The Houston Association of Realtors’ promised Harvey temporary housing mini-site went live yesterday. Unlike HAR’s main site of MLS listings, the new Harvey site allows anyone to post available properties — or at least to attempt to do so; each one must be approved before it is posted.
The association with Hurricane Harvey relief efforts provides a charitable aura to the site, but that may or may not be reflected in the by-the-week rental listings that show up: There’s no requirement that rents on listed properties be reduced — or not elevated over expected levels. You can sign up to post a property here. They can go up for a week at a time or for up to 90 days.
We’ve embedded a portion of the site above so you can get a quick sense of the locations and pricing of the listings that have populated it already, but the main site is more functional — it includes a sidebar you can use to filter results or show detail on individual properties.
Prior to Harvey’s arrival, Airbnb suggested to property owners that they might want to offer their homes as shelters to those fleeing the storm at little or no cost. The company waived its service fees for the homes, and provided a section of its website to list them.
- Harvey Temporary Housing [HAR]
- Urgent Accommodations [Airbnb]
“. . . An undergound aqueduct probably won’t resolve the situation. However, this storm has made it pretty clear that having both Barker AND Addicks draining 100 percent into Buffalo Bayou may not be ideal. An addition channel that would allow USACE to divert some of the Barker outflow to Brays Bayou would allow for some flexibility.
While Brays DID flood during Harvey, the water receded very quickly, with the water back within its banks and falling quickly while Buffalo Bayou was still rising.” [
It took a 
Opening night for Mary Chase’s 1945 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Harvey at the Jeannette and L.M. George Theater is 
“I suspect you’ll start seeing ‘Didn’t flood in Harvey’ as a selling point in future real estate listings, which will drive up the land values, and drive the poor out to the flooded areas (which is par for the course). It’s no wonder that happened, though. Many of the oldest neighborhoods in Houston are also predominately minority. And the oldest neighborhoods (read, first settled) are the highest points in Houston. After all, who is going to settle in a lowland when the ‘highlands’ are still available?” [
“My home didn’t flood, though a few blocks away, others did. I wonder if we could get a ‘Certificate of Nonflooding’ or some such official thing. I always laugh when I see a home listing with the words ‘Never flooded, per owner.’ Yeah, right!” [
