When Julia and James Long’s Meyerland home flooded for the third time with Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the couple considered just walking away from it, but something held them back. Even though they’d owned the home for less than a decade, the connection ran deep.

Julia, now an architect at 514 Design, had visited the home, designed in 1965 by Hy Applebaum for friends of her parents, throughout her childhood. When its owners were ready to sell in 2008, they called her first. It suffered minor flooding in 2015 and 2016; the Longs cleaned up and moved on. The decision was bigger in 2017, after having more than 2 feet of floodwater and facing updated city code requiring any new construction be lifted 5 feet off the ground.

Chuck and Connie Broskoski faced a similar dilemma for their Braeswood Place home, a cozy midcentury ranch just a block from Braes Bayou. It virtually drowned in Hurricane Harvey, with 6 to 8 feet of floodwater causing extensive damage. New city building codes for Houston’s 100-year and 500-year floodplains meant the Broskoskis would have to rebuild any home a whopping 7 feet, 7 inches off the ground.

Considering the depth of the flooding, Connie wasn’t surprised at the new elevation requirements, but Chuck hesitated about their next step. “All we were seeing were the people who just lifted their homes off of the ground, and that’s not what we wanted. I couldn’t put my head in a space that said ours could look totally different,” Chuck says. “We initially thought we would sell the lot.”

The Memorial Day and Tax Day rainstorms in 2015 and 2016, respectively, caused a good deal of damage but were child’s play compared to Hurricane Harvey, which in 2017 hovered over the area for three days, dumping around 50 inches of rain. Cities and counties sprang into action with new drainage work, ranging from the $131 million North Canal Project and $80 million Inwood Forest stormwater detention basin to more creative efforts where public green spaces double as stormwater basins. The Willow Waterhole Greenway can hold 600 million gallons of water, while Exploration Green in Clear Lake can hold 500 million gallons.

Immediate efforts, though, addressed building codes for the 100- and 500-year floodplains, broadening both and requiring that new construction be built higher off the ground. Since Harvey, the City of Houston requires that new-construction homes in the 500-year floodplain be at least 2 feet above the floodplain. How high off the ground a home must be built varies, since each home’s elevation can differ. In many neighborhoods that have experienced flooding, it’s not unusual to see homes elevated by 4 feet to 10 feet.

The Broskoskis’ home had to be 7 feet, 7 inches off the ground, and they ended up with an 8-foot-tall, non-air-conditioned ground-floor level that they use as a two-car garage, with a workshop for Connie and a home gym for Chuck.

“The floods have really taken apart the beautiful feel of Meyerland, homes designed in the 1960s, and so many beautiful mature oaks. Now, the houses are taller than the oaks,” says Julia Long. “It’s definitely different. We always thought we would downsize to one of the smaller houses in Meyerland when we were done raising kids. Now that’s not a possibility…there’s not many of those homes left.”

These new city codes, along with homeowners’ fear of flooding, have driven a flurry of post-hurricane construction that is dramatically changing Houston’s architectural image.

Not all of the homes in Meyerland, Bellaire, and the Braeswood Place area—three neighborhoods that flooded extensively—qualify as midcentury gems, but they were all part of the post–World War II rush to erect new housing. That’s when modern architecture in America was beginning to edge out traditional lines of the Beaux-Arts era, and homeowners were hiring local architects such as Howard Barnstone, William Jenkins, Burdette Keeland, Lars Bang, Lucian Hood, Fred MacKie, and Karl Kamrath. Most were single-story homes with 1,500 to 2,500 square feet of living space that hugged the ground and reflected the landscape around it.

By the twenty-first century, though, many had become teardowns, and Hurricane Harvey accelerated new construction in many neighborhoods, swapping small homes with ones double or triple in square footage that devoured ordinary lots. “Even two-story houses from before [the hurricane] are dwarfed by what has come back. It’s a shocking transition,” says Anne Eamon, who with her husband, Mark Schatz, is a principal at the M+A architecture studio.

The same is true for Houston’s sprawling suburbs, and it’s expected to continue, since the long and arduous process of getting FEMA money for Harvey flooding is still ongoing.

“In the neighborhoods we’re talking about, most of the original stock was typical for its era, builder products, and that satisfied the majority of the market,” says Steve Curry, a principal at Curry Boudreaux Architects. “By and large, the housing product now driven by the market are standard cookie-cutter and they look a lot alike. The obvious difference is scale, vertical scale differences and volumetric differences. They leave no room for trees and are built to the maximum lot line. There are several examples of someone buying two lots and building a giant house on them.”

These tall bases make a new house cost more, too. Rame and Russell Hruska, of Intexure Architects and Aura Prefab, said that for one of their clients, the difference between concrete blocks and poured concrete for the elevated base was $100,000. Adding a stucco finish to the base for a more seamless appearance would cost another $6 to $8 a square foot, potentially tens of thousands of dollars.

Making these very tall homes look less ominous takes creative thinking. Long—who chose to lift up her existing home, which alone cost $300,000—used a concrete base, added brick detailing and planted fig ivy to grow over it. To avoid a massive staircase, she created a few pads of concrete and brick that guests ascend before getting to a smaller staircase. In the end, it’s a good look.

For the Broskoskis, the Hruskas designed a beautiful wooden garage door on one end, and planted pink muhly grasses to create a meadow-like look along the other. It’s a visual trick to give anyone passing by more to look at than a concrete wall. Schatz noted that architects have a creative toolbox to make these taller homes look more unassuming, but builders working from their own design plans often think differently.

“They’re aiming for a new grandeur; it’s like having a circular drive and how high your house is off the ground have become a new status symbol,” Schatz says. “I see it as highly problematic, aesthetically and from a social standpoint. There hasn’t been a lot of critical thinking about how we build. We’re going to build up in the air, but we don’t think about the ways we build up in the air.”