In Too Deep

Class and Mothering in a Flooded Community

Rachel Kimbro

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520976436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

In a small Texas neighborhood, an affluent group of mothers has been repeatedly rocked by catastrophic flooding—the 2015 Memorial Day flood, the 2016 Tax Day flood, and sixteen months later, Hurricane Harvey. Yet even after these disrupting events, almost all mothers in this neighborhood still believe there is only one place for them to live: Bayou Oaks. In Too Deep is a sociological exploration of what happens when climate change threatens the carefully curated family life of upper-middle-class mothers. Through in-depth interviews with thirty-six Bayou Oaks mothers whose homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey, Rachel Kimbro reveals why these mothers continued to stay in a place that was becoming more and more unstable. Rather than retreating, the mothers dug in and sustained the community they have chosen and nurtured, trying to keep social, emotional, and economic instability at bay. In Too Deep provides a glimpse into how class and place intersect in an unstable physical environment and underlines the price families pay for securing their futures.

1 Choosing Bayou Oaks

ARE WE IN PLEASANTVILLE?

On a sweltering “fall” afternoon in Houston in 2007, Nicole, age 38, was walking back to her car after working as an assistant in a class at a local community center. She and her husband, Dave, had recently sold their bungalow near downtown for three times what they’d paid for it a decade earlier. Now they were looking for a place with less traffic so their young son could play outside and eventually ride his bike. Nicole decided to drive through the neighborhood near the community center, Bayou Oaks, which she knew to be safe and in a great location not too far from the central city. As she drove through it, the place called to her. It looked like a real neighborhood, with wide sidewalks and mature oak trees, without being all the way out in Houston’s far-flung suburbs. Homeowners were maintaining their lush lawns. The lots were enormous for the city, with plenty of space between neighbors. The homes were a mix of unassuming ranch houses and large mid-century modern homes. The big homes would be out of their price range, but because of the extraordinary appreciation of their starter home, they could now afford a ranch house in Bayou Oaks.

Nicole realized she was near the local elementary school, Bayou Oaks Elementary, and pulled over to watch as school let out. With a teaching certification, she had a special perspective on schools and now, of course, was starting to think about where their son would attend school. Without any prior knowledge of Bayou Oaks Elementary at all, she watched families pick up their children and liked what she saw. Many parents were walking their children home, instead of driving, and she saw “a good mix of skin colors,” instead of the racially homogenous schools she knew were more common in the district. Bayou Oaks Elementary was a magnet school with a specialization in languages, and the odds of getting in via the Houston school district’s lottery were only about one in four. As in many Houston Independent School District (HISD) magnet schools, however, residents of the school’s attendance zone were essentially guaranteed admission. Nicole had no interest in playing the magnet lottery game; it felt like a gamble, and she thought it would be too stressful. So she had always intended to strategically buy into a good school’s attendance zone before her son started kindergarten. Before she drove away, Nicole noticed that many parents were lingering after the bell rang, chatting with each other as their kids tore around in the grassy area in front of the school, darting in and out between large, hand-painted letters that spelled out B-A-Y-O-U O-A-K-S. This also seemed like a very good signal for the school—and for the neighborhood. Nicole wanted to be part of a community where parents hung out together and where the school was the center of the community.

As she drove home, Nicole knew she’d found their new neighborhood; she just had to let Dave know. It was exactly what they were looking for, with a great location, good school, and quiet, leafy streets where their son would one day ride his bike safely. It was the opposite of their current gritty, traffic-ridden neighborhood near downtown, but it was still close enough to the city amenities they valued, like museums and art galleries and restaurants. Ten years later, when I spoke with Nicole after Harvey had flooded their home, she still felt the same way. Her gut instinct that day, just driving around, had been right. Floods or no floods, Bayou Oaks was still the perfect neighborhood to raise a family. And they weren’t going anywhere. Nicole’s story illustrates how the Bayou Oaks mothers felt about their neighborhood. It had all the qualities they sought for a place to raise their children. Choosing Bayou Oaks, then, allowed the mothers to curate a lifestyle for their families that they desired. Living there would be advantageous for their children, and so living there was part of their identities as good mothers. What would it mean, then, if they were to leave?

