The people who are in need in Houston should not be the subject of political retribution for the bad planning decisions of local governments and developers. That is just pure cruelty and does nothing to change things. If you really wanted to change things, impose a tax on all developers who build in flood plains and fill in wetlands and prairies to fund flood relief.
Houston's flooding problems have many contributing factors, some were well within the power of local officials to mitigate, others were either unintended consequences or factors beyond anyone's control.
As for the latter, Houston was founded on a swamp along a bayou. At that time, Houston was not supposed to be much more than a smaller sister city to Galveston. But after the great storm of 1900 almost completely destroyed Galveston, Houston became the major city on the Texas Gulf Coast. The Spindle Top oil boom saw Houston grow exponentially. Houston decided to use what was then abundant ground water for its water supply. A combination of oil drilling and diminishing ground water supply in Houston caused subsidence, making the city like a bowl when it came to water flow into the Gulf. Houston stopped using ground water and switched to reservoirs. But it was too late.
Then, Houston saw another boom in the 60s and 70s. Engineers believed that the way to beat flooding was to dredge the natural bayous and fill them with concrete. The idea was to move water out faster to avoid flooding. This did not work because development quickly outstripped the carrying capacity of the bayous because the drainage systems had no detention/retention capacity. Every new development was designed to dump stormwater as quickly as possible into the bayous, causing them to overflow with water in big storm events. But to be fair, no one new any better back then and a lot of money was spent to try to improve drainage.
Here is where Houston only has itself to blame. Thanks to the big bust of the 1980s, Houston saw massive sprawl take place in the 90s due to white flight and abundant cheap land all around the city. New development codes in the burbs eventually required good stormwater detention/retention practices. But a lot of new development went in on prairies and wetlands. Even with the best detention/retention practices, these developments sent more water downstream to Houston's already inadequate stormwater system. The City of Houston finally caught up with times and did a bunch of big stormwater mitigation projects and required developers to install detention ponds if they added more than an acre of impervious cover. But this was too little too late. First, the big stormwater mitigation projects were supposed to be paid for by a special impervious cover tax. But those funds were first used to refinance debt and did not become available for draiinage projects for years after the tax went into place. Many of the big drainage projects have yet to break ground due to the delay. Then, the City does not require detention ponds if the new development is on ground that was previously impervious cover. So, if you take an old strip mall and turn it into a big mixed use development, you do not have to add any drainage detention.
Finally, developers have been able to build WAY to close to bayous and rivers and to the big flood mitigation reservoirs. This has been going on from the start. A lot of the flooding you see on TV is because developers built too close to the waterways that carry stormwater to the gulf. When you get 30-50 inches of rain, any body of water is going to flood. Houston should have restricted development near these systems and put in detention/retention ponds to slow the movement of water into the bayous and rivers.
Nothing really big ever gets done in Houston on drainage because each big disaster was supposed to be the biggest and baddest we would ever see. Allison was unprecedented and set the benchmark for the outer limits of what Houston needed to be prepared to handle once in a life time. But then Ike hit and was just as bad as Allison in places with lots of wind damage in addition. That was supposed to be as bad as it could get until the Tax day and Memorial day floods. These were not even tropical systems. Just big storms. Now Harvey has set the bar at basically Allison times two. Everything planned in response to Allison and Ike now will seem insufficient, leaving local leaders to delay and delay measures that might actually fix everything.