ TRANSIT, involved permanently eliminating the threat by completely filling the canal. The "Long Slip Fill and Rail Enhancement" project represents a multi-year, approximately $195 million endeavor. Jersey City contributed over $3 million to the project, representing a leverage ratio of approximately 65 to 1.
The most significant coastal defense project emerged from the Rebuild by Design Hudson River Project, securing an initial $230 million federal grant. The project's budget has grown substantially, now standing at a total of at least $480 million.
The "Resist" element consists of an integrated system of more than 8,846 linear feet of hard infrastructure, including floodwalls and seawalls, punctuated by 28 deployable flood gates. Construction began in 2023-2024, creating the primary shield designed to protect the urban core of all three municipalities from a Sandy-level storm surge.
Flood Regulations Work (If Enforced)
Jersey City's best idea isn't any single infrastructure project but integrating stormwater management into the development process rather than treating it as an obstacle to growth. By enacting a stringent Stormwater Control Ordinance that mandates on-site retention and green infrastructure for both major and minor developments, the city has institutionalized resilience into its legal and economic structure.
Jersey City's Stormwater Control Ordinance goes beyond state requirements by applying to "minor development" projects that disturb as little as 5,000 square feet. The ordinance requires Green Infrastructure and Low Impact Development techniques as mandatory requirements, shifting stormwater management costs from public agencies to private development. This threshold captures virtually all development activity, ensuring that the entire fabric of the city contributes to stormwater management.
From Chronic Flooding to Development Boom
The contrast with Hurricane Ida's impact in 2021 is instructive. While at least 27 people died across New Jersey from Ida's flooding, Jersey City's damage was primarily limited to $35 million in infrastructure impacts rather than loss of life or catastrophic property damage.
The intersection of Sip Avenue and West Side Avenue represented the city's most severe flooding challenge. The comprehensive solution involved three critical components: overcoming tidal lock through the $4 million pump station, expanding capacity through the $14 million sewer replacement, and improving collection through upgraded local stormwater systems. The project, completed in August 2023, has been transformative.
Lessons for American Cities
Jersey City's post-Sandy transformation demonstrates that cities can build substantial amounts of housing. In fact, development (with the right governance) help prevent residents from floods. You can’t build to protect from flooding without building anything. For other American cities facing similar challenges, Jersey City's model requires specific institutional arrangements:
Cities need unified infrastructure planning authority to coordinate across agencies and jurisdictions
They need mandatory developer regulations that apply to all development, not just major projects
Cities need the capability to coordinate federal, state, and local funding streams
Most importantly, they need long-term capital commitment frameworks that provide predictable, sustained investment over decades
Bottomline
What Jersey City proves is that in dense coastal cities, YIMBYism and flood protection aren't exclusive but complementary necessities. You can't have sustainable development without flood protection, you can't afford comprehensive flood protection without the tax base that development provides, and you especially can't build resilience without building, well, anything.
The contrast with 2025's flooding disasters nationwide is stark. While Texas lost 135 people to floods that rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, and New York City experienced its second-highest hourly rainfall on record, Jersey City's prepared infrastructure protected residents. There are still issues, but Jersey City is still building out new projects and constantly improving.
Again, at the end of the day, the real divide isn't between YIMBYism vs flood protections, but between those that use markets as tools vs the weird mix of those who don’t want markets (Left NIMBYs particularly) and those who let markets run rampant. Jersey City has chosen to be master rather than servant of market forces (in this case), and created a model for flood-resilient urban growth that other American cities should study.