Battery Park City after Sandy. (Flickr/WarmSleepy)
Waterfront views are a sought after luxury for many New Yorkers, but post-Hurricane Sandy, many urban planners and government officials are questioning the wisdom of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s emphasis on waterfront development as part of his PlaNYC goals for 2030. These development plans include incentives to builders in Coney island, Red Hook, and the Rockaways, which were among the hurricane’s worst victims.
The Bloomberg administration may be the biggest booster of waterfront redevelopment efforts, transforming industrial buildings into luxury high rises across the city, but the rethinking of the waterfront from factories to condos began in the 1960s and 70s, with Battery Park City which is built on former landfill. DUMBO in Brooklyn followed in the 1990s, later to become one of the costliest neighborhoods in the entire city. This kind of development shows few signs of slowing down. Near the northern end of the Brooklyn Bridge, there is a large hotel and family apartment complex yet to come, not to mention the Willets Point development in Queens, Coney Island, and the ongoing conversion of the former Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg. Long Island City’s shoreline is also filled with new luxury buildings, and even more on the way.
In addition, before Battery Park City and Bloomberg made waterfront living a luxury, city officials put low-income, public housing on lower ground, where it remains today in Coney Island, Red Hook, the Lower East Side and the Rockaways. Both the very rich and the very poor are living by the water, but the difference is in the speed and quality of recovery. Hurricane Sandy may not discriminate between the projects and the penthouse, but the residents of One Main Street in DUMBO, whose prime apartments go for $19 million, will have an easier time recovering than residents of the Red Hook Houses, one of the largest public housing projects in the city, which remained without power and heat for days.
If, as Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and numerous climate scientists maintain, a storm like this could easily happen again, the question remains whether there are any viable solutions and even whether this kind of building should continue. In post-Sandy press conferences, Bloomberg has reiterated that “We cannot build a big barrier reef off the shore to stop the waves from coming in; we can’t build big bulkheads that cut people off from the water,” and that he stands behind PlaNYC. But multiple planners interviewed by the New York Observer cited the necessity of at least some new protection, which other countries have been building for years.
Inspired by these examples Vishaan Chakrabarti, the director of Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate, as well as the former head of the Manhattan Office of the Department of City Planning, proposed what he names LoLo (stands for Lower Lower Manhattan), a series of landfills connecting Lower Manhattan to Governors Island. It would be new neighborhood and a new tax base, in addition to performing the lifesaving work of absorbing any storm surge that might be headed northward.
While LoLo may be on the more ambitious end of the new infrastructure scale, other experts including Ron Schiffman the founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development and a former City Planning Commissioner recommend at least referring new building plans to the city and state Offices of Emergency Management for approval. The real estate industry is sure to oppose what they see as extra red tape, but — as Sandy showed — this may be matter of life and death.
