Reimagining Our Streets: What We Resisted, Adapted, and Reclaimed in Brooklyn

Prospect Heights Open Streets: Community Led, Community Driven

By Semire Bayatli and Walker Johnston UPM609 Lan Analysis of Public Space Spring 2022 Studio

An architectural project first emerges as a problem and a design opportunity. The project is a journey that can be done at many scales, from interior design to city design and planning. The problem and opportunity turn into an idea in the hands of the designer, then a project as a team works collectively, and eventually a real building, structure, or place with the coordination of many different disciplines. All of these stages are a process and these processes require planning. However, sometimes the project does not arrive on time, even if everything is planned. Given the complexity and challenges of humanity, disasters, pandemics, and wars that hurt different parts of the world cannot be planned, despite our best efforts to anticipate and prepare. In spite of these unplanned processes, humanity reveals its power to heal. It resists, stretches and rebuilds, and a new city experience emerges.

In 2020 our entire world shifted with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; our understanding of the environment, the places we live in, and our expectations from our homes have changed. Despite the devastating hardships, loss, and collective trauma, we discovered our capacity to pivot, and that we were open to more. We decided to breathe more, drive less. We came to value the importance of social connection in profound ways, and in turn, as a society we worked to reinvision communities that support a vibrant civic life. In New York City, as well as many other parts of the world, this resulted in a reimagining of perhaps the city’s most mundane public spaces—the streets.

The NYC Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Open Streets program emerged as a way to reimagine streets for all people.1 In April 2020 the initiative began to provide economic relief for restaurants and businesses and give New Yorkers more open space to safely socialize. After over two years, we now have an idea of the economic impact it provided. The Streets for Recovery: The Economic Benefits of the NYC Open Streets, published by the DOT in October 2022, found that businesses and bars on Open Streets corridors were able to stay in business at a higher rate than across the rest of the same borough, and sales growth on Open Streets corridors significantly outpaced sales growth in the boroughs that the corridors are in.2

While recovery from COVID-19 is largely considered the impetus for this public reimagining of the function and capability of streets, the sentiment behind streets for the people extends beyond an emergency response to the pandemic; many people see Open Streets and other

Lida Aljabar

Emily Ahn Levy

Studio Members

Zein ali Ahmad

Semire Bayatli

Ziqing Feng

Clay Grable

Walker Johnston

Alexander Lipnik

Marium Naveed

Maithri Shankar

Robyn Stebner

Allie Wertheimer

Alexandre Zarookian street repurposing initiatives as an important step in the fight against the climate crisis and traffic violence; in this sense, there are multiple crises calling for collective adaptation.

Streets that are closed to traffic and open to pedestrians are part of our new conception and reality of the built environment. The Urban Placemaking and Management (UPM) had the opportunity to study this new typology of public space in the Spring 2022 Studio, exploring the Vanderbilt and Underhill Open Streets in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

The Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council (PHNDC)—a 501(c) (3) and civic organization that advocates for neighborhood-wide issues on behalf of the residents and businesses of Prospect Heights and manager of the two Open Streets3—invited the UPM studio to help envision a sustainable, generative, longterm future for Vanderbilt and Underhill Avenues.

The Open Streets program is a true collective effort— management of the Vanderbilt and Underhill Open Streets is spearheaded by passionate community members volunteering their time, with operations and some financial support from the City. Early in the studio process it became clear the adaptation of city streets into places for people doesn’t come without its challenges: namely, streamlining daily operations and long-term management of public spaces, and ensuring underrepresented community voices are centered in these decisions. History and demographic research, field work and site analysis, and community engagement with multiple stakeholder groups supported these findings, and revealed new ones:

1. There has been a significant amount of displacement of Black residents in the last 20 years.

2. Prospect Heights is now home to a predominantly white, high-earning, highly educated population.

3. Everyone approached Open Streets differently: one person’s Open Street is another person’s “closed street.”

4. Current management and operations is unsustainable due to the reliance on volunteers.

5. Safety (physical, emotional, sense of belonging, psychological) is of concern to most users.

6. The community’s ambition for a democratic commons is disrupted by current management, funding, operations of the Open Streets, as well as street design & amenities.

