It seems many ride-or-die Houstonians are breaking up with the city. Beryl, the Category 1 storm that left millions of residents powerless and nearly 20 dead, has been the back-breaker. It has tipped the scale of what’s ugly about Houston to outweigh the beautiful.
For those who want to leave this place, the city’s magic was lost in the storm’s 80 mph winds with the sideways rain. Its strength buckled spirits.
Leaving Houston is the last resort when the romance is gone and the love is faint. It’s what happens when you can’t endure one more storm, one more heartbreak.
A 2023 study by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs asked nearly 800 Houston residents likely to vote in last November’s election, “Over the past few years, have you considered moving out of the Houston metro region?”
Some 57 percent of respondents said yes. Then when asked if severe weather, like the 2021 freeze and extreme heat, was part of the reason, more than 51 percent cited it as a factor. Millennials and Gen Zers (65%) were more likely than older groups to cite weather as a factor.
“If Houston can’t figure out ways to become more resilient in terms of storms, it will face a greater exodus of people or fewer people wanting to move here,” said Mark Jones, a research associate at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs and a political science professor at Rice University. “There is still a demand to migrate to Texas, but this might shift the migration to Dallas, San Antonio or Austin.”
Hurricane Beryl is one more reason Marc Newsome said he’s thinking about leaving. The artist, a Houston native, has been contemplating the idea of moving out of the country. Maybe Portugal, he says. He has friends there.
“There’s a pervasive apathy for people here and the communities they live in,” Newsome said. “It’s a collective mentality that makes it very difficult to live here. We have electricity now, so what is the strategy for the next storm? Even if we don’t invest in the infrastructure, we should have a pre-storm strategy in place. But it feels like we’re on our own in many ways.”
He was without power for seven days and, like many people, became a nomad, finding a cool place to sleep at a friend’s house.
A better quality of life becomes a clear goal in fractious times. Still, leaving Houston will be hard for Newsome. The arts scene here is “the only thing that gives me sanity,” he said.
Gretchen Cearnal Botha didn’t wait for Beryl. She was gone after Uri, the winter storm of 2021 during which 43 people died in Houston.
In August that year, she, her husband and two children moved back to her hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss, where they now live on a beautiful Lake Serene. It’s a peaceful place like it’s name.
“We made it through Hurricane Harvey, but that winter storm, I was scared for my kids’ lives,” Cearnal Botha said. “We had no power, then I looked at downtown and it was lit up. I realized they don’t care about us. When you love someone and they don’t love you back, it breaks your heart.”
She misses the big city life and the Astros, but hopes to return to Houston one day.
There’s no clue what will come next month or next year. Whether another storm will beat us down, like Beryl, or be kind enough to drop a few inches of rain and move along. But the low-key anxiety of living in a city knowing that the next hurricane could mean devastation or even death is a frightening thought.
Hurricane Beryl was not Houston’s first rodeo. The Houston area is used to emergencies.
In fact, they’ve become all too common. In the last decade the area has gone through the Tax Day flood, the Memorial Day flood, the long-lasting devastation of Harvey, Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and last summer’s extreme heat and drought.
And this year, a surprise derecho and Hurricane Beryl have hit the region.
It’s all been enough to say to some Houstonians, “That’s it. I’m out. I’m leaving.”
In fact, there’s a leaving Texas support meet-up scheduled on Thursday at Raza Persian Grill on Hillcroft Ave. for people contemplating such a move.
Houston Matters began to wonder: are Houstonians contemplating moving out of the area because of repeated weather emergencies?
On their behalf, researchers with the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston asked the Houston Matters exclusive question.
The survey found that 57% of respondents said yes, they’d considered moving out of the Houston Metro regionin the past few years, with more than half the respondents citing extreme weather as the reason why.
Texas Monthly contributor Mimi Swartz and Sarah Smith, Senior Enterprise reporter for the Houston Chronicle joined Houston Matters on Thursday to discuss the findings.
Swartz said she is hearing a lot more chatter about Houstonians who are thinking about packing it in.
“I’m afraid it makes me sad, but I think you can’t look around outside and think about it,” she said.
Smith said Beryl came through as a Category 1, and didn’t linger in the area for long, but the devastation lasted longer than the storm did.
“I think people are upset and they’re angry and they weren’t expecting this level of damage from that kind of a hurricane,” Smith said.
It’s not like Houston isn’t seeing growth. While the pace of population growth has slowed from a decade ago, more people still seem inclined to move here than to move away. Smith said she moved to Houston in 2018 and said personally she loves it.
“It’s a vibrant city, it’s diverse. It’s somewhere that I feel like I’ll never fully know or get bored of,” she said. “There’s job opportunities, a relatively low cost of living compared to other cities. There’s so much to love here and I think that narrative does get missed a lot during disaster season.”
Swartz said she wonders about the politics also being at play in the area.
“I wonder if rather than packing up and moving, people are going to start demanding more from their public officials and from corporations like CenterPoint,” she said. “I mean, why do we have to be the ones that pack up?”
“like *its* name”. Please lose the catapostrophe