Houston City Council approved on Wednesday the allocation of $899,000 for the purchase and installation of a permanent generator for the Kashmere Gardens Multi-Service Center as part of the city’s pilot program to build resilience hubs in vulnerable communities. 

The initiative and the generator, which Houston energy supplier Enchanted Rock Solutions will install in approximately one year, are intended to provide a safe space for residents during power outages and extreme weather events. 

“The resilience hub program is a concept and an idea being implemented in cities all over the world in full recognition that we live in a time when upheaval and storms of all kinds are the norm,” said Angela Blanchard, chief recovery and resiliency officer for the City of Houston, at a post-city council press conference. “[They] are meant to be places where people can go for refuge, power their phones, a resilience hub is meant to operate like that all year round.” 

The Kashmere Gardens Multi-Service Center was initially dubbed Houston’s first resilience hub in December 2023. It was part of a larger initiative to open similar gathering points in Alief, Sunnyside, and Acres Homes, some of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. In Kashmere Gardens alone, 44 percent of homes were submerged underwater in the aftermath of the storm. 

However, nearly a year after the city declared the multi-purpose center a resilience hub, little had been done to equip it for that function. So far, it only has a solar carport, which was damaged during a storm and only recently repaired, and a plaque proclaiming it a resilience hub. 

These delays were something that both residents and officials noticed during Wednesday’s announcement. 

“That multi-service center was not any different than any of the other multi-service centers in Houston,” council member-at-large Leticia Plummer said. “Solar panels didn’t work, no generator. The city’s definition of resilience hubs specifically talks about emergency power generation capacity. And Kashmere doesn’t have that.” 

Keith Downey, the superneighborhood president for Kashmere Gardens, went to city council after every storm event this year to ask for an actual resilience hub for the community. 

“These communities, these under-served communities, need a resilience hub,” Downey said. “People need to know where to go when these events, these unfortunate events take place.” 

At the FY 2025 budget meeting in June this year, Plummer proposed a sum of just under $900,000 out of the city’s Contributed Capital Project Fund for Kashmere Gardens generator. 

The plan—along with an agreed-upon contractor—then went to the city council for final approval. Typically, planning and executing a generator can take up to two years, said Plummer. The generator for the Kashmere Gardens hub should be up and running within a year. 

Still, a year between now and an operating generator will leave communities facing the possibility of another winter storm and hurricane season. When considering the timeframe during the press conference, Mayor John Whitmire said, “Now is not the time to be negative.” 

‘It’s not a time to be pessimistic or negative, but to celebrate the greatness of our city and the can-do attitude of my administration,” Whitmire said. 

Blanchard followed this by highlighting the other places of refuge available for residents during a disaster, including the city’s cooling and warming centers and other workarounds. 

Now that the generator is being installed, Whitmire said the city will practice “common sense” and have a working list of what they can do quickest, the most cost-effective and what will service the largest number of people.” 

Downey said he wants the city to focus on food insecurity and train residents, nonprofits, and others in disaster resiliency to be better prepared during an emergency. 

“Resilience is not just cold or hot,” Downey said “It is planning for the future of our communities and we must always have the input from the residents.” 

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