Lydia Musher discusses Hurricane Harvey, the Meyerland Community, and how floods are inevitable. Despite not flooding in the Memorial Day Flood or the Tax Day Flood, Musher was not surprised to flood with Harvey. The impact of Harvey led her and her husband to decide to sell their house at a loss and build elsewhere. They decided to build in the Meyerland area but to elevate 10 feet for the new house. Musher also discusses the inherent Jewishness of the Meyerland community and why it is such an essential part of their family. Musher discusses the impact of the floods on Houston and Meyerland in specific and how people need to plan for more floods to come. Musher ends with thoughts that Meyerland will remain a Jewish epicenter for Houston due to the ancient tendency for Jews to want to stay together, even as society has become more open to Jews.
Read on for the full transcript of the interview:
Interviewee: Lydia Musher
Interview Date: May 17, 2018
Interview Location: Houston, Texas
Interviewer: Paula Davis Hoffman
INTERVIEWER: Good morning, this is Paula Davis Hoffman. I’m here with LM. And it is May 17, 2018 at 8:30 in the morning in Houston, Texas. And this is an interview for the University of Houston Center for Public History’s Resilient Houston project.
PDH: Good morning, LM.
LM: Good morning.
PDH: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself — age, job?
LM: Sure. I am 41 years old, and I work at Rice University as a lecturer in the business school.
PDH: And can you tell me about your experience during the Memorial and Tax Day floods — and during Harvey separately?
LM: Yes, that’s a lot of story. Is that okay?
PDH: Let’s start with Memorial Day. We’ll go chronological.
LM: Sure. My family lived, at the time, in Meyerland. And we woke up to water two-thirds of the way up off the street, but it didn’t enter our house. It was probably vertically 12 inches from our house [0:01:00]. And we spent the next — I spent the next several weeks or month volunteering with people in the neighborhood who had flooded. I felt that it was sort of a random stroke of luck that we hadn’t flooded. It flooded four doors down and the rest of the neighborhood and virtually everyone we knew. And I could tell that it was the sort of experience that threw a family off balance. So — and I knew — I just had a sense that we were going to eventually flood and that I was going to need other people’s help. And so I wanted to contribute to the collective. And so I spent a lot of time volunteering with them and so did my family. But we — so we had family members and friends who flooded, but we didn’t personally.
PDH: What about Tax Day?
LM: That weekend, my husband and I were in New Orleans, so it was Monday morning, I think, that it flooded — Sunday night, Monday morning. My husband and I were gone for 24 hours to New Orleans. And I didn’t realize it was flooding [0:02:00], but we were watching the flood gauges online at the airport in New Orleans. And all the flights were canceled, so I rented a car. And we drove back. And then I waded through the water when we got home. It wasn’t a bad drive actually.
PDH: So there was water outside your house? You said you waded through the water.
LM: Yeah, much less. Yeah, much less, but I waded through the neighborhood.
PDH: So you couldn’t enter your neighborhood?
LM: We could get pretty close — like from the backside, if you will. We — I parked like a block away and walked. It was much easier than Memorial Day.
PDH: So did you feel pretty safe at this point? I mean, your neighborhood had flooded twice.
LM: No.
PDH: Two big floods, but you personally did not flood. How did that make you feel?
LM: The first time we flooded — my husband had grown up in Meyerland, I should say. He grew up even closer to the bayou than we live. And so he kept telling me, “This happens in Meyerland. Don’t worry about it. It won’t happen to us.” My — and after it happened in [0:03:00] 2015, I felt — everyone was saying, “This was the biggest flood that’s ever happened. It’s never going to happen again.” And I didn’t really believe them. It just seemed like, with climate change, we were just getting more extreme drought. We had come out of a really profound drought. And we’d gotten this unprecedented rain. And I just felt it was going to keep happening. But I sort of focused on helping people at the time.
The second time the neighborhood flooded, a lot of people felt vindicated — like, “Oh, see, this one wasn’t as bad as 2015. And if you didn’t flood, you’re never going to flood.” But my impression was this was two unprecedented storms in 11 months. And I — and I wanted to know why and what we could do about it. So I started a study group called Citizen Solutions to Houston Flooding. And we invited in 20 or so of the world’s leading experts in flooding to explain to us why it was flooding more and what, if anything, could be done about [0:04:00] it. I felt very, very strongly it was going to keep happening and that we had been spared before, but we weren’t going to be spared next time. So starting, basically, like the day of Memorial Day, I started begging my husband to move almost every day.
PDH: And did you?
LM: No, he didn’t think it was going to happen to us.
PDH: What were the results of the Citizen Solutions to Houston Flooding?
LM: I learned a lot about flooding as a layperson. And we partnered with another organization called Houston Residents Against Flooding to create a petition that’s at fixhoustonflooding.org that has something like 12 to 15 requests for the local, state, and federal governments to prevent future residential flooding — all the way from creating one government agency responsible for water in Houston, which we don’t currently have, down to, you know, what do you consider the runoff coefficient when you do water planning [0:05:00] or water drainage planning — so some very big-picture requests and some very, very little requests. It has, I don’t know, fifteen hundred signatures on it. And I think it did influence the Houston Chronicle’s list of requests to the government, because their list looks pretty similar and reflective of our list. So that’s — I had been working on it until we flooded, and since then, I’ve mostly been doing recovery stuff for our family.
