The majority of experiments to characterize the turbulence in the surface layer have been performed in flat, open expanses. In order to characterize the turbulence in built-up terrain, two mobile towers were deployed during Hurricane Ike (2008) in close proximity, but downwind of different terrain conditions: suburban and open. Due to the significant non-stationarity of the data primarily caused by changes in wind direction, empirical mode decomposition was employed to de-trend the signal. Analysis of the data showed that the along-wind mean turbulence intensity of the suburban terrain was 37% higher than that of the open terrain. For the mean vertical turbulence intensity, the increase for the suburban terrain was as high as 74%, which may have important implications in structural engineering. The gust factor of the suburban terrain was also 16% higher than that of the open terrain. Compared to non-hurricane spectral models, the obtained spectra showed significantly higher energy in low frequencies especially for the open terrain.