A few days after Hurricane Harvey swamped Texas, Richard Florida, the urban theorist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, rang an alarm, declaring that the “new age of the city” might be ending. He wasn’t talking about the impact of the storm but, instead, cited statistics that show some big cities are losing population, including Chicago, and some suburbs are gaining—in the Sun Belt around Charlotte, North Carolina, and Orlando, for example. There are signs, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece, “that the tide [of urbanization] has crested.”

But try telling that to the people of Houston, where overdevelopment has been blamed for the catastrophic flooding the city has endured, not only during Harvey but with two other calamitous floods in the last three years. Houston’s population continues to grow—it now has 2.3 million people and is on track to become the nation’s third-largest city by 2025. Miami, the other major city in a hurricane’s path this season, is also booming, with a downtown population that rose 6.5 percent every year between 2010 and 2016. When Irma whipped through last month, two of more than 20 construction cranes on the skyline toppled, both atop new multifamily structures.