7. There is a lack of communication regarding intention, mission, and values of the Prospect Heights Open Streets.

8. There is a lack of system-wide strategy and intention behind the Open Streets program as a city-wide initiative.

From these key themes in our findings, we developed seven guiding principles that form the foundation of our recommendations:

THE STREET SHOULD FACILITATE COMFORT AND BE USABLE WITHOUT CONCERN FOR SAFETY

THE STEWARDSHIP OF THE OPEN STREETS SHOULD BE COMMUNITY-LED AND PARTICIPATORY

THE MANAGEMENT, OPERATIONS, AND FUNDRAISING SHOULD ENABLE A SCALABLE AND SUSTAINABLE MODEL AND SHOULD HAVE AN EQUITABLE IMPACT

CLIMATE RESILIENCE GUIDELINES SHOULD BE INCORPORATED INTO STREET DESIGN, PROGRAMMING, AND COMMUNICATIONS

THE OPEN STREETS PROGRAM SHOULD BE INCLUSIVE OF THE NEEDS OF ALL USERS AND SHOULD HAVE AN EQUITABLE IMPACT

THE OPEN STREETS PROGRAM SHOULD HAVE ACCESSIBLE, TRANSPARENT, AND CONSISTENT MESSAGING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Because the client of the studio was the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, our scope of work was narrowed to the neighborhood level, with our recommendations tailored to the Prospect Heights community. Thinking more holistically about the city-wide approach, the case of Vanderbilt and Underhill revealed a critical opportunity to make the program more equitable through better distribution of resources to Open Streets across the city. We proposed the creation of full-time, paid Open Street Liaison positions through DOT. We imagined multiple Open Street Liaisons for every borough who would work with a number of community partners to: better engage the community; help measure impacts of the Open Streets through standardized evaluations; and help communicate planning, permitting, programming processes of the Open Streets program to local residents.

THE OPEN STREETS PROGRAM SHOULD PRESERVE THE HISTORY AND CULTURES OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD AND INCORPORATE ANTI-DISPLACEMANENT STRATEGIES

Scope Of Recommendations And Highlights

Governance: Scalable, Equitable Distribution of Power

Mgmt & Operations: Paid roles; Diverse Involvement Opportunities

Fundraising: Envisioning a Long-Term, Sustainable Future

Communication: Accessible, Inclusive, Transparent, Consistent Street Design: Strategies for Connectivity, Safety, Sustainability, & Community Well-Being

Programming: Preserving Opportunities for Organic Informal Programming & Centering Community Agency

Even more broadly, the Open Streets program demonstrates the City’s continued interest in investing in public space. However, the City needs to make a more concrete investment in order for the program to be successful city-wide and not perpetuate inequities by requiring community partners to take on the majority of fundraising responsibilities and costs of running an Open Streets program. Furthermore, organizations like the Design Trust for Public Space4 and Open Plans5 have proposed policy changes at the city-wide level to create an agency dedicated to public space. Based on our research and analysis, we support the creation of a new agency, inter-agency, or an office that sits within the Mayor’s Office dedicated to public space management to enable a longterm investment in all the Open Streets programs across the city.

Of course, the Open Streets program isn’t the first time people have been advocating to reimagine the street. Many organizations and community leaders have been advocating for streets for people and will continue to do so. Notable are the efforts by advocates to repurpose the curbside lane, whose current primary use is car parking, to make for more sustainable, social, and safe streets. Admittedly there is a long way to go to transform streets into thriving, democratic public spaces. Yet, it’s critical to recognize the Open Streets program—and other imaginative uses of the street—as a tool for change to create more liveable communities. Perhaps the greatest success of the Open Streets program is its ability to awaken our collective capacity to imagine a city we want to live in and work to make it a reality.

Thesis

City and Regional Planning

CHALLENGES TO FRESH FOOD AVAILABILITY IN CONEY ISLAND AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE LAND USE THROUGH COMMUNITY GARDENING

by Nana Acheampong

Spring 2022

Residents of Coney Island suffer from poor access to fresh, affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods. Coney Island reflects a community long affected by top-down planning structures, with lacking inclusion of the local community through resident-led actions over land use decision making. This issue of effective nourishment through fresh produce sourced locally is in conflict with the community’s agency over land use actions most beneficial to the long existing residents of the community and their future generations. While food sources exist, they provide limited access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally relevant options. Coney Island currently has a ratio of 1 supermarket to 21 bodegas.1 Gross abuses of inequitable land use development practices by the City of New York has had its unpleasant mark on the historical and present day development of Coney Island.