PDH: That’s great that you were able to affect change.
LM: I don’t know if we were, but I hope so.
PDH: It sounds like your husband was a lot more optimistic. He was telling you, “Don’t worry. It won’t happen to us.” And then he was reluctant to move. Does he regret it now? Does he have a different perspective now?
LM: So he — I think — I don’t want to oversimplify. I think he thought we would flood eventually, but I think he thought it was going to happen in geologic time — like evolution or tectonic plate movement. Do you know what I mean? Like if we lived in this house for [0:06:00] 500 or a thousand years, it would flood eventually, whereas I thought it would happen within the next five to ten years.
Does he regret it? I would say yes for a number of reasons. One is I was very, very angry. There’s been — our kids are fine. We didn’t lose very much, because we had a two-story house. So the people who lost everything and all their child — all the children’s toys and clothes and memories, that didn’t happen to us. But our kids have been displaced, and we have been displaced. It’s cost us a fair amount of money even with flood insurance. And I was very, very angry, so I think he, for a while, felt remorse, I guess, that he had caused his wife a lot of consternation. And he loved that house, and he loved living there. And I was unwilling to move back. So we’ve been now forced to make decisions under the gun where we could have made them more slowly. But do you want the Harvey story also?
PDH: Yeah, I was going to ask you.
LM: Sorry. [0:07:00] So were you in Meyerland also at the time? Or were you in Houston?
PDH: I live in Westbury 1.
LM: Okay, so close.
PDH: Yeah.
LM: So you were in Houston at the time that this all happened?
PDH: Yes.
LM: Okay, so the week before, we’re watching this huge hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. And I’m getting nervous. We had Shabbat dinner guests. And we were all talking about, “Should we evacuate to Dallas?” My in-laws didn’t want to evacuate, and I was unwilling to evacuate without my in-laws. So we stayed in Houston, but the hurricane kept getting downgraded from like a Category 4 or 5, 3, 2, 1 to a tropical storm. So I’m like, “We’re fine. It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it. And nothing’s going to happen.” I sort of forgot that all the most — many of the most damaging storms we’ve had in Houston have been tropical storms, because they just sit there. So I just didn’t think it was a big deal actually.
My husband left his car at work, but I had mine at home. And it drizzled all day Saturday. Nothing really interesting happened, and then, obviously, Sunday, it started to rain. And then we started getting these text messages. Did you get those text [0:08:00] messages starting at 4:55 A.M. on Sunday morning? I think it was Sunday morning. So we woke up, and our — oh, I should say, Saturday night, our neighbors had started flooding. So we had, overnight, three or four different families sleeping upstairs at our house. And then Sunday — I’ve told this story so many times that I’ve started telling it more briefly now.
But Monday morning, my husband and our guests started elevating all of our stuff up to the second floor and then our heavy furniture onto paint cans. And while they were doing that, I was out kayaking the neighborhood, bringing elderly and infirmed people into our house. So we ended up with 38 people, 8 dogs, and a cat on our second floor — and eventually started evacuating people to Kroger at Belfort and South Post Oak, which the Houston Fire Department told me was the place that they were evacuating people. And some of our guests were coordinating calls to 911, because [0:09:00] we didn’t know how much higher the water would rise. So eventually, HPD sent three dive team boats and got the rest of the people out. So my husband and I and a couple of friends were kayaking people to Kroger. And then the dive team boats took like 30 people and the dogs and cat to Kroger.
And then we, by hook and crook, got to the convention center. We got on the back of some guy’s pick-up truck at Kroger with my four kids and my dog. And then they took us to the Loop, some like random place on the West Loop. And then these huge National Guard LMTV trucks took us to the convention center. We sat outside a church for 90 minutes in the rain. And that’s kind of the whole story. Then we walked to a hotel. We had made a reservation at the Embassy Suites with our same friends who had stayed Saturday night with us. And we stayed there for two nights. Then we stayed 10 days with my in-laws. And we stayed 3 months in an apartment, and now, we’re back in a rental house in Meyerland [0:10:00].
PDH: You said you were on these Army tanks. And I heard they’re required to take you to an emergency designated shelter.
LM: They did.
PDH: Is that why you went to George R. Brown?
LM: Yeah.
PDH: Did you go inside?
LM: No, we had already had a hotel reservation, so we just like had backpacks and walked our kids a block or two to the Embassy Suites in the rain.
PDH: Okay. Were they scared? How did your kids do?
LM: My kids were totally okay except for one of them. One of my kids was really freaked out. They — we travel a lot, and they’re used to kind of weird circumstances. So they were fine. One of them was very anxious, because we were getting rained on a lot. And once we got into a covered LMTV, he just totally calmed down. But walking through the rain for a block was kind of the least of their troubles.
PDH: The LMTV, those are the military vehicles?
LM: Uh-huh.
PDH: Okay, and some of them were not covered?
LM: Uh-huh.
PDH: So you guys were just in a tank?
LM: Sitting in the rain.
PDH: Being driven in the rain?
LM: Uh-huh.
PDH: I wanted to go back to those [0:11:00] text messages. Were they about tornado warnings?
LM: A lot of them said like it was a flood warning. It’s going to flood. It’s going to rain. It’s going to flood, and I’m like, “Yeah, I can tell it’s going to rain.” We got those every eight minutes for 48 hours or something.
PDH: Did you get any about tornado warnings?
LM: I don’t remember — maybe.
PDH: Okay, but you weren’t alarmed enough to like go to a bathroom?
LM: I wasn’t home for most of it. I was on a kayak. No, I didn’t. It wasn’t even really raining. It was — it wasn’t even raining that hard really. Like they — you know, the rain came in bands. And the problem was really that it wasn’t draining, so you could see the sewers didn’t have a whirlpool. It was just sitting for hours. And I — when the rain picked up, I would kind of like hurry people along to get in the kayak and get home, because it was a little rainy and a little windy but not the extent of the drainage problem that we were having. I [0:12:00] think the water was just draining into Meyerland and into southwest Houston in general.
PDH: So from your point of view, it had more to do with — the water wasn’t receding. And so there was an issue with the drainage and with how the water was coming into Meyerland?
LM: That’s what it seemed like. Not just Meyerland, but I think all of Houston. Like if you looked on the news, it was just sitting. It seemed to be sitting. It could have been — I guess a historic amount of rain fell on Houston, so it was probably the rain. But it seemed that we just couldn’t get rid of it.
PDH: Experientially though, you didn’t feel like there was this torrential, constant rain?
LM: No, no, I was on a kayak the whole day.
PDH: Okay.
LM: I wasn’t — I was a little wet, but I’ve been in worse rain on kayaks before.
PDH: Did your study group, Citizen Solutions to Houston Flooding, talk about why it didn’t drain and why there was this problem with the water receding?
LM: I haven’t — I haven’t — I haven’t really done anything with the study group since Harvey. But yeah, I think a lot of our issues pertained to not having enough places to store water and having a lot of development and a lot of concrete and [0:13:00] not a lot of way to get rid of the water. Because we have almost no elevation change in Houston, right? So water runs downhill, and we don’t have hills. So it just kind of sits. And we don’t use — some cities use pumps to move the water, but we use gravity only. So we have these two huge reservoirs. But we would need like a thousand of them to hold all the water from Harvey or some huge number of them.
PDH: So how do you feel now about Meyerland’s prospects in terms of future flooding? I mean, you have a rental property in Meyerland. You chose to stay in Meyerland while you were renting. I mean, hurricane season starts in about two weeks.
LM: Yeah, I’m hoping for a drought. We’re building a house ten feet up — not in Meyerland, in Braes Heights. I actually think the entire city of Houston faces approximately the same storm risk. I don’t think it’s specific to Meyerland at all. I think Meyerland’s going to flood again. I think Houston’s going to flood again. I think we’re going to experience [0:14:00] cycles of extreme drought and extreme rain. And I’m hoping that in the time it takes me to build a house ten feet up, we experience extreme drought and not extreme rain. We’re in a tiny house that’s all on one floor this time. So if we flood this year, now, we’re going to — then we’re going to lose everything.
PDH: Did this house flood?
LM: Yeah.
PDH: So you’re in a house that flooded. Did it flood Memorial or Tax Day?
LM: I’m not — I’m not sure. I know it flooded in Harvey.
PDH: So you’re in a house that flooded during Harvey. And it’s a single-story house.
LM: I’m hoping for the best.
PDH: And you’re hoping for the best?
LM: Yeah. The thing that always made me nervous about flooding wasn’t the financial thing that made me nervous — wasn’t the stuff. It was the loss of property value. And we did sell our flooded house, and we lost some substantial amount on the sale of the house. So the good news is if we flood this time, we’ll elevate whatever we can and try to keep the kids’ photos and stuff [0:15:00]. But we’re already displaced, so what’s another displacement? And we don’t own the house, so if the house floods, I don’t really care that much.
PDH: But you wouldn’t be worried for your safety?
LM: No, I have a kayak, and that was part of my husband’s sales pitch to me about this rental. He found the rental house, and he said, “It’s a short kayak ride to Kroger.” I’m not that worried. I probably wouldn’t take other people into my house now, because it’s not a safer place like our old house was. I might actually — we’re really close to our old house, and we sold it. So I might kayak to their house. I might kayak to my old house. Or I’ll just kayak straight to Kroger.
PDH: Do you miss your old house? How long were you there?
LM: We were there six years — almost six and a half years. Do I miss it? We had a double lot, so the kids had a huge backyard with a trampoline and a garden — a vegetable garden. We went to say goodbye to that house a few weeks ago — the night before we sold it. And it was sad. But I have so many bad feelings about worry associated with that house that I’m glad [0:16:00] we don’t live there. Obviously, my husband is more sad that I am.
PDH: What about your kids?
LM: It sort of depends on the day. I think they’re — they feel — I think they feel displaced. Like they want a permanent house that they live in. They refer to our house as the rental house. I think, when we were there saying goodbye, they felt sad about it, but I think they’re basically okay about it.
PDH: So they don’t call where they’re living now home?
LM: Nuh-uh.
PDH: So you decided to sell your house at a loss, buy a new property, and you’re rebuilding ten feet up?
LM: Uh-huh.
PDH: Did this area where you bought your house flood?
LM: Yes. Yeah, it flooded two feet, same as —
PDH: I’m looking at a picture, and it looks beautiful.
LM: Thank you.
PDH: And very high.
LM: And very high. It flooded two feet, same as our street.
PDH: Okay, so the ten feet, you’ll be good?
LM: That’s the hope.
PDH: When is it supposed to be completed?
LM: We have to start [0:17:00] first. I think next fall, so fall of 2019, I hope.
PDH: What other options did you consider?
LM: We had looked at a lot of houses before Harvey, right, in that two-year period where I was trying to convince my husband to move. So we looked at buying a house, and we thought about leaving Houston actually. But we’re really close with my husband’s parents, and I would like to stay here as long as they’re alive. And so would my husband.
PDH: So you mentioned that you keep Shabbos. Would you say you keep a Jewish home? Would you say you are observant?
LM: Yes, we don’t keep Shabbat to the extent that the Orthodox would consider us to keep Shabbat. So we’ll use phones and drive, but we have Shabbat dinner. We go to shul on Saturdays. And so like Shabbat is a thing at our house, and I would call us observant, yeah.
PDH: Is that one reason you [0:18:00] chose to stay in Meyerland? I mean, your rental is in Meyerland. Your new house is very near Meyerland.
LM: Yeah, definitely.
PDH: So part of the appeal is the Jewish community?
LM: Uh-huh.
PDH: Can you tell me a little bit about Houston’s Jewish community before the flood and after?
LM: I’m not an authority. I can tell you about my experience with the Jewish community.
PDH: Yeah, just like what about the area makes it more welcoming to an observant Jew?
LM: So I would say, from my experience, Judaism is a collectively-observed religion, as opposed to a religion that you could observe alone in the wilderness somewhere. So right, a service requires 10 adults and dinner is –always has guests. And so being around other Jewish people, particularly people who walk only on Shabbat, is part of the observance of the religion.
And then just [0:19:00] having a Jewish community in physical proximity to one another, I think deeply, qualitatively enriches the experiences of observing Judaism. I heard the other day — we’re looking at floor plans. And I heard someone say that when they were looking at floor plans of houses that the architect or the builder had said, “This is a Jewish dining room,” which that person meant to me a huge dining room intended for lots and lots of guests. And that, to me, is just beautiful and so evocative of my experience, which is we built this floor plan entirely around a huge dining room.
And that was the only complaint about our old house — was the dining room was too small. The thing that my kids miss the most, I think, about having a house is having Shabbat guests. So it’s –I don’t know. Even though we drive, like I would rather walk to synagogue on Saturday. And we’re going to be — we started two miles from synagogue, and we’re going to be .9 miles. So that’s a huge improvement for me. And then [0:20:00] we’re — you know, Meyerland has experienced, I think, a change in demographic Jewishly. So the Jewish community is dispersing a little bit, and maybe that’s your next question. So I feel like we’re moving closer to work, and we’re moving still within walking distance to shul. But we’re kind of abandoning the Jewish community a little bit by moving east a little bit. So you know what I’m saying?
PDH: I’d like you to expand upon that. So when you say there’s this Jewish migration, do you mean the Orthodox going to Fondren? Or do you mean –?
LM: No. I mean, I think — and I’m — here, I’m not an expert. And maybe you need like a kinder person, but I think if a generation ago, when my husband was growing up in Houston — and he was in Meyerland. And most of the Jewish community was in Fondren. So we drove around Fondren the other day, and he said, “This is where all of my friends lived, and I lived kind of outside of the Jewish community,” or further out of the Jewish community. Then they moved to Meyerland, and now, it seems that that community is either like flooded out or aging in place. But they’re staying.
My generation and [0:21:00] younger, particularly younger, are moving to places like The Heights and places like Montrose that I don’t think, a generation ago, Jewish people considered. But I think people are less observant and so they don’t need that communal aspect as much. They don’t — maybe they don’t go to the JCC. Maybe they don’t send their kids to Jewish Day School. They don’t — maybe they don’t go to — kids don’t go to Hebrew school at all or maybe they go to Emanu El, which is in West U. Or they just want to live in West U, or they want to move kind of further to the more affluent neighborhoods. And the affluence and the proximity to those more cosmopolitan resources is more important to them than being close to the Jewish community. So my impression is that the — if you had a heat map of Jews 30 years ago, they’d be further southwest than it is today, where it’s probably more spread out over the whole region.
PDH: So your husband grew up in Meyerland. Has he mentioned a difference in — I know that [0:22:00] supermarkets in Meyerland, for example — you have Belden’s, and the Kroger, and the Randalls, and the old HEB. They had kosher sections. You know, they had a lot of policies in place to safeguard these kosher laws. Were they more stringent when he was growing up?
LM: I don’t think so.
PDH: I’m asking about the — qualitatively, what’s different about Meyerland now that the Jews are not as concentrated there?
LM: Interestingly, I think the kosher sections have remained the same. There’s still Randalls, and Belden’s, and Kroger. And then they’re opening an HEB in Meyerland Plaza, so I think, for whatever reason, the kosher sections have stayed the same. I think the modern Orthodox community is now a little more split between Fondren and Willow Meadows so that Meyerland still acts as a geographic center. And it’s still a good place to buy kosher meat. I don’t think that’s changed very much.
I just think the [0:23:00] — I don’t know how to explain it. There’s this committee that deals with allocation of tzedakah to the community at the Federation that I’m allegedly involved in, but they always meet at 4:00 P.M., which is not a great time for me. So I haven’t been to a meeting in a long time. But they talk about, you know, how much money should we give to each institution. And one of the questions they have to ask is are people still utilizing this institution. Are people still going to this particular synagogue or this particular community center if they live in The Heights? And if they’re not going there, should we give funds to that institution? Or should we allocate funds in a different way? Do you know what I mean?
PDH: Is the JCC still a — I’ve heard it described as the cultural center of the Jewish community. Is that still true? Or would you say it’s more secular [0:24:00] now?
LM: I still consider it that way. I don’t know what the official line is, but we’re there a lot.
PDH: You haven’t heard anything from these meetings though?
LM: No, and I also haven’t been to one in a while because of the 4 o’clock scheduling problem.
PDH: But just in terms of the allocation of the funds?
LM: Uh-huh. No, I’ve never heard anyone say that there is a new cultural center of the Jewish community. I think that’s kind of the issue — is like there was a density a generation or more — two generations ago when you know, there were quotas on how many Jewish people would get hired in a law firm or how many Jewish people who get into an Ivy League school. We needed each other more. Now that a Jewish person can get any job he wants and live in any place he wants and go to any country club he wants, he may not want to go to the J. He may want to go to a fancier country club. Or you know what I mean? We don’t have to huddle together anymore, and so we don’t.
PDH: So we don’t have to huddle, but [0:25:00] it’s still a very communally-practiced culture and religion.
LM: Correct.
PDH: I wanted to shift gears and talk a little — you have four children. Was it important to you to raise them in a Jewish community?
LM: Initially, it was more important to my husband. I was not raised observant at all. My — we raise our kids in a very similar way to how he was raised. So now, it is more important to me, because I’ve seen the benefits of having the children have that experience. But it had to be — I had to grow with them a little bit.
PDH: What benefits do you see to raising your children in a Jewish community?
LM: I don’t know if my — I don’t know if my experience is typical at all, but I’ll tell you my experience. There’s a certain rhythm of Judaism [0:26:00] over the course of a week, over the course of a month, over the course of a year, over the course of a life that I think helps people notice the passage of time in a really beautiful way. So if you have Shabbat and you have this time where your family unplugs a little bit and spends time together, I think that benefits everyone, the children and the family. I think it’s — my grandfather used to say, “You turn around three times, and you’re 80,” like meaning your whole life has disappeared because you’ve worked. And I think Judaism helps slow that down a little bit.
And the communal aspect helps to reinforce it. So I don’t think there’s anything better about Jewish people or there’s any — I don’t believe there’s a chosen people. You know what I’m saying? I don’t have that sense at all, but of people who choose to spend time together in this way, I think there’s a very deeply enriching experience [0:27:00] of kind of smelling the roses, and stopping, and appreciating life and this tremendous focus on gratitude. Probably all religions have it, but I think Judaism has more of a rhythm to it than most.
PDH: And this was important enough to you that you are trying to start a walkable Jewish community for Shabbat?
LM: I’m not having a tremendous amount of success, but yeah, I would love to.
PDH: Can you tell me about your efforts to that? What is your pitch? How’s it going?
LM: I really haven’t made much of a pitch. I posted on a couple of Facebook groups that there are a couple of lots on the cul de sac on which we’re building and would anyone be interested. And I got very little interest. There’s one woman who built in Meyerland and now wants to move, so she might be my only hope.
PDH: What is your dream? What is your goal? What’s the ideal when you put that out there?
LM: We lived from 2004 to 2009 [0:28:00] in a town outside Philadelphia called Wynnewood that was so much like Meyerland. It had hills though. And it was a lot of Conservative Jewish families and a lot of other people, too. So it wasn’t insular, but it happened that we were kind of huddled together. And we walked to synagogue together, and Shabbat afternoon, the kids played. Our kids were too young at the time, but you could see the older kids playing. I would love to have something like that where the kids would just play on the street together on Shabbat afternoon. And we would just sit around and play boardgames and talk to each other. You can drive to do that stuff. There’s nothing about driving that inherently ruins the experience, but walking is just — it’s like being on vacation with other people who are on vacation with you. Do you know what I mean? You want to come?
PDH: Sure. Wynnewood, has your husband made any comparisons to growing up [0:29:00] in Fondren in an observant community to Wynnewood? Was that what is was like for him?
LM: So he grew up in Meyerland.
PDH: Oh, sorry.