Originally advertised in the Houston Chronicle in 1955 as a community where children could “go to the right schools, play with the right kind of companions,” Bayou Oaks became a destination for a largely Jewish population who moved to the suburbs seeking bigger yards, bigger homes, and yes, distance from Houston’s growing African American community, according to the Houston Jewish History Archive. Today, Bayou Oaks is somewhat more diverse, with a large concentration of Jewish and other non-Hispanic White families but also a small percentage of Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans. Together, non-Whites today make up about 15 percent of the neighborhood.¹ At the same time, Houston’s extraordinary outward expansion has turned this once-suburban neighborhood into a “close-in,” desirably located community, only about twenty minutes from downtown except during peak rush hour (a desirable trait given that most Houstonians live much farther away). Bayou Oaks was suburban by design, but now quasi-urban by virtue of its (relative) proximity to downtown.

Not only was the location convenient, and the home prices (from the mothers’ perspective) relatively affordable, but Bayou Oaks fit their values of urban living, with a tight-knit, child-focused community, and its choice was an identity statement in a city where the majority of Whites chose the more distant suburbs. It allowed them to retain their image of themselves as city people who valued access to the city’s amenities and rejected the suburbs’ racial homogeneity, but their kids could still walk and bike to school on wide sidewalks under shady oaks. Most importantly, the neighborhood provided the kind of community they were looking for, which was hard to find in Houston’s jumbled, sprawling urban landscape with no zoning. As a result, Bayou Oaks became so desirable that just a few years before Harvey hit, in order to purchase a home there, buyers had to swoop in before it actually went on the market, and this was true across price points. Before the first major flood in 2015, homes in the neighborhood ranged in cost from $300,000 for a real fixer-upper to more than a million dollars, with the median home price about $400,000. For comparison, in 2014, city-wide, the median home price was about $195,000. The wide range in Bayou Oaks prices before 2015 reflected the variation in housing stock, from modest three-bedroom ranches to five-bedroom, sprawling mid-century moderns, all built in the early 1950s.

The Bayou Oaks mothers were exemplars of the “concentrated cultivation” approach to middle-class parenting first described by Annette Lareau.² While Lareau’s initial study focused mostly on the home environment, other researchers have explored how class influences parenting and family life in other arenas, notably the school environment.³ I argue that an overlooked component of intensive mothering, especially for middle- and upper-middle-class families, is the choice of neighborhood.⁴ While concerted cultivation refers to the child’s personal development, curation refers to the child’s environment, and I argue that mothers are actively curating their children’s environment when they choose a neighborhood and a school. In most places, the neighborhood choice is also the school choice, making those decisions interlinked.⁵ When parents choose a neighborhood, they are choosing a package of amenities for child-rearing. The ability to choose a neighborhood at all reflects class (and racial) privilege; the ability to do so with children’s future success in mind reveals a way that inequality is reproduced in an era of increasing economic anxiety. The Bayou Oaks mothers wanted to situate their children in the best possible position socially, geographically, and educationally. While they believed parenting was important for children’s development and exhibited some elements of intensive mothering, they also recognized the crucial nature of an environment where children could thrive and saw choosing that environment as part of their identities as “good mothers.”

In Bayou Oaks, mothers expressed this sentiment over and over. It was seen as a given that they had to choose a place to live where the public schools were strong, preferably “all the way up,” or through high school. That, they felt, left them with only a handful of neighborhood options unless they wanted to move to the suburbs. In addition to the schools, the mothers reported evaluating family lifestyle elements, such as commuting times, local amenities, and the presence of other families, in their choice of neighborhood. All of these factors, along with their financial resources, allowed the mothers to “curate” the type of family life they wanted for their children and for themselves. That curative labor was not complete when the family moved into Bayou Oaks, but continued as the mothers worked to build their social networks within the neighborhood, something made easier by the presence of many other families who were in a similar life stage.⁶ Curation, then, was a constantly evolving, labor-intensive strategy the mothers used to situate their children for the best possible lifestyle. As we will see, once mothers believe their curation has resulted in a good place for their children to grow up, it will be difficult to change their minds.

The Bayou Oaks mothers frequently mentioned several features that had led them to choose this lifestyle and this neighborhood, all of which were framed as related to their parenting. First, they valued the close-in location of the neighborhood, rejecting the long commutes and homogeneity of the suburbs. Next, they lauded the people who lived in Bayou Oaks, distinguishing them both from suburbanites and from the wealthier residents in two nearby communities. Jewish mothers valued the proximity to major Jewish institutions. And most importantly, the mothers valued Bayou Oaks Elementary as the place that would educate their children. In this chapter we learn why—and how carefully—the mothers chose where they wanted to live and raise their families. The choice of neighborhood was about the “parameters of their child’s life,” one that was freighted with symbolic weight.⁷ The mothers believed that the qualities Bayou Oaks offered were unique in this fourth-largest city in the country, and their belief that the neighborhood was perfect for raising their children was barely shaken by the repeated flooding. Instead of departing en masse after the floods, they dug in and fought for the neighborhood’s future and the lifestyle they had carefully curated within it for their families.

