Even though Mark Krikorian is a second-generation American, he spoke only Armenian by the time he went to kindergarten in Cleveland decades ago.

Members of his extended family had fled Turkey during a time of persecution and genocide in the early 20th century, and put special value on trying to preserve their language and ethnic heritage in their new homeland.

Yet Mr. Krikorian’s experience assimilating into a wider American culture shaped what turned out to be a lifelong mission to preserve a “shared sense” of the United States’s unique national identity, he says.

Today he’s an advocate for tighter controls on legal and illegal immigration – partly on the idea that it’s unfair if an immigrant tide makes it harder for current residents to rise rise up the socioeconomic ladder.

Ricardo Aca, a senior at Baruch College in Manhattan, has a different concern about fairness. He’s one of about 800,000 undocumented immigrants to whom the Obama administration policy granted a temporary reprieve from the threat of deportation, since they arrived in the US as children.

“We trusted the government to come forward and to come out as undocumented. They took our fingerprints. They took all our personal information. They know everything about us.”

And now, he says, they feel betrayed.

The issue of fairness animates both sides in the deeply emotional debate that’s now flaring over the status of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and its recipients, often called “Dreamers.” President Trump is now moving to fulfill a campaign promise to end DACA, while giving Congress six months to come up with a permanent solution to what both sides agree is a complex and even wrenching issue.

Mr. Trump’s move this week is easily one of most contentious in a young presidency already brimming with partisan rifts.

“We feel so betrayed, because we put our full trust in this country, which we’ve called our home,” says Mr. Aca, who’s studying public and international affairs. “We’ve established our lives here, we contributed just as much as any other American, even though we don’t have the same benefits.”

Illegal use of executive power?

But Republican critics insisted from the start, back in 2012, that Obama’s action was an illegal exercise of presidential power. Nine conservative state attorneys general, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, had threatened to sue the Trump administration if it didn’t end the program by Tuesday.

Earlier this year, Trump called the issue “one of the most difficult subjects I have, because you have these incredible kids.” And though he had campaigned on the promise to immediately end DACA, he said he would deal with the matter with “great heart.”

But in the end, the president’s legal team did not feel they could defend the order in court. In a press conference Tuesday, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Department of Homeland Security “should begin an orderly, lawful wind down, including the cancellation of the memo that authorized this program.”

Mr. Sessions echoed many of the arguments espoused by Krikorian, who now heads the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that advocates for strict immigration controls and supports most Trump policies on the issue. Sessions said the administration’s move “will further economically the lives of millions who are struggling…. And it will enable our country to more effectively teach new immigrants about our system of government and assimilate them to the cultural understandings that support it.”

Krikorian acknowledges that his own views will seem odd or even hypocritical to some.

“There’s the old value, your grandparents came here, so how can you be so critical of immigration?” says Krikorian, a fierce critic of what he calls the “lawless amnesty” decreed by President Obama, which persisted due to congressional inaction. “Well, government policy isn’t about what’s good for my grandparents, it’s what’s good for my grandchildren.”

“We need a breather,” he continues. “Lower levels of immigration are not going to fix everything, and we have a lot of problems, but it will enable our children to be able to handle and work through those problems more easily than if we continue to exacerbate them by letting in a million people every year without end.”

Why ‘Dreamer’ debate is so sensitive 

Yet in the name of fairness and compassion, both Republicans and Democrats tend to agree that Dreamers are a special case. Most did not choose to break the law coming into the country as minors with their parents, and the process of uprooting them from their established lives seems unnecessary.

“It’s not only unfair, it’s cruel. It’s psychological cruelty,” says Salvador Reza, an immigration activist in Phoenix. The government “promised them that they would be protected, they promised them that they would be able to work, and that even though they have illegal status they would be part of the society,” Reza says.

But DACA was never meant to be a permanent solution, most advocates and critics agree. In fact, since it must be renewed every two years, most Dreamers remain in status limbo.

House Speaker Paul Ryan issued a statement Tuesday saying DACA “was never a viable long-term solution to this challenge,” and emphasizing that Trump has called on Congress to act. “The president’s announcement does not revoke permits immediately, and it is important that those affected have clarity on how this interim period will be carried out,” Speaker Ryan added. “At the heart of this issue are young people who came to this country through no fault of their own, and for many of them it’s the only country they know.”

