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We're in the process of buying a house and I flatly refused to buy one in 100 or 500 year floodplain. Still, we're working to close on one that is fairly near them. It's wild how much of Houston's residential housing is in the floodplains.
My wife and I make a really decent income, and I even pick up sidegig work delivering for Amazon, yet we still struggled to find a house in the city. Houston needs to work a lot harder on affordable housing, because families a lot worse off than us need a chance to find a home.
This was welcome news. This is a little over a mile upstream from the house we're preparing to buy. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Council-OKs-11-5-million-buyout-of-apartment-15737385.php
My advice for people trying to find a house inside the Beltway for less than $300K is to check out Willow Meadows/Willowbend area. I had never heard of it, but it's on the bottom left corner of 610 and has some nice residential streets.
That, or Spring Branch, but make sure to stay south of Kempwood or you're back in the flood zone.
Also highly recommend Fred Willcox for inspection. He saved us from a disastrous house that had beautiful finishes and almost ruined us with a siren song. Fred charged us half price on that. And pointed out all the things we needed to request a fix for on the house we are buying.
Tools you need to check flood stuff are the Flood Education Mapping Tool and the Flood Warning System. FEMT will show you the designated flood zones, and FWS can show you estimated inundation flooding at previous historical times. https://www.harriscountyfemt.org/ https://www.harriscountyfws.org/
I wrote up some precise instructions for seeing how bad Harvey flooding was in a particular area here. 8/27/17 at 8 AM is the time to target to see it at its worst. http://kylejack.com/?p=106