LM: No, because I think that the Jewish community was more in Fondren, so I think he was kind of like outside looking in a little bit to his friends in Fondren. And I think there were — he has said many times, “We would get home from school, get on our bikes, go to the park or the J, and come back at dark.” That was his experience of growing up in the 70’s and 80’s in Meyerland. But our kids were so super young, and we were so almost middle-aged in Wynnewood that there was no natural comparison. Do you know what I mean? If we had stayed there and our kids were now — our kids are now 11, 8, 6, and 3 — and they had been on bikes and running around. I think he might have drawn the comparison more naturally.
PDH: Were most of his [0:30:00] friends growing up Jewish in Meyerland?
LM: Yeah, he went to Day School, and most of his friends were Jewish.
PDH: So when he would ride to the J and ride back, he was around other Jews.
LM: Uh-huh.
PDH: What about your children? Are most of their friends Jewish?
LM: Yeah, they go to Day School. And they mostly have Jewish friends.
PDH: What about just from the community?
LM: They don’t have a lot of friends like from the street. Do you know what I mean? From — certainly not now, because the neighborhood’s mostly empty. My son plays Little League, and his friends are — he has friends from Little League who are not Jewish. My daughter’s other activities are mostly in the Jewish community or individual. Like she takes violin lessons. That’s not a communal activity so much. So yeah, most of their friends are Jewish, which is a little bit different from my upbringing.
PDH: And so your daughter’s activities, are they at the JCC?
LM: She does theater at the J. They have a wonderful theater program. And that’s her primary activity at the J [0:31:00].
PDH: I saw Suessical.
LM: She was in Suessical, yeah.
PDH: So I heard that you had some opinions about whether the Jewish community should stay in a flood prone area. But what I heard does not reconcile with what you’re saying about Meyerland not being particularly prone to flooding.
LM: It’s interesting that you mention it. I think I felt differently about it before Harvey — before I saw the — I saw the pictures with the whole city. It seems to be that there’s nowhere safe. And we just need to move up — physically upward out of the water.
PDH: Houston or the Jews?
LM: Yeah, everyone in Houston, yeah.
PDH: Okay, so this is not something specific to the Jewish community?
LM: Initially, I thought it was. Initially, I thought, “This is a problem that’s particularly bad in the Jewish areas,” meaning Meyerland, Willow Meadows. Obviously, so far, Fondren has been largely spared. Bellaire was spared until Harvey [0:32:00] — or mostly spared until Harvey. Braes Heights, which is where we’re moving, had some Jewish community in it and, I think, had been taken out so much by Allison that they mostly had built up already. Now, I feel like it’s just the whole city that’s just being affected by climate change. And we have to build up higher. It’s not just the Jewish community anymore.
PDH: Why do you think other people located Meyerland as a particularly problematic area?
LM: That I can help to answer. So I think Meyerland’s population – I’m going to choose my words really carefully – is, on average, pretty well-educated and advocates for itself pretty well. Initially, when it seemed as though a lot of the flooding was in the Meyerland area, I think people felt that they were advocating for the community by saying, “Come look at us [0:33:00]. We’re suffering. Help us.” And I understand why they did that. It makes a lot of sense. I think what they didn’t realize is that they were doing damage to the reputation of the neighborhood and kind of branding the neighborhood as the locus of flooding, which damaged property values pretty substantially.
PDH: Do you think that’s one reason you lost money when you sold your home?
LM: I think we lost money when we sold our house primarily because of the flooding. I don’t — I don’t think we would have done much better if we had been in another neighborhood.
PDH: So this option that you’re — I mean, everybody needs to build up. There’s definitely a class element. I mean, most people can’t afford to buy a property and build up or elevate their house.
LM: For sure. Absolutely.
PDH: What other options to do you see as available? Do you think the city’s doing enough?
LM: In the Netherlands, what they have is [0:34:00] this — as I understand it – I’m not an expert – this idea that eventually the first floor of every building will be abandoned. And people will live and work on the second floor. Ultimately, I think that’s probably something like what’s going to happen here. I think Houston will eventually look like Galveston. I don’t think — I just don’t think — I don’t see a way — something like 13 trillion gallons of water fell on Houston. And it can’t be the last time that that’s going to happen. So I don’t see another way to keep water out of people’s living rooms.
Unfortunately, flooding, I think, historically always affects people as a function of their financial status, right? So flooding affects the poor more, because they live in more vulnerable areas. And they can’t elevate themselves out of the water. I don’t — I don’t see another — I’m not an expert in any of this, but I don’t see another solution other than abandoning Houston or creating some elaborate system of pumps and levees [0:35:00] like New Orleans has. I don’t see another solution other than elevating ourselves out of the water. And the city council just passed an ordinance that we have to be two feet above the 500-year flood line, so it seems that’s where they’re going, too.
PDH: How confident are you about the effects of widening the bayous?
LM: I’m very confident it won’t make much of a difference at all. I don’t know how that answers your question. I wouldn’t rely on it as a homeowner.
PDH: Is the City of Houston doing anything else that you see as might be making a difference?
