The Texas GLO's recovery plan was revised thirteen times between 2017 and 2023, each amendment a correction that came years after the harm had already accumulated in the lives of families waiting for help. Throughout all thirteen versions, the word "race" never appears.

And the Texas General Land Office took charge of distributing $5.676 billion in federal Community Development Block Grant funds through programs covering homeowner assistance, affordable rental housing, and local infrastructure.

Four years after Harvey, a Houston Chronicle investigation revealed that a small, predominantly white inland town with comparatively modest damage had received far more state recovery funds than majority-minority Houston neighborhoods that had lost far more.

Research by economists Stephen Billings, Emily Gallagher, and Lowell Ricketts confirmed the pattern at scale.

This is precisely how infrastructural violence operates, not through obvious failure or deliberate discrimination, but through the quiet, technical design of systems that distribute harm through their ordinary functioning.

when the infrastructural violence of the recovery system ensured that inequality was deepened rather than corrected.

Scholars Jayajit Chakraborty, Sara Grineski, and Timothy Collins found that flood extent significantly increased in neighborhoods comprising predominantly Black, Hispanic, and socioeconomically deprived residents.