Meet Ryan Slattery
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Or a dinosaur. NASA was right down the road so astronaut seemed the more practical ambition. After working hard through undergrad at UT and a master’s degree from UH, I ended up in a space that is as indelibly tied to Houston as NASA is – disaster recovery.
I had a lot of odd jobs growing up. In high school - when I wasn’t playing baseball - I was a little league umpire. During the summers, I worked for a company that installed vehicle driving systems for persons with disabilities and I worked on a construction crew that built single family houses for one of those cookie-cutter home developers in the suburbs. That last job would prove useful in 2001 when Tropical Storm Allison sat over Houston for days dumping water. After the storm passed, my church would help muck-and-gut homes for parishioners all over northwest Harris County. We spent weeks ripping up carpet and cutting out swollen drywall. 10 years later, I graduated with a master’s degree in Architecture from UH where I concentrated on urban and suburban design.
I graduated from UT in December of 2005. Katrina hit New Orleans in August of that year and Austin was hosting a lot of our Louisiana neighbors. With that storm fresh in the minds of everyone along the gulf coast, Hurricane Rita was bearing down on Texas. I was in Austin, my brother was in College Station, and mom was alone at the house. She wanted to stay and that wasn’t an option in our minds. We finally convinced her to load up the dogs and make her way to Austin. It took her 27 hours. 3.5 million humans tried to evacuate all at the same time. It was its own disaster.
After undergrad, I spent the first part of my professional career working in democratic politics as an organizer. Which came in handy in 2008 when Ike made landfall at Galveston. We suspended all campaigning and worked with then Mayor Bill White for the next two weeks helping folks apply for assistance, delivering water and food to distribution points all over the city, and pitching in anywhere we could. Incidentally, Ike made landfall on my birthday that year.
Houstonians use disasters to mark the passage of time. I was born in 1983. Ask my mom and she’ll tell you I was born the same year Hurricane Alicia hit Houston. For Houstonians, this is a reflex. There’s also an inimitable sense of pride that comes along with Houston’s ability to rebound from catastrophe. Helping our neighbors in their time of need is also a reflex for Houstonians. Those of us baptized by floodwaters know all too well that it could be us in need when the next storm hits. And, we know there will always be a “next storm.”
Today, I work in the Houston Mayor’s Recovery Office. It’s a unique confluence of my life – politics, architecture, organizing, and planning. There’s literally no other job like it in Houston. We’re a lean team that exists at the intersection of a lot of city departments and divisions united behind a common cause – help people, be polite, get shit done. We’re a service organization. We take that seriously. And for those of us whose roots anchor us to this marshy prairie, we take it personally.