LM: I don’t know. I heard stories that they’re looking at buying golf courses to create additional detention. I don’t know what else they’re doing. I keep tweeting Mayor Turner that he should, you know, work on developers and have them build [0:36:00] appropriate detention and retention, and they should not bring fill into a hundred-year floodplain and not — you know, they’re building on — they build their own little hills. And then they build on their own little hills, which pushes water to other people instead of building up on pier and beam. I don’t know what the city has decided to do other than that Chapter 19 ordinance to make private residents elevate themselves further.
PDH: Let’s go back. I want to talk about the character of Meyerland. So we’ve talked about this trajectory. When your husband grew up there and he was riding around with his Jewish friends going to the JCC and home, and now, you’re living there with your children. And they also go to the JCC, and they go to nearby Jewish Day Schools. And you have shuls that you could walk to. It’s a Jewish area even if there is this migration.
LM: Yeah.
PDH: And you mentioned the heat map. Even though the heat’s lessening, it’s still a [0:37:00] Jewish area. Do you see Meyerland remaining a Jewish area? Is it going to stay an enclave? Or do you think the character is going to be deterred by flooding?
LM: I think it’ll be part of a trend of dispersal. As long as the kosher meat is there, as long as the J continues to be there, as long as the Day Schools are there and the synagogues are there, I think, in name, it will still be the Jewish neighborhood, but I don’t think it will have the same concentration of Jewish people. So just as an example, we build a sukkah every year. And in Wynnewood, there was a sukkah — during Sukkot, which is the feast of booths or whatever — Feast of Tabernacles. So we would have a progressive sukkah lunch on Sukkot, where one family would host like appetizers. And one would host more appetizers. And one would host dessert [0:38:00] or whatever. And the whole community would walk from one sukkah to another, because there were so many sukkoth within walking distance.
I tried to set that up a few times over the years in Meyerland, and we couldn’t because not enough people built sukkoth. So it was like us and one or two other families that built sukkoth. And it was too distant, so even — we’ve been there since 2009 in two different houses in Meyerland. And even during that time, the Jewish community has been both not observant enough or too dispersed to observe the way that, at least, I would like to observe. Do you know what I mean?
PDH: Uh-huh.
LM: So I think it will — I think already it was dispersing. And Harvey will just continue the dispersal.
PDH: I recently read an article in The Times about younger Jews becoming more observant than their parents were — this trend towards more observance, do you think younger Jewish families — keeping this trend in mind, do you [0:39:00] think Meyerland will still appeal to young Jewish families who want to observe the cultural and religious traditions?
LM: I don’t — I mean, I’m so not young anymore. I would say, now that you have to build up, right — to live in Meyerland, you either have to buy a house like we’re renting where it’s going to flood, or you have to pay a million dollars to build a house that’s elevated five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten feet. Most young families can’t afford to do that and don’t want to risk living in a house that they feel pretty confident is going to flood. So I don’t think so. I think they’re going to want to go to a place that’s safer and more affordable. I just don’t know where in Houston that’s going to be. So we have seen a decline in people moving into Houston who are observant.
PDH: Okay, but there’s no other area that is attracting Jews?
LM: In Houston?
PDH: Yeah.
LM: I don’t think so.
PDH: Okay, so Meyerland’s still —
LM: I think it’s just part [0:40:00] of a trend. I don’t think — I don’t — to me, Meyerland is — some people refer to Meyerland as like the greater southwest Houston Jewish area. And if — I don’t — I don’t think there’s anything about that area that — I think Harvey was like just an accelerant to a trend that we see globally away from religion generally. There might be a few — I mean, there might be like a mini-trend of younger families observing more, but people are less and less interested in religion. So as that happens and as we flood and flood and flood, I see why we’re having trouble bringing observant families into Houston and why they’re dispersing more into areas that they think are a little bit safer.
PDH: I want to talk about this role that you’ve taken on social media. You started — was it after Memorial Day that you became the administrator of a site?
LM: One of them, yeah.
PDH: Can you tell me about why [0:41:00] you started that and what you hoped to do? Was it the 2015 and Beyond Facebook site? Houston Flooding?
LM: Tandy Harris started it to connect people. And overnight, it had thousands of people on it. It was just too much work for her, so she asked a few of us to help. And as I was able to find resources, I would share them there. It’s just kind of — like we all have different things we like to do to help. And I guess that’s one of the things I like to do to help. Eventually, it became sort of full of cattiness and drama, so I handed it back. And I helped in other ways.
PDH: So you’re no longer an administrator?
LM: Right.
PDH: When you called it cattiness and drama, do you think that that’s a function of social media? Or is it a function of all the feelings around flooding?
LM: Both.
PDH: Just the desperation.
LM: Both.
PDH: So what is the pulse of the community of the floodees? What are they feeling? What can people do [0:42:00]?
LM: What do you mean what can people do?
PDH: Well, you said you were trying to help. You were trying to offer support. What sort of support were you offering? And what is it that the you see the community as needing?