Early examples include the creation of poorly equipped bungalow structured housing communities in the west end section of the present day neighborhood,2 which housed immigrant groups such as Puerto Ricans and African Americans immigrating from the south, after they were denied access to rent apartments along Ocean Parkway.3

The West End of Coney Island is now predominant to low-income residents, and residents of color residing in NYCHA apartments. Much of the West End section of the community was redlined, designating Coney Island as “C” and “D” levels. The “C” classification designated such areas as yellow or in decline, while “D” defined in red recommended investors to stray away from investments in such areas.4

The government’s topdown review and decisionmaking processes, justified through Universal Land Use Review Procedure and City Environmental Quality Review, most recently supported outside real estate interests which led to the demolition of the Unity Street Towers Boardwalk Community Garden plots in 2013.5 The formerly thriving Boardwalk Community Garden, formerly located at West 22 Street, served over thirty resident gardeners who cultivated plots to grow food and produce medicinal plants, used as an alternative to holistically heal ailments and illnesses. The demolition forced a unified group of gardeners to renounce their ownership over the garden after years of their cultivation and maintenance of the plot. Today, it is now home to an Amphitheater and Childs Restaurant.

From observations through a community-centered gardening pilot program in 2021, in partnership with the Coney Island Anti-Violence Collaborative (CIAVC), my research examined opportunities for alternative land use practices to support a localized produce hub. CIAVC acknowledges the multitude of socio-environmental and socio-economic benefits a year round community gardening program can provide. Increased community centered gardening opportunities can serve as a holistic benefit tool to activate community ownership of existing and adaptable spaces in the community. The action of collective residentled gardening can support jobs and workforce development, community beautification, green infrastructure enhancement efforts, and climate change adaptation in this coastal community.

Community Gardens Before & After Demolition

Today the work continues by residents and local organizations aligned to mitigate high rates of poor nutrition and the lack of neighborhood resources to fulfill needs in Coney Island.

Regional and global emergencies such as Hurricane Sandy and the COVID-19 pandemic compelled this resilient community adapt to the unfortunate conditions, through community reliance on local organizations and local political offices to meet the emergency need of fresh and affordable local produce.

In the summer of 2021, CIAVC secured space with the existing Surfside Garden located on Surf Avenue, which was a temporary pilot program effort towards the future planning of a permanent space for resident cultivation of fresh produce. The gardne also functions as a safe community healing space from gun violence affecting the community. The pilot program provided a lens into the opportunities and challenges in scaling up existing gardens, such as successful land use allocation in the community.

Residents of this community would benefit from a clear resiliency plan that satisfies immediate community health, environmental, and economic needs with urgent actions that can serve as preventative measures for mitigating the long-term consequences of the current landscape. Today the tool of a community agricultural garden presents itself at the nexus of a global pandemic and climate change. There is a timely benefit to implementing immediate actions for food sovereignty, which can greatly benefit urban communities. Racist historical policies such as redlining have resulted in systematic damages to coastal community like Coney Island, where social vulnerabilities continue to exist including: poor nutritional health, and food access.

Opportunities for expanding garden initiatives in Coney Island include: (1) Establishing a Community Agriculture and Green Infrastructure Resiliency Plan. (2) Forming a Coney Island Adaptation Council to set goals and implement plans towards the preservation and improvement of the community. (3) Expanding perennial gardening and activities by utilizing local community infrastructure such as: community centers, NYCHA developments, and other public facilities. (4) Expanding garden typologies in Coney Island, through alternatives, such as hydroponics and aquaponics, to engage residents where they reside. These alternatives provide an opportunity to use non-traditional community spaces and to retrofit spaces such as NYCHA courtyards, rooftops, and windowsills. Other potential greening sites include: open streets, sidewalk bioswales, street medians, and porous pavements like Surf Avenue, a corridor which also serves as the first point of contact for incoming storms, such as a future Hurricane Sandy. These serve as immediate actions that can also provide green sector job opportunities to residents.

These recommendations help imagine a more sustainable, inclusive, and community-owned food system for residents. They represent a necessary first step that should be adopted to meet the varied issues in Coney Island. Local residents must lead the initiative and be involved throughout each stage of the planning and programming process. Without the focus on the residents of the community at the center of the movement, necessary decisions for the community’s well-being may be co-opted or disregarded altogether. A fairly robust community infrastructure already exists through public facilities that can expand their long-term growth and local distribution of fresh produce through pandemic and climate adaptive gardening typologies. These innovative steps can provide a synergy of holistic benefit for Coney Island residents and their descendants in the future.

Demonstration of Professional Competence

Sustainable Environmental Systems

RISING TIDES, RISING RENT: CONNECTING CLIMATE JUSTICE TO SOCIAL HOUSING IN NEW YORK

by Alex Miller Fall 2022

Ten years have elapsed since Superstorm Sandy barreled through the Tri-State region in 2012. It was a violent climate shock that immediately forced tens of thousands of people from their homes, and sent city, state, and federal officials scrambling to match the displaced with hotel rooms, or scarcely available vacant apartments. A year later, more than 30,000 residents of New York and New Jersey had not returned home.1

Today, Sandy lives in the collective imagination of many New Yorkers as a harbinger of the climate shocks lurking over the horizon. By 2100, events like Sandy could occur in the region up to 17 times as often.2 But Sandy is also a reminder that the climate crisis is already here. Beyond headline-grabbing storms, we are beginning to see more subtle climate stressors inch into everyday life. Next year, the city is expected to experience 15 days of “sunny day” flooding; by 2050, the phenomenon could occur between 60–85 days each year.3

Both shocks and stressors will diminish New York City’s limited housing stock, displacing both residents who have the means to relocate and those who do not. Without factoring in future development, the 2050 100-year floodplain (roughly equivalent to Sandy’s inundation zone) is expected to reach 111,000 buildings containing 522,000 residential units.4 About 800,000 New Yorkers, or 9% of the city’s current population, currently live within those boundaries.5 Most are renters, a group of people so uniquely vulnerable to climate change that a 2021 study coined the term Renters’ Climate Inequities (RCI) to encapsulate the outsized issues that they face.6 Those issues include financial co-vulnerabilities; reduced support from neighbor networks due to relatively high housing turnover; and the absence of targeted assistance from federal and state programs, which are largely designed for homeowners.7 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/nyregion/displaced-by-hurricanesandy-and-living-in-limbo-instead-of-at-home.html.

2. Lin, Ning, Robert E. Kopp, Benjamin P. Horton, and Jeffrey P. Donnelly. “Hurricane Sandy’s Flood Frequency Increasing from Year 1800 to 2100.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 43 (October 25, 2016): 12071–75. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1604386113.

3. Simauchi, Kevin. “New York May See Up to 15 Days of Flooding in Next Year as Sea Levels Rise.” Bloomberg. Com, August 2, 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-02/new-york-may-see-up-to-15-days-offlooding-as-sea-levels-rise.

4. “MapPLUTO 22v2.” Calculated by clipping property data from this file to the “Sea Level Rise Maps (2050s 100-year Floodplain)” published by the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.

5. “Info Brief: Flood Risk in NYC.” NYC Department of Planning, November 2016. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ planning/download/pdf/plans-studies/climate-resiliency/flood-risk-nyc-info-brief.pdf.

6. Dundon, Leah A., and Janey S. Camp. “Climate Justice and Home-Buyout Programs: Renters as a Forgotten Population in Managed Retreat Actions.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 11, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 420–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-021-00691-4. 7. Ibid.

