City Weighs ‘Bold’ Funding Plans in Case Feds Don’t Pony Up for Lower Manhattan Resiliency; Your Share Could Come to Six Figures
On the evening of Monday, March 16, a team of City planners at a Community Board 1 meeting presented the current iteration of the FiDi and Seaport Coastal Resilience Plan, which aims to rebuild the nine-tenths of a mile of waterfront between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Battery. This project, which contemplates a new network of decks, berms, flood walls, piers, and breakwaters that will extend into the East River between 90 and 210 feet, has been given the provisional name of Harbor View Park.
Preliminary designs call for the creation of up to 14 acres of new land, of which eight acres will be open space, according to Alexis Taylor, vice president for Climate Resilience at the City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), which is overseeing the plan. She added that it is slated to cost up to $10 billion and take a decade to build, although no start date for construction has been announced. On projects of this scale, the budget is customarily split between local and federal government agencies, with City Hall and Albany partnering on 35 percent of the total, and Washington covering the remainder.
But that formula was cast into doubt last April when the Federal Emergency Management Agency terminated its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which was the primary source of such funds. Multiple states, including New York, sued in federal court to undo this decision. The plaintiffs won a preliminary round in December, which found that FEMA’s BRIC shutdown was illegal, and another on March 6, when a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the agency to cease unwinding the program. But this litigation is ongoing, and there is no guarantee that localities will ultimately prevail.
In the meantime, City Hall has been searching for alternate funding sources. “We’ve been looking through every couch cushion,” Ms. Taylor said at Monday’s discussion. One possible revenue stream that the Mamdani administration is considering was cited by CB1 member Eric Yu, who said, “it’s ominous that you might fund this from the communities deriving the benefit.” He was referring to mentions in multiple recent documents from the FiDi and Seaport Coastal Resilience Plan of the possible creation of a “Shoreline Protection District” (SPD). A December report said, “our financing strategy sets a precedent for how to advance projects without waiting for a disaster to unlock federal recovery dollars, and includes innovative mechanisms like a ‘special assessment district.’” That document added, “the City needs a bold funding plan now,” and predicted, “to secure one of the revenue streams identified, EDC will work with the City and stakeholders over the next year to advance plans to pilot a Lower Manhattan special assessment district.”
In February, a separate EDC analysis noted, “coastal resilience capital projects could be funded through broad-based charges, such as a Property Tax Surcharge (an additional percentage of the value of real property, as measured by assessed value); a Sales Tax Surcharge (an additional percentage added to the base sales tax rate for retail sales of certain tangible personal property and services); Property Insurance Surcharges (an additional percentage of a subset of property insurance premiums most tied to climate risk; and an SPD User Fee (to properties protected by specific coastal resilience assets).” This document added, “there are many other potential revenue streams, including incremental payroll taxes, corporate taxes, personal income taxes, hotel taxes, ‘sin’ taxes, and real property transfer taxes.”
The February report went on to say, “the Lower Manhattan SPD would be the first to see its user fee activated. This SPD would include the area protected by the series of resilience projects around southern part of the island [that] runs from the Lower East Side down the southern tip of Manhattan and up to Battery Park City.”
This document recommended, “the State should create a new Resilience Finance Authority and Resilience Board,” with the legal power to levy taxes (or other fees) and issue bond debt, adding, “the City may need to build up the capacity to deploy $1 to $2 billion per year in capital costs over several decades, reaching nearly $50 billion (in 2025 dollars) in the absence of federal or state subsidy.”
For Lower Manhattan residents, property owners, or business owners, the implications could be significant. The most recent population estimates for Lower Manhattan (defined here as the borders of Community Board 1, an area between the Hudson and East Rivers bounded by Canal, Pearl, and Baxter Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge) indicate that the area is home to 78,390 residents. If they were asked to bear entirely the $10 billion cost estimate for the FiDi and Seaport Coastal Resilience Plan, this would come to approximately $128,000 per man, woman, and child living in the community. Divided between the district’s roughly 40,000 households, that would amount to a burden of $250,000 each. Even if spread out over a decade, this would impose a cost of more than $2,000 per month per dwelling. In practice, these costs would be levied both directly and indirectly, or in some cases, invisibly. (Residential landlords would likely increase rents to cover their own rising costs, for example.) In many instances, local property values could be expected to soften in response to the increased cost of ownership in Lower Manhattan.
At Monday’s CB1 meeting, Mr. Yu said, “these flood resiliency projects are needed to protect all of Lower Manhattan. However, they need to be funded from federal, State and City grants, and existing fees and taxes. Congestion pricing comes to mind. The residents and businesses of CB1 cannot be burdened with new taxes, or increases to existing taxes and fees, which will only increase in the future. Since the proposed funding sources are from Lower Manhattan’s residents and businesses, then the FiDi-Seaport resiliency plan needs to be cost-conscious for long-term flood protection, simplicity and lower operating costs.”
Ms. Taylor said the EDC is working to build awareness of the project in hope that this will translate into political support for federal grants (such as renewed BRIC allocations), and thus preclude – or at least diminish – the need to raise revenue locally.
The funding outlook for the FiDi and Seaport Coastal Resilience Plan was also cast in a sobering light by the acknowledgment that almost none of the budget it will require – even to complete the design, much less begin construction – has been committed. As Ms. Taylor noted, “we have partial funding to work on the environmental impact statement, but we don’t have any money to go beyond the 30 percent design milestone.”
When CB1 chair Tammy Meltzer described public frustration in Lower Manhattan with large projects that ignore community input, Ms. Taylor responded that modifying the resiliency project based on community feedback is also contingent on increasing its budget, saying, “the lack of funds means the design will not change during the environmental impact process.”
Financial District resident Catherine McVay Hughes (a former CB1 member, who chaired the Board during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy) noted, “City representatives confirmed that zero dollars are budgeted to continue the study for the FiDi-Seaport Resiliency project in fiscal year 2027’s $110-billion preliminary budget. Flood protection is urgently needed along the East River from the Battery up to the Brooklyn Bridge. This historic area where New York began, one of the most densely-populated areas of the entire City, is the missing segment. We must not forget the devastation and loss of life that Sandy caused within Community Board 1.” She also noted that the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection and Waterfronts is holding a preliminary budget hearing this Thursday (March 19), and urged interested local residents to participate.
Monday’s discussion also reviewed design components of the FiDi and Seaport Coastal Resilience Plan. Architect Ishita Gaur said of the planned ferry terminal, which will join the Staten Island and Governors Island ferry landings around a grand atrium called the Civic Gateway, “we want to create a ferry hub and public space that is the maritime equivalent of Grand Central Terminal or Moynihan Train Hall.” She added, “this is the ‘wow’ element, a space that allows people to get closer to the water and experience the harbor.”
Describing the plan to deck over the Battery Park Underpass and create a new pedestrian plaza in front of the Battery Maritime Building, architect Travis Bunt, who was part of the team from the City making the presentation to CB1, said, “This will fix a lot of the congestion for pedestrians and bikes, and create additional open space.”
Most of the dramatic design flourishes in the FiDi and Seaport Coastal Resilience Plan are situated on land, Ms. Taylor said, “because we have a legal mandate to ‘avoid, minimize, and mitigate’ when it comes to anything we do over water. When we have in-water impacts, we have to show they are not avoidable.”
Another proposed waterfront element was described as “perched” beach in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, which would be protