Fifty-one inches of rain.
Twenty-four trillion gallons of water.
Businesses were flooded.
Thousands of homes were impacted.
If you were from middle-income, affluent areas you flooded.
If you were in low-income communities, you flooded.
It was a phenomenal event.
It's going to be the most expensive storm ever in American history.
Houston has to return to some sense of normalcy after Hurricane Harvey.
The goal was to get our kids back into school as quickly as possible.
The transit system was back up a few days after the storm.
Airport system was back up, the power was totally on.
But at the same time, even though the city is quickly recovering,
there are still thousands of people whose homes need to be repaired or rebuilt.
Harvey can be characterized as the largest housing disaster in the history of the U.S.
We think on the order of 300,000 homes impacted by Harvey.
That's about half single-family homes and about half apartments.
Houston's success in the future depends on its ability to build a much more resilient city.
How do we accommodate that reality as we go forward in the 21st century?
It's going to take three things:
It's going to take, number one, time, it's going to take money,
and, above all, it's going to take many additional workers.
If you come at it from a point of economics and importance to the entire country,
Houston and the surrounding area, the Port of Houston, represents probably 6% of the GDP in the country.
When you look at the ship channel, we supply fuel to all parts of the United States.
There are two international airports. The largest medical center.
The largest childrens' hospital.
There are not too many places that will have a greater impact
on what happens in this country than right in the city of Houston.
One of the challenges we face is the storm has acted as a economic event all of its own.
Not a good one, but one that's created a great deal of demand for labor.
There's a lot of different kinds of work to be done. You can think of very highly skilled work
on some of the facilities around town - water and those types of things.
I think because Harvey was such a significant housing issue -
hundreds of thousands of houses that are damaged -
That's the piece that I worry most about.
Every able-bodied individual within the City of Houston and the surrounding region
is called upon to do that work.
As you can imagine, there is a huge need for contractors, and people will tell you
it is kind of difficult to find those contractors these days.
Our country and, in particular our industry, are facing a workforce crisis.
We have an exiting generation of boomers - 10,000 a day are retiring
and we're seeing a big gap in the workforce.
The next significant number is Millennials and their expectations of jobs are a little bit different.
Non-profits have asked the question: What are you doing recruiting-wise in in the wake ofthe storm?
The answer is: Nothing new. There are no more new recruiting techniques.
Those that are recruiting have been turning over every stone in an attempt
to find qualified workers or candidates.
Having this rebuilding effort going at the pace that we would like and having sufficient human resources
out there to get that work done, is a piece of uncertainty right now that we're not able to solve.
My concern is clearly that it won't be sufficient,
and the clear result of it not being sufficient is people suffer for longer.
One third of all the residents of Harris County are foreign-born residents.
500,000 are undocumented immigrants.
They are critical to the well-being of the city to our ability to to rebuild
in way that we need to in the timeframe we have.
Especially in construction industries which are precisely the industries that undocumented new immigrants
who have difficulty with the language and knowledge about how to how to do this building
become the key forces in the construction industry that are going to be
be absolutely essential to Houston's ability to position itself for prosperity in the 21st century.
We need to find a way to bring those people out of the shadows
to allow them to work and to pay taxes while they work on coming
to a position of legal status.
So that we can take advantage of that area the workforce
because when you try to recover from something like Harvey
over a period of the next several years that's an enormous surge in activity.
As far as I'm concerned we need all hands on deck.
What's the big solution? How do we blend together all these things?
We have a fabric of laws and I think we need to enforce the ones that we have,
but I think the truth is that our immigration system does not work anymore.
It does not address an economic solution one that business can deal with.
I need, as a representative of the city in this case, I need a legal way to be
able to access that workforce. Not necessarily trying to convert those
tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals to full-fledged legal citizens,
but this idea of: Can you get identification? Can you be put in a special category?
That would be amazing for us. We would we would love for that to happen.
it is unfortunate that we're living at this point in time when people are
fearful to participate in this economic engine that we call the City of Houston.
All of the private businesses that are in need of them.
We need that labor force. In this absence, or the shortage thereof, it is going to take
longer and everyone is going to pay the price.
As any other American city, we're gonna need immigrants to maintain our GDP.
To maintain our workforce and continue to have a good economy.
Houston finds itself at the forefront of the transformations
that are occurring across all of America.
Houston is the fourth largest city in America. It's the single most ethnically diverse
major metropolitan area in the country. More diverse than than than New York,
more representing equal division among Asians, African Americans, Latinos, and Anglos.
So Houston is one of the places where the American future is going to be worked out.
Our ability to build and attract the desirable legal workforce is an economic
and a value proposition. I think that's something that everyone could learn from.
I think it's missing from the message everywhere.
We talk about right and wrong and left and right
and we never talk about value.
At the end of the day, anybody that should be here should be in the country because
they bring something to the fabric of our society.
The fact of the matter is that everybody in this city, and I'm saying everybody
not just those with papers, contributes to the economic engine of this city
and this region which impacts the rest of this country.
Watching a city like this and how those very diverse populations now are to live together and
thrive together and maintain some unique character - all well being part of a bigger city...
It is a fascinating experiment and one that the U.S. sure better get right.
The reason why there's room for optimism about Houston is that
Houston is good on the business case. It's able to add to recognize the enlightened
self-interest that is involved here. It's businesspeople recognizing this is
in the long-term economic self-interest of the city as a whole.
That's where I think you're going to see that ability to transcend the
anxieties, the fears, that come with this remarkable demographic transition
and say "Yes, this is who we are. This is our destiny, whether we would have chosen it or not."
We live in a pluralistic society. That's not gonna change.
Learn how to live next door with your neighbors.
Recognize the strengths that people bring to the table.
We are welcoming city. We don't be a walls, we build relationships.
If you are within the city of Houston, whether you're documented,
regardless of the language, you're welcome in this city.
Because the City of Houston is so diverse and because we place so much
emphasis not just on being diverse but being inclusive...
the city is standing.