His comments hints at how sensitive the issue is for Republicans, as pressure within the party to get tough on border security runs up against the human implications of a change in course. Ryan voiced the hope for “permanent legislative solution that includes ensuring that those who have done nothing wrong can still contribute as a valued part of this great country.”

The road to a possible deal

Advocates for restrictions on immigration say Trump’s victory means that his priorities should be included in any DACA deal.

“Isn’t that the way the legislative process works?” asks Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington.

Indeed, many advocates for the president’s immigration policy are willing to consider a limited amnesty for the plight of Dreamers. But if any Republican is going to consider the “amnesty” word – which is toxic to many of their constituents – Mr. Stein suggests that any deal should include legislation that pays for a border wall, more detention facilities, greater curbs on legal immigration, as well as the implementation of E-verify, an online system that allows businesses to instantly check a person’s immigration status before making a hire.

For Andrea Valdez, however, being at the center of legislative horse trading only sets her on edge.

Now in her early 20s, she was just 5 when her family came to this country from Mexico on a tourist visa and stayed. Had it not been for DACA, Ms. Valdez says, she wouldn’t have been able to get a driver’s license or a Social Security number that allowed to get work as a sales clerk. It also allowed her to get a cosmetology license that capped her two years in a high school vocational program.

It took her two years to apply for the program because she was hesitant about sharing personal information with the federal government about herself and her family, which includes both US citizens and undocumented members.

Eventually, however, it gave her peace of mind. “They gave us everything so that we could do things right,” Valdez says. “For them to just take it away from us, it makes no sense to me. It’s really unfair and it scares me because, if they do take it away, what are we going to do?”

Lourdes Medrano contributed to this article from Tucson, Ariz. 

Korean Central News Agency/ Korea News Service via AP

North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un holds a meeting of the ruling party's presidium on Sept. 3, 2017. This image was distributed by the North Korean government and cannot be independently verified.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un seems to enjoy overshadowing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meticulously choreographed appearances in the global spotlight.

On April 4, a missile was launched one day before Mr. Xi’s high-stakes first meeting with President Trump, who welcomed his Chinese counterpart to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. In May, he launched a ballistic missile hours before Xi delivered a keynote speech to dozens of world leaders who had gathered in Beijing for a two-day forum on China’s signature One Belt, One Road initiative, a $900 billion infrastructure and trade project expanding the country’s influence across three continents.

Then, on Sunday, he detonated North Korea’s sixth nuclear bomb hours before Xi was scheduled to speak at the start of the BRICS summit of five large emerging economies in the southeastern Chinese city of Xiamen. The summit was the latest opportunity for Xi to position himself as a champion of globalization.

But perhaps most importantly, the underground blast – by far North Korea’s most powerful ever – comes weeks before the Chinese Communist Party will hold its once-every-five-years leadership conference. South Korea has warned that more launches may be ahead.

It can be all too easy to see Mr. Kim as a nuclear-armed nuisance desperate for attention. But as is often the case with the belligerent North Korean leader, analysts say there is a perverse logic to his carefully timed provocations aimed at China and the United States.

“Right now China’s most urgent task for the government is to make sure the 19th Party congress goes as smoothly as it can,” says Zhao Hai, a research fellow at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “North Korea knows that before the congress there is a window of opportunity to press China, because it’s hard for Xi to maneuver at this time.”

Xi, already one of China’s most influential leaders in decades, is likely to further consolidate his power at the meeting in mid-October. Even so, now is an especially sensitive time for him as he looks to project an aura of stability and calm. Calculating that China is unlikely to push North Korea much harder than it already has to give up its nuclear program – at least not until after October – Kim is doing everything he can to stoke tensions between China and the US before Beijing considers harsher options, Mr. Zhao says.

Ahead of the the party congress this fall, Xi is focused on installing his allies in the Politburo, the Communist Party’s main decision-making body. The North Korean nuclear test poses an untimely distraction from that work. It also brings unwanted attention to how little sway Xi holds over the much younger Kim. The Chinese state media often portrays Xi as decisive and bold strongman, but North Korea presents a glaring weak point that’s hard to gloss over.

If the North continues its nuclear and missile testing in the coming weeks, Zhao says, it could force a showdown between the US and China that the two countries have long tried to avoid. Each accuses the other of failing to de-escalate the crisis. Washington blames Beijing for not doing more to rein in its rogue neighbor, while Beijing blames Washington for its unwillingness to negotiate with Pyongyang.

