Five years ago, Houston was forced to confront something communities had been living with for decades: raw sewage overflowing into streets, parks, and bayou, often in the same neighborhoods, again and again.
In 2021, Bayou City Waterkeeper’s legal intervention helped secure a landmark wastewater consent decree: a $2 billion, legally binding agreement between the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the City of Houston to address these long-standing violations of the Clean Water Act. This was a hard-won victory driven by community advocacy, investigation, and years of demanding accountability.
That agreement required long-overdue investment in Houston’s wastewater infrastructure, particularly in communities most affected by sewage overflows.
For decades, sewage overflows were not just a technical failure, they were the result of repeated choices about where and whether to invest taxpayer dollars.
As Houston grew, infrastructure in many neighborhoods was already underbuilt, had been underfunded or left to deteriorate. Redlining and inequitable planning practices shaped which communities received reliable services and which were left behind. Today, those same communities are often the ones experiencing the highest levels of overflows.
The consent decree established a pathway to accountability and required the City to begin fixing its system. It also created new transparency requiring Houston to track and report sewage overflows in ways communities can see and respond to.
That transparency matters. Today, when residents submit 311 reports, they are not just reporting a problem, they are helping document patterns and holding the city accountable. What happens in one part of the system doesn’t stay there, overflowing in streets, storm drains, and bayous, eventually reaching Galveston Bay and the Gulf.
Five years in, the data is both promising and troubling. In 2022 and 2023, sanitary sewer overflows remained consistently high, with more than 1,200 incidents each year and over 800,000 gallons of sewage discharged annually. Hundreds of these overflows reached or impacted nearby waterways. Repeat overflow locations remained persistent, and enforcement actions were limited.
At the same time, this data shows something important: where investment has gone in, improvements are possible. Progress is real in some places, but not everywhere.
In 2024, those gaps became even more visible when sanitary sewer overflows reached their highest levels since the consent decree began, with 1,377 incidents and more than 1.6 million gallons of sewage released, nearly double the previous year. For families in those neighborhoods, that’s not a statistic. It’s their street. A major storm event in May alone contributed over 623,000 gallons of overflow, highlighting how vulnerable Houston’s system remains in the face of extreme weather.
While repeat overflow locations declined, the overall increase shows that progress is fragile and uneven.
In 2024 and 2025, in partnership with community organizations like Northeast Action Collective and West Street Recovery, we worked alongside residents to document how sewage overflows affect daily life: from backups in homes to contamination in neighborhoods. These stories shaped the Turning the Tide policy agenda and underscored the urgent need for investment not only in public systems, but also in private sewer laterals.
Through storytelling, data, and community leadership, a clearer picture has emerged: this is not just an infrastructure issue. The consent decree addresses the City’s infrastructure (the pipes and systems owned and maintained by Houston) but it does not cover private sewer laterals: the pipes connecting individual homes to the public system.
For many working families, especially in neighborhoods already impacted by repeated overflows, these pipes are aging and failing. Repairs can cost thousands of dollars – far beyond what many households can afford. And when these pipes fail, they create the same overflows the consent decree is meant to stop.
Five years in, the consent decree has created a foundation for accountability and progress, but compliance alone is not enough. The decree sets the minimum Houston is legally required to do after years of failure. It should not define the limits of what this city is willing to achieve.
Houston has the tools, data, and resources to build a wastewater system that truly serves all of its residents. The question is whether it will choose to.
As we move into 2026, the City budget season and more, we are building on years of advocacy, data, and community leadership to push for Houston to prioritize its investments in water infrastructure and scrutinize who benefits first.
This is a moment to move beyond minimum compliance and toward meaningful, lasting change, to be a city that chooses to invest in its people: in their health, their neighborhoods, and their future.
For the latest sanitary sewer overflow data, visit the map at https://bayoucitywaterkeeper.org/justice-in-the-sewers-map/
Stay tuned for the full report coming later this month.
For questions about our policy work, please contact Guadalupe Fernandez at guadalupe@bayoucitywaterkeeper.org.