HOUSTON — Antonio Armenta paid $45,000 for the little white house with the arched kitchen doorway by the train tracks in northeast Houston, where he is raising his children on construction-worker sweat in the blue-collar neighborhood of El Dorado-Oates Prairie. When the flood hit, he was $400 away from owning it outright.

Viet Nguyen, a doctor specializing in family medicine, is raising his three children in a two-story brick traditional in the Southdale neighborhood of Bellaire, with its stately houses on tree-lined streets full of comfortable professionals and where the average house in 2015 was valued at $700,000.

Now they are united in soggy duress, figuring out what they can rescue from flooded homes. It is a common experience in the waterlogged sprawl that is Houston and its suburbs.

A wide swath of New Orleans was flooded after Hurricane Katrina, with some of the worst of it occurring in the white, middle-class Lakeview neighborhood. But many of the iconic images of the storm captured a divide of class and race — the desperation of the poor stranded at the Superdome and the devastated, largely black, low-income neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, which were among the ones most likely to suffer catastrophic flooding and the last ones to recover.

Tropical Storm Harvey, on the other hand, wreaked havoc across Houston, battering poor and rich with similar ferocity. Piney Point Village, a city of 3,125 people in west Houston described as the richest in Texas, flooded. So did Houston’s historically black and poor Fifth Ward, two miles northeast of downtown.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a native of Houston who is one of the city’s most influential pastors, said the widespread nature of the destruction was unfathomable.