Analysts say Kim’s goal is to force the US into talks that would leave him with nuclear weapons and ultimately lead to the lifting of economic sanctions on his country. But he needs China’s help in pressuring the US. Although Beijing has stayed consistent in proclaiming its commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, it has also called for a “freeze for a freeze.” The proposal, also backed by Russia, entails North Korea freezing the development of its nuclear and missile program in exchange for the US and South Korea freezing major joint military exercises as a starting point for negotiations and a long-term solution. 

“For a long time, we have made enormous efforts and done a lot to promote the peaceful settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue through dialogue and negotiation,” Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said Monday at a daily press briefing in Beijing. He dutifully condemned Sunday’s nuclear test but gave no indication that the government has any intentions of changing track, nor has any other Chinese official.

For Xi, the basic calculus remains the same: a nuclear-armed North Korea is less dangerous to China than the possibility of destabilizing the country through severe tactics such as cutting off its fuel supply. (China supplies more than 80 percent of the North's crude oil.) The collapse of North Korea would likely lead to a refugee crisis on China’s doorstep and the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under the American security umbrella, two highly undesirable outcomes for China.

For now, China appears stuck reiterating its calls for negotiations and going along with the latest round of United Nations sanctions. Yet international pressure is mounting on it to do more, and the calls aren’t just coming from the Trump administration. British Prime Minister Theresa May told reporters last Wednesday, the day after North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan, that “We see China as being the key.”

On Monday, it was Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s turn. He told reporters in Canberra that although China will be enforcing UN sanctions against North Korea, “there will be more that needs to be done.”

“China has by far the greatest leverage,” Mr. Turnbull said on a radio program in Sydney last Thursday. “China really has to step up now and bring this regime to its senses.”

Still, the question remains: what is China’s red line for its ally? Wu Riqiang, an associate professor of international affairs at Renmin University in Beijing, says that after North Korea tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile on July 4 he didn’t think the launch was as pressing for China as another nuclear test. Now that one has occurred, Dr. Wu says, it will be difficult for Xi to remain above the fray. 

“It’s getting harder for Xi not to do something,” he says. “You can’t just let other countries provoke you with no reaction.”

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The Capitol is seen on Tuesday, Sept. 5, as Congress returns from the August recess to face work on immigration, the debt limit, funding the government, and help for victims of hurricane Harvey.

After a month-long recess, Congress is back in town to face a jam-packed and consequential calendar. President Trump kicked things off with a tweet, “Big week coming up!” The same could easily be said of this month, and really, the entire fall as it stretches into the new year.

Divided lawmakers are staring key fiscal and legislative deadlines in the face this September, from government solvency to an expiring program for flood insurance, as well as funds for disaster relief in the wake of hurricane Harvey.

Meanwhile, the White House wants a tax overhaul by the end of the year and the president just tossed a new agenda item to Congress: fixing the childhood “Dreamers” immigration program within six months. And this doesn’t even count the surprises, whether they be controversial presidential tweet storms or meteorological ones, another Charlottesville, Va., or something out of North Korea.

“These are the most dangerous and action-packed months for Congress that I can ever remember,” says longtime congressional observer Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, the center-right think tank in Washington.

That’s not to discount opportunities for progress. Harvey has brought Americans together, and it could do the same with lawmakers as they consider disaster funding. And a bipartisan effort to stabilize the health-insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act seems more possible than before the recess, when the GOP effort to “repeal and replace” Obamacare fell flat.

Here’s a look at Congress’s hefty to-do list:

Show me the money

First things first. The House will take up a $7.9 billion hurricane Harvey relief package on Wednesday, as a first tranche of help to a region hit by record flooding. The politics have softened on federal disaster spending since fiscally conservative Republicans – including from Texas – objected to relief for New York and New Jersey after superstorm Sandy in 2012.

The tables have turned now that Texas, a Republican stronghold, has been hit and members more clearly realize that natural disasters don’t respect state borders.

Harvey aid is considered “must pass” legislation, and that makes it attractive as a vehicle for a much tougher vote: raising the cap on the nation’s federal debt.

If Congress, which controls the country’s purse strings, does not raise the debt ceiling by Sept. 29, the government could default on what it owes its creditors – throwing into question the credit-worthiness of the United States, riling the financial markets, and casting doubt on governability in Washington.