Even though the Uniform Relocation Act of 1970 requires federally funded programs to provide assistance to displaced renters, that does not always happen in practice. The NYC Build it Back program, started in 2013 with $2.2 billion in federal grants to help residents relocate to a new home or repair, rebuild, or elevate existing properties, was engrossed in the challenge of assisting thousands of homeowners, and had not served a single renter by 2016.8 A retroactive tenant assistance program was later instituted to provide housing choice vouchers to displaced renters, but recipients struggled to find landlords who would accept the vouchers, a common form of discrimination in New York.9

There is a gulf between the renting and owning classes of New York City. Last year, renters’ median household income was $50,000, while owners brought in $98,000.10 The divide between renters and owners was even more exaggerated within the pool of 150,000 New Yorkers who registered to receive assistance from FEMA after Sandy: the median income of renters was $18,000, but $82,000 for owners.11 The flood zone is an area of contrast, not only covering affluent enclaves but also neighborhoods debilitated by redlining. Today in NYC, people of color head 67% of renting households, 75% of rent-regulated units, and 94% of public housing units.12 A large portion of the city’s public housing exists in the floodplain.

With the Housing Act of 1937, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was established; however, to prevent public housing from competing with the private market, buildings were severely income-restricted and often isolated from the rest of the city. Land was often cheaper at the margins, but Congress also made marginalized populations inexpensive to displace by authorizing federal funding to be used for slum clearance and urban redevelopment.13 As a result, thousands of NYCHA units rose along the shoreline, concentrating low-income communities and communities of color in the floodplain. Sandy inundated more than 400 NYCHA buildings, directly affecting 80,000 residents.14 By 2050, 26% of NYCHA’s buildings will be in the 100-year floodplain.15

Given the historic injustices shaping current housing inequities in New York, there is a great deal of work for the state to do to correct these disparities before they are exacerbated by climate change. The response to date has not been promising. After Sandy, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched the $930 million Rebuild by Design competition to fund resiliency projects in the TriState region.16 A proposal to protect Lower Manhattan called the BIG U, which consists of berms, floodwalls, floodgates, and raised parkland, received a disproportionate 36% of the grant. It is an impressive megastructure, albeit one that sells New Yorkers on a “false sense of longer-term protection,” according to Klaus Jacob, special research scientist at Columbia University’s Climate School.17 That is also true of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) new proposal to install 12 sea barriers in New York Harbor for $52 billion. When USACE announced the tentatively selected plan this September, they acknowledged that the project was designed to manage flooding rather than “totally eliminate flood risks,” lowering annual regional damages from $7.95 billion to $1.69 billion.18

The feasibility of the plan hinges on USACE’s benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR), a totalizing instrument that is used to determine if a project should move forward. To assess the plan’s benefits, an intervention’s value is calculated purely terms of avoided flood damage to property, ignoring persistent calls for the BCR to include more criteria that avoids perpetuating social, economic, and environmental disparities. In short, the federal government is designing their coastal storm response for the New York Harbor region to protect property values rather than defend frontline communities.

Within the context of New York City, that is not entirely surprising. The current market value for all properties within the five boroughs is estimated to be $1.398 trillion.19 Property owners both large and small have an interest in protecting and growing the value of their assets, and so does the City, which heavily relies on property taxes as a source of revenue. That, combined with the BCR, creates a perverse incentive for various levels of government to spend just enough money shoring up assets to keep the real estate market stable through coastal adaptation projects. This paradigm is just one facet of what housing policy analyst Samuel Stein calls the real estate state, “a government by developers, for developers,” with New York serving as its capital city.20

We are beginning to see the inherent danger in leaving the real estate state unchecked during a climate crisis. Since Superstorm Sandy, the market value of New York City properties in the 100year floodplain has thrived, increasing by 44% to more than $176 billion.21 This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by major players: a report co-published by the Urban Land Institute and Heitman warned that “the financial system that underpins local real estate markets and public finance has yet to be sensitized to climate risk.”22 Given that sensitization could crash investor confidence in a highly profitable $1.398 trillion market, or at least in the floodplain, there is not much incentive for New York’s property holders or government to act. Meanwhile, the floodplain continues to expand. By the 2050s, properties that are currently worth $242 billion and generate $3.1 billion in annual tax revenue will be at risk.23

8. Morris, Deborah Helaine. “The Climate Crisis Is a Housing Crisis: Without Growth We Cannot Retreat.” In Global Views on Climate Relocation and Social Justice: Navigating Retreat. Routledge, 2021.

9. Ibid.

10. “2021 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey Selected Initial Findings.” NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, May 16, 2022.

