The EO he rescinded was an add-on to much older flood-planning requirements. Those stay in place.
Tried reading Obama's EO and it's not an easy read: Too much "amend this" and "replace paragraph #___ with this new text." Not sure what it did above and beyond what the '77 EO it amended did.
Most of the flooding in Houston is in 100-year flood-plains and already were covered; after Allison in '01 Houston did a lot of flood-plain revision. Not sure what I think of the now-rescinded requirement that FHA loans only could cover houses in the flood plain that are raised 2 feet. A lot of the 100-year-flood-plain housing here are lower-income housing and that would price them out of the market. Also not entirely sure about what all the "cimate science" entails--while there's certainly global warning, the projections always have rather wide error bars. When science hits the ground in terms of policy, there can be no error bars. Make the standards too lax and people are hurt; make them too rigorous and people are hurt. (Then again, the EO only really applied to federal agencies and rode along downstream with federal dollars, hence the FHA reference.)
Many banks around here won't loan to people in some areas already unless they elevate the houses. That's certainly the case for new housing in flood plains.
Note that Houston's undergoing a lot of drainage revision. There's a tax in place to provide a lot of secure funding for flood control measures, esp. in areas in the 100-year floodplain. (The tax was controversial and applies even to the quasi-governmental school districts and their properties--if you have property bordering a road, you pay according to how much frontage you have.) Anyway, not sure what the revised drainage mechanisms will do to the accuracy of the flood-plain maps.
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