Raising the debt ceiling used to be a routine matter, considering that the payments are on expenses already incurred. That changed after the tea party wave of 2010. More fiscally conservative Republicans, alarmed by a federal debt nearing $20 trillion, demanded spending cuts in exchange for their approval to increase the debt limit.

The high-stakes drama resulted in broadly maligned, across-the-board spending cuts that kicked in in 2013, restricting, for instance, growth in defense spending.

The White House doesn’t want another fiscal-cliff showdown, and is pushing to combine a debt-ceiling increase with the Harvey aid, making it hard to vote “no.” But some Republicans are resisting. They don’t want to lose a bargaining opportunity.

Meanwhile, another deadline is bearing down on Congress. Unless it passes a budget by Sept. 30, the end of this fiscal year, the government will have no money to pay many of its workers, resulting in a partial government shut-down that effects non-essential services, such as the national parks.

President Trump threw a grenade into this process when he said that if Congress doesn’t include funding for his border wall in the budget, he would shut down the government. But he’s since pulled back on the immediate threat. Now it looks like Congress will pass a budget resolution that keeps the lights on until December – delaying the anticipated fight over the wall, but not ending it.

Harvey aid, the debt ceiling, the budget. “There are a lot of moving pieces here and they are all dependent on each other,” says Stan Collender, a budget expert in Washington.

The legislative checklist

It’s far from a done deal, but lawmakers are at least exploring a bipartisan solution to the problems with Obamacare’s private insurance markets, where insurers have been dropping out and premiums have been rising.

Insurers are especially skittish because the Trump administration has been paying “cost-sharing” subsidies – which help insurers with high-cost patients – on only a month-to-month basis instead of ongoing payments, creating uncertainty about whether the payments will continue.

Last week, a bipartisan group of governors floated a plan while a bipartisan group of House members is also working on a way to stabilize the troubled exchanges. Five of the governors are expected to appear before the Senate health committee this week. Committee chairman Lamar Alexander (R) of Tennessee says a legislative fix is likely to be narrowly focused on the “cost-sharing” subsidies and on greater flexibility for states.

In a related issue, authorization for the Children’s Health Insurance Program expires at the end of this month. The program helps 9 million low-income kids – not least of which are children affected by the floods. The program has traditionally had bipartisan support but that does not guarantee reauthorization.

Similarly, the federal program for flood insurance and the Federal Aviation Administration also face a Sept. 30 reauthorization deadline.

Add to these essentials a huge Republican priority: a tax overhaul that the White House wants by the end of the year. President Trump is now actively stumping on a major corporate tax cut, a middle-class tax cut, and tax simplification. He met with senior Republican leaders on the issue on Tuesday, but as with health care, Republicans are also divided over the details of tax policy.

There’s also a timing issue. “History is not on the side of great accomplishment in the latter half of the year,” says Ross Baker, a longtime observer of Congress and a professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

If tax reform legislation were to move this year, members would have had to have made much more progress before the August break, he says. Instead, they got bogged down in health care.

And now, Congress suddenly has another heavy lift on its plate: immigration reform.

On Tuesday, the administration announced that it is ending the Obama-era program that defers deportation of people who came illegally to the country as children under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The administration will no longer review new applications for legal status under the program after Tuesday, though it will allow people still in the program a chance to renew their permits if they expire before March 5, 2018.

The move kicks the ball over to Congress, which has six months to work out a fix if it wants to save the program. That’s a tall order, considering it was not able to pass a “Dreamers” bill for undocumented children in the past.

“What we’ve got here is a whole set of dilemmas, which make it very difficult for the country,” sums up Mr. Ornstein. “They are not easy to resolve.”

Carlo Allegri/Reuters

A family stands in the door of their flooded house in Port Arthur, Texas, Thursday. Many of the residents experiencing flooding in the aftermath of hurricane Harvey live in areas that have no history of flooding.

Just a few weeks ago, Betty Martin looked into purchasing homeowner’s insurance for her Houston condo, since she was considering selling the unit where she’s lived for 18 years. Neither she nor the insurance agent she talked to even thought of discussing flood insurance: The condominiums where she lived aren’t even situated in the 500-year flood plain, and no one can remember the area ever flooding, not even during hurricanes Camille, Ike, or Katrina.

But when the rains from Harvey hit, Houston’s Memorial Drive became a river, and her condo at The Pines – along with treasured recipes, mementos, and family heirlooms – became part of the nearby Buffalo Bayou. When Ms. Martin left, even before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved a controlled release at nearby Addicks Reservoir, the water was already to her waist.

As many residents like Martin start to take stock of their losses, a number of experts are pointing to hurricane Harvey as the latest example of what could be a new reality for many parts of the world, due at least in part to climate change.

In Houston, it wasn’t the wind or the storm surge that caused the damage in the end. It was the massive amounts of rain, that fell and fell over multiple days, long after the system had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. At least 30 inches of rain fell over an area the size of Maryland, so much that the National Weather Service had to add two new colors to their map. And while there is significant debate among climate scientists about how climate change will affect hurricanes, there is strong consensus about its link to heavy and intense rainfall.

Those changing weather patterns – combined with human factors like city zoning, where homes are built, and the loss of porous surfaces, all of which can affect flooding and a storm’s impact – mean it's time for a major shift in how we think about flood risk and planning, say experts.

“Our entire civilization is built on an obsolete assumption,” says Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, noting that all the mapping that tends to drive requirements for building, engineering, and insurance is based on past observations about a static climate that means little for the future. “The smartest thing to do at this point,” she says, is to “be building resilience to the risks we face. And in many cases, those risks are being exacerbated by a changing climate.” 

An outdated model?

While detailed studies and analyses about the role climate change may have played in Harvey's severity will take time to complete, most scientists say they are confident about at least a few factors. Among the clearest: Sea surface temperatures are higher, the atmosphere above oceans is warmer, and the warmer air can hold more moisture.

In addition, warmer subsurface water in the oceans means that storms can last longer than they might otherwise, says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. Research he and others have done leads him to expect that climate change may actually lead to fewer hurricanes, but ones that are more intense and longer-lasting. Relatively few storms, and the huge variability among storms makes, the observational record tricky. However, there is significant debate and not a lot of consensus among scientists about just how hurricanes will be affected.

That’s not the case when it comes to the linkage between global warming and heavy rainfall. “That’s where the greatest agreement exists,” says Dr. Trenberth. “It’s not just Harvey, and it’s not just tropical storms. In general, when it rains it rains harder.”

But while rainfall is a weather- and climate-driven phenomenon, flooding also has a lot to do with human factors.

Even before Harvey hit, many scientists and engineers in Houston had been warning how ill-prepared the city was for a big rainfall event, and the ways in which planning decisions – like the significant loss of green space – can exacerbate floods.

Back in December, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica ran an article, part of a larger series about Houston’s flood risk, about the ways in which development planning decisions were combining with climate change to increase risk. It documented a number of housing developments that were seeing repeated “urban flooding” that occurred outside of any known flood plain. It also noted that since the county began keeping data for 24-hour rainfall totals, in 1989, there have been eight storms that qualify as either 100-year storms or rarer.

With Harvey – which has shattered records for rainfall, dropping nearly 52 inches at one location just east of Houston – scientists are talking about it as a 1,000-year event, meaning it has a 0.1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. But increasingly, experts say all those numbers are fairly meaningless.

“Those numbers are based upon stationary statistics,” says Trenberth. “What used to be a 1,000-year event is now more like a 100-year event. A 500-year event is a 50- or 70-year event.”

While scientists can agree that a changing climate is making heavy precipitation events more common, they still don’t know exactly where and how those changes will play out, creating challenges for planners and engineers who in most cases are still relying on outdated maps.

The key, say experts, is more resiliency planning – which a number of cities and states are already doing – that takes worst-case scenarios into account and sets standards well beyond where they currently are.

Building resilience

Rather than relying on the principle that buildings and towns need to be “fail-safe” and designed to keep extremes out, “we need to start to think about how to make it safe to fail instead,” says Mari Tye, a project scientist at NCAR’s Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes. When the 2013 floods hit Colorado, she notes, cities like Boulder and Arvada escaped much of the damage that hit other towns because they had designed routes along creeks and detention basins that were able to absorb the flooding when it occurred. Those areas have park spaces and bike paths in normal times, and could accommodate the floods – resulting from a 1,000-year rain event – with minimal damage to infrastructure and homes.

Jennifer Jacobs, an engineering professor at the University of New Hampshire and director of the Infrastructure and Climate Network, says that it’s becoming clear to a growing number of states just how vulnerable their existing systems are. Just in the first six months of 2017, she notes, there were five major incidents of flooding in the United States that closed interstate highways, including in California, Idaho, and Missouri.

“This is an issue that’s happening everywhere,” she says. And if there’s any upside to disasters like Sandy or Harvey, it’s that “it opens the door to the question of what extremes are we preparing for.”

Putting that thought into resiliency planning, and designing for more extreme weather, can mean saving about $10 for every $1 spent, says Professor Jacobs, since such planning results in less devastation when a disaster does hit.

And it’s certain to be a big topic as the waters subside from Houston and attention turns to where and how to rebuild.

Professor Hayhoe notes that she works with a number of people who are skeptical about the idea of human-caused climate change, but says all of them – anyone who works with data and risks and hazards – accept that things are changing and that planning has to change as a result.

That made President Trump’s decision, 10 days before Harvey hit, to rescind an Obama-era rule requiring that the federal government consider stricter flood-risk standards when building all the more infuriating to many engineers and scientists. “It’s like a step backward into the last century,” says Hayhoe. “It’s a short-term decision that might save money now but will cost more money later.”

Laura Lightbody, who directs the Pew Charitable Trusts’ project on Flood-Prepared Communities, says that rule was an important tool for communities trying to be more resilient.

“It’s a resource communities no longer have when they think about rebuilding,” she says.

Ms. Lightbody says many cities – including Nashville, Tenn., which had flooding in 2010, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area in North Carolina – have taken the initiative themselves to heighten their standards and be better prepared for big storms in the future.

But it’s a discussion that needs to happen at the federal level as well, she says.

“It’s unfortunate that an event like hurricane Harvey has to bring that to the table,” says Lightbody. “But it does force the hand of Congress to have a conversation about flooding.” 

Carmen Sisson contributed reporting to this article from Houston, Texas.

AP Photo

Water levels start to recede near downtown Houston on Aug.30 in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Harvey.

If one moment captured the start of Houston’s recovery from hurricane Harvey, it was a sporting event on Sept. 2 that reconnected the city’s scattered and still water-logged residents: The beloved Astros baseball team played the Mets in a downtown stadium and won the doubleheader. The games were a welcome symbol of resilience as the city begins to muster the resources to bounce back from more than 40 inches of rain in late August.

Disaster experts have long tried to define the characteristics of people who are able to rebuild their lives and improve their community after a major storm, fire, or earthquake. For Houston and the Gulf area, the list of tangible and practical tasks remains long, such as the need to restore some 40,000 houses, improve water controls, and clean up toxic waste. Congress must also decide how much aid to provide. And Texas might want to rethink zoning. Yet studies of post-disaster societies point to intangible qualities that also bring recovery and even open opportunities for a new direction.

One quality, as was evident in Houston with the heroic rescue of stranded residents by volunteers, is civic kindness toward strangers in need. Houston may be the nation’s fourth-largest city and one of the most diverse, yet its people took care of each other. The crisis stripped away differences over race, religion, or class. That calming spirit was again on display as churches, mosques, and temples reopened their doors and held services of prayer, outreach, and gratitude.

“Gaps will be left in the seams of our city and it falls on all [of] us to seal them with kindness and patience,” a Houston Chronicle editorial stated. “The storm has passed. The recovery now begins.”

Patience is particularly needed for a recovery because many people are disoriented, lost, and eager for a rapid return to normal life. Yet a community needs time to reflect and deliberate in making crucial decisions that can protect it from further hazards and even improve itself. Post-disaster planning requires a social trust in which diverse voices can be heard. Such listening helps people to rise above seeing themselves as passive victims. And it is best achieved through horizontal networks of local groups rather than top-down action by a central authority. After hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, New Orleans rushed to put its initial recovery plan in place without much input. Residents reacted and forced a revision.

Listening also requires a commitment to equality. Disasters can reveal inequities in patterns of housing and land use as well as other social problems. Recovery is a process, not a goal, and must empower all stakeholders through the sharing of information and by fixing long-delayed problems. “This is a city not run by one person. This is a city that’s run by 2.3 million Houstonians,” Mayor Sylvester Turner told the Chronicle.

Many other traits help in a recovery, such as creativity and flexibility. One study of 1,400 Japanese after the country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami pointed to eight characteristics in all, including “self-transcendence,” or the awareness of the meaning of life from a spiritual perspective.

For societies hit by tragedy, finding attributes such as trust and altruism can take hard work. Houston, which showed widespread care and adaptability during the storm, may become known less for the disaster than how it found the character to recover from it.