11. “Sandy’s Effects on Housing in New York City.” NYU Furman Center, March 2013. https://furmancenter.org/research/ publication/fact-brief.

12. “2021 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey Selected Initial Findings.”

13. “Major Legislation on Housing and Urban Development Enacted Since 1932.” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, June 2014. https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/LEGS_CHRON_JUNE2014.PDF.

14. Hernández, Diana, David Chang, Carole Hutchinson, Evanah Hill, Amenda Almonte, Rachel Burns, Peggy Shepard, Ingrid Gonzalez, Nora Reissig, and David Evans. “Public Housing on the Periphery: Vulnerable Residents and Depleted Resilience Reserves Post-Hurricane Sandy.” Journal of Urban Health 95, no. 5 (October 2018): 703–15.

15. “Ten Years After Sandy: Barriers to Resilience.” Office of the New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, October 2022. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/ten-years-after-sandy/.

16. Rebuild by Design. “PROJECT PAGES: THE BIG U.” https://rebuildbydesign.org/work/funded-projects/the-big-u/.

17. Jacob, Klaus. “Climate Scientist: Manhattan Will Need ‘Venice-Like Canals’ to Stop Flooding.” Next City (blog), June 25, 2014. https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/climate-scientist-manhattan-needs-venice-like-canals-flooding.

18. “New York-New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries Coastal Storm Risk Management Feasibility Study: Draft Integrated Feasibility Report and Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement.” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, September 2022.

19. NYC Department of Finance. “Department of Finance Publishes Fiscal Year 2023 Tentative Property Tax Assessment Roll,” January 18, 2022. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/about/press/2023-tentative-property-tax-assessment-roll.page.

20. Stein, Samuel. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Jacobin Series. Verso, 2019.

21. “Ten Years After Sandy: Barriers to Resilience.”

22. “Ten Years After Sandy: Barriers to Resilience.”

23. Misdary, Rosemary, and Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky. “New NYC Storm Surge Map Shows How Climate Change Threatens Affordable

It is important to remember that these valuations represent places where hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers live and work, who might assume with good reason that the new sea barriers are being designed to fully protect them and their neighbors from climate changerelated disasters. They might also be convinced that post-Sandy building improvements or local infrastructure upgrades will be enough to keep them safe. The reality is that engineered solutions of all sizes are devised to “buy down” risk, not eliminate it.

Engineered solutions have time limits, too. Klaus Jacob told Gothamist that “they work for a while in some places longer than others, but eventually the ocean will win.”24 Rather than rely on these solutions, he urges that “we need to start moving people to higher ground now, and using the coastal area as a barrier.”25 Save for storm surge events, the floodplain impact on the coast will be gradual, offering a few precious decades for the City to prepare upland areas for the arrival of residents from lowland neighborhoods. Academic literature refers to these places as receiving communities.

A survey of households five months after Sandy in areas highly affected by the disaster indicated that residents preferred protection in place, but were open to relocating if their health and safety were at risk.26 If they want to leave, where can they go? Last year, NYC’s vacancy rate was only 0.9% for apartments that cost $1,500 (the median rent), but 12.6% for apartments that rent for more than $2,300.27 This poses a significant problem for rentburdened New Yorkers who are looking to move, and it could get especially challenging for those seeking higher ground in the near future.

When locally observed flooding incidents started to become much more frequent in Miami-Dade County after 2000, a long-term positive relationship emerged between elevated residential properties and higher price appreciation rates.28 Elsewhere, higher-ground assets are generally not priced at a premium,29 but that could soon change in New York, with sunny day flooding anticipated to rise significantly over the next 30 years.

Anamaria, and Graham Owen. “Attitudes towards Relocation Following Hurricane Sandy: Should We Stay or Should We Go?” Disasters 41, no. 1 (2017): 101–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12186.

27. Mironova, Oksana, and Samuel Stein. “Plenty of Apartments…If You’ve Got Plenty of Money: Key Points from Selected Initial Findings of the 2021 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS),” June 14, 2022. https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/ plenty-of-apartments-if-youve-got-plenty-of-money-2021-hvs-findings.

