Over the past decade, developers and property owners have used a little-known federal appeal process to remove at least 6,556 homes from official floodplains, a Houston Chronicle investigation found.<\/p>\n
The Chronicle found that the successful appeals have clustered in newer subdivisions<\/a> and more affluent neighborhoods, especially in suburban communities near Katy, Cypress, Humble and Tomball. The typical removed home was worth about $100,000 more than the median single-family home in Harris County, according to the Chronicle\u2019s analysis of FEMA records and Harris County Appraisal District data.<\/p>\n \u201cYou often have to spend money on a surveyor or engineer, and that\u2019s out of reach for a lot of people,\u201d said Sarah Pralle, a Syracuse University professor who focuses on environmental policy.<\/p>\n These map changes occurred through two types of FEMA processes<\/a>. A Letter of Map Amendment, or LOMA, is used when an owner shows that a structure or lot naturally sits high enough to be removed from the floodplain. A Letter of Map Revision Based on Fill, or LOMR-F, is used when the owner has brought in dirt to raise the ground under the house.<\/p>\n A third type, called a Letter of Map Revision, or LOMR, can redraw the floodplain across a subdivision or wider area. The Chronicle did not include LOMRs in this analysis because they are broader changes, and the records are not directly comparable.<\/p>\n Explore the map to see where homes have been removed from Harris County floodplains, which FEMA process was used and how much those homes are worth.<\/p>\n This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Use<\/a> and acknowledge that your information will be used as described in our Privacy Notice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Click the dots to learn more about each removed property. Across Harris County, thousands of homes have quietly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-366887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"logo\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/hc-square-black.png\"\/)
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