The mothers justified their choice of Bayou Oaks with several major narratives, including its location, the type of homes, who they did (and did not) want to be their neighbors, and its elementary school. This combination of factors, they felt, could not be found anywhere else in Houston. But more importantly, they believed that their choice of neighborhood was a statement about the type of people—and mothers—they were (and were not). The choice of Bayou Oaks, then, was not just tied up with their active curation of their children’s lives, but also with their own identities.

The location of the neighborhood within Houston was mentioned by many of the mothers as a major reason they chose Bayou Oaks. Houston is an unusual city in many ways, but one distinctive feature is that the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods are close to the central core of the city rather than in the suburbs. In addition, the lack of zoning and rapid growth of the city have led to urban sprawl across more than ten thousand square miles, an area larger than the state of New Jersey. People can drive an hour and a half and still be in “Houston.” Suburban commutes on the city’s notorious freeways can top two hours a day. While many families brave such commutes in exchange for the relative tranquility and large, much less expensive houses in the suburbs, some families seek to live as close to the center of the city as possible, both for easier commutes and for quicker access to the city’s significant cultural amenities. Proximity to downtown and—crucially—the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world, which employs more than 100,000 Houstonians, makes Bayou Oaks the best-situated neighborhood in Houston where one can buy a home for under $800,000. It has the wide, flat streets characteristic of Texas; well-appointed landscaping; and majestic, mature live oaks. If you didn’t know better when you drove the streets, you’d think you were in the suburbs. Of course, when the neighborhood was founded in the 1950s, it was the suburbs.

Proximity to the central city mattered to the mothers not just because it meant shorter commutes for themselves and their husbands, but also because it meant less time driving children to school and after-school activities—a common problem of American suburban life. Like others in their social class, this group of well-educated, affluent mothers factored in their children’s extracurricular activities as just part of life, something that would be easier if they lived close to city amenities. While this was a practical concern—these were busy families, and there is only so much time in the day—it was also a value statement about how they wanted to spend their time, as Kelly, 48, put it:

We chose it because of the proximity of the medical center. So we could get a lot more for our money farther out [in the suburbs], but we just didn’t want to pull our family up. Being able to have our daughter go to school nearby, and being able to drop off in 10 minutes and not have to spend all our time in the car. Like we wanna spend time as a family and we just . . . we just love Bayou Oaks.

These mothers knew what they wanted from family life—and made sacrifices to achieve it. They wanted their children to have access to excellent dance teams and piano teachers, but not at the cost of excessive driving. They could be home from work in time to cook dinner or get their kids to baseball practice, and they could drive their kids to ballet without it taking forty-five minutes. This was not just about easing schedules; it was about enabling the kind of family life they valued. The extra time they gained, they envisioned, would be family time, as described by Laura, forty-two, a stay-at-home mother of two:

And so with this choice and this location, it meant that [my husband] was gonna be home for dinner and actually spend a few hours with everyone. And you know, the trade-offs were a smaller home at a higher price point, but we felt like what we were getting for that, it was more than worth it.

The Bayou Oaks mothers were willing to live in a smaller, older, and more expensive home if it meant they could have the type of family life they desired, and they believed it was the best type of environment for child-rearing.

In addition to saving time through shorter commutes, in Bayou Oaks the mothers also would be well poised to take advantage of all the amenities of the city. It was important, they thought, for their children to have access to these institutions. They believed that if their families lived in the suburbs, they would not visit the city’s restaurants and museums nearly as often, because it would take so long to get there. Michelle, forty-two, an interior designer and mother of two, appreciated all that Houston offered, and that living in Bayou Oaks allowed her easy access to it:

I also love that it’s affordable for what I consider in-city living. I think we’re quite convenient to museums, and theater, and shopping, and the restaurants in Houston are bar none the best in the world. So I just . . . I’m a super huge cheerleader of Houston. But like, our neighborhood too.

Implicit in these statements about the choice of Bayou Oaks was a rejection of other types of neighborhoods and other types of neighbors. Many of the women believed that the neighborhood matched the type of people they were and the values they held. Like other house hunters, the Bayou Oaks families had relied on their within-class so...