28. Keenan, Jesse M, Thomas Hill, and Anurag Gumber. “Climate Gentrification: From Theory to Empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida.” Environmental Research Letters 13, no. 5 (May 1, 2018): 054001. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aabb32.

29. “Climate Migration and Real Estate Investment Decision-Making.” Urban Land Institute, 2022. https://knowledge.uli.org/en/ reports/research-reports/2021/climate-migration-and-real-estate-investment.

30. O’Sullivan, Feargus. “Barcelona’s Latest Affordable Housing Tool: Seize Empty Apartments,” July 16, 2020, U.S. edition. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-16/to-fill-vacant-units-barcelona-seizes-apartments.

31. Cohen, Rachel M. “How State Governments Are Reimagining American Public Housing.” Vox, August 4, 2022. https://www. vox.com/policy-and-politics/23278643/affordable-public-housing-inflation-renters-home.

32. Housing Justice for All. “Our Platform.” Accessed October 22, 2022. https://housingjusticeforall.org/our-platform/.

33. Rabiyah, Sam. “More than 60,000 Rent-Stabilized Apartments Are Now Vacant — and Tenant Advocates Say Landlords Are Holding Them for ‘Ransom.’” The City, October 19, 2022. https://www.thecity.nyc/housing/2022/10/19/23411956/60000-rentstabilized-apartments-vacant-warehousing-nyc-landlords-housing.

34. Forrest, Adam. “The City That’s Built An Affordable Housing Paradise.” HuffPost, July 19, 2018. https://www.huffpost.com/ entry/vienna-affordable-housing-paradise_n_5b4e0b12e4b0b15aba88c7b0.

35. Förster, Wolfgang, William Menking, Sabine Bitter, and Aedes am Pfefferberg (Berlin, Germany), eds. Das Wiener Modell: Wohnbau für die Stadt des 21. Jahrhunderts = The Vienna model: housing for the twenty-first-century city. Berlin: Jovis, 2016.

Considering this outlook, it is not prudent for New York City to leave rent to market forces with a majority of renters burdened by the cost of housing. The climate crisis must compel our city and state governments to radically rethink how they approach housing now. The number of residents in the 100-year floodplain will grow from 400,000 to 800,000 over the next 30 years. By the 2050s, 522,000 residential units could be eliminated by the next Sandy. If we do not replace those units with a greater or equal amount of housing in elevated areas by then, we could be in serious trouble.

Fortunately, we can learn a great deal about how to address this situation by studying how other governments are acting to resolve the current housing crisis. In Spain, the Catalonia region has allowed municipalities to seize long-vacant properties by compulsory purchase at half the market rate price since 2016.30 In Maryland, the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission started a revolving fund in 2021 to create publicly owned mixed-income apartments; about 9,000 new units are already in the pipeline.31 California state representative Alex Lee introduced a bill this year to create publicly owned mixed-income housing, and it made significant progress in the legislature.

New York State assembly members and senators are beginning to act. The Housing Justice for All coalition has introduced legislation on good cause eviction, a housing access voucher program, and a bill to prohibit certain local exclusionary zoning measures.32 The End Warehousing Act of 2021 was also introduced, which would fine landlords who keep their apartments vacant and use the funding to provide housing vouchers for homeless people.33

Recently, Assembly Members Emily Gallagher, Marcela Mitaynes, Linda Rosenthal, Phara Souffrant Forrest, and State Senators Brian Kavanagh and Julia Salazar visited Vienna, Austria as part of a delegation to learn about social housing. In that city, about 62% of residents live in affordable, high-quality housing that is owned or maintained by the government.34 The contrast is striking, but Vienna and New York are relatively unique within the context of their own countries for making government-supported housing a priority, with 20% of New Yorkers relying on the state for housing aid or subsidies.35 The problem, of course, is that our system was purposefully hobbled from the start by racist, classist, and capitalist interests who had no desire to make affordable housing available to everyone. Today, there is an urgent need for our government to not only provide low-cost, high-quality housing for people who need it now, but also for New Yorkers who choose to leave the floodplain in the years to come.

Thesis

City and Regional Planning

COMMUNITY-BASED ALTERNATIVES TO WATERSHED PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE LOWCOUNTRY

by Amron Lee

Spring 2022