LM: I mean, initially, there was no experience in the community — of a flood of this magnitude, so nobody knew how to apply for funds from FEMA. And nobody knew anything really. So when friends and I would figure out like this is where you go to apply for an SBA loan, we would share that. Now, through three floods, the community kind of knows. And most people who flooded in Harvey flooded before — not everybody. But there were a lot of repeat offenders, if you will. So there’s, I think, less uncertainty in that regard [0:43:00]. And you don’t see people as much posting like, “This is how you do your immediate recovery” stuff. Do you know what I mean? That period — that acute period has passed.
I think it’s like with any — I don’t know what you’d call it — trauma or intense experience. I would say the thing that most people don’t understand at this point is that it continues for most of us — that it’s not over. And so I’ve had a friend say like, “Everything’s fine for you. You’re doing great.” And that’s true. We’re — you know, we have jobs, and our children are healthy. And everything’s going to be okay, but it’s still on a day-to-day basis. We have stuff that we’re dealing with. And so I just think being patient and understanding, asking how things are going in the recovery effort, just like with any — just being a friend, honestly, at this point. I don’t think you need — people need to go to social media and tell other people how to, you know, get a meal or how to whatever, because [0:44:00] those immediate needs mostly have passed.
PDH: And so when you talk about these communal aid efforts, some of them were uniquely Jewish.
LM: Uh-huh.
PDH: Can we talk about that? So this is obviously secular — you know, this Flooding and Beyond site. But in the community, there were Jewish — I mean, the relief efforts were coordinated by the JCC, but that was secular.
LM: Yeah.
PDH: On a Jewish campus though.
LM: Yeah.
PDH: But then there were a lot of Jewish organizations who were intent on helping the Jewish community of Meyerland.
LM: Yeah.
PDH: Did you utilize any of the services?
LM: Yeah, both in trying to help other people when we hadn’t flooded and in helping ourselves when we had. We — I would ask people, “Can you get some boxes from the J?” Because the J had boxes — like cardboard boxes [0:45:00] and tape and those sorts of things that we were running out of. So we did utilize it in that way. And I had people offer us — they had — Beren Academy, after Harvey, was like kind of a secondary hub. And people were dropping off kosher groceries, and people were offering us kosher meat and so on. We’re very lucky. Like we were never financially uncertain, and we were able to get groceries and so on. So it was really just boxes that we — that we utilized.
Our synagogue also flooded, so that was kind of another just — our kids school flooded also, so there was a lot of inward focus of each organization helping itself recover. And that’s still ongoing as well.
PDH: Is there anything else that you wanted to add about what the Facebook site has become, about Meyerland and the Jewish community, or [0:46:00] just anything that we’ve touched on that you want to elaborate on?
LM: I do want to say that the Mormon community — I don’t know if this is — I don’t know if this is what you want to hear, but the Mormon community came out in force and did a tremendous amount of like mucking and tearing out of houses after 2015, including — the head of my children’s Jewish Day School is Mormon. And his family was at our aunt’s house mucking out her house, so I was — amazing — I was overwhelmed with how much the Mormon community came out and supported the Jewish community and other religious communities as well.
Other things about the Facebook group or the Jewish community? I wish the Jewish community could find a way back to creating a locus of geographic density. I think it would benefit the community as well individual Jewish families. I’m not an insular person. Like [0:47:00] we — my husband and I both have friends who are not Jewish and work outside the Jewish community. We don’t have Jewish communal jobs. But I think there are benefits to a lot of aspects of Jewish observance that come from density that we’re losing. And I wish the community were – I’ve said this to the Federation as well – more intentional about what are we building to attract Jewish people to live closer together. So I would be really excited about an intensive cross-institutional effort to build something really beautiful that encourages Jewish people to huddle together as opposed to huddling together from need.
PDH: What sort of institutions do you mean? Like what would attract more Jews?
LM: I have no idea. So I think part of it is finding out — like if you’re — I’m 41, so if you’re newly married and you’re 25 or 30 or you’re starting to have kids, what would pull you? What would make you say — and you can’t ask that question directly. You have to — I think you have to do [0:48:00] trial and error. Like that worked. That didn’t work. We’re going to do more of this and less of that.
PDH: Excuse me. I’m so sorry.
LM: No, it’s okay. I think a lot of it is — I think Shabbat dinner is really beautiful. And if there were a concerted effort to bring people together for Shabbat dinner and a way — although I — I’m really just thinking off the top of my head — to have people try living within walking distance of one another on a trial basis, so they could see how amazing it is to walk home after Shabbat dinner, and have the music in your head, and have the candlelight sort of flickering in your memory, and have that experience. I think that that’s very powerful and would draw people to live together — and you know, just having physical safety. If the houses were affordable and up high enough, I think that would do it. I’ve suggested to the Federation that they should build — they should buy or operate an elevation company so that more Jewish and other families can afford to [0:49:00] elevate in a less expensive way.
PDH: I’m so sorry.
LM: Do you want to take a break?
PDH: I’m so sorry.
LM: You’re okay. I think the Jewish community, historically, has relied upon the fact that Jewish people are going to be excluded from general society. And they’re going to huddle together out of need. They haven’t really focused on what will attract Jewish people to choose to live this lifestyle and to choose to live in this community. I think Chabad actually does an amazing job at this. And we should all learn from Chabad.
PDH: Yeah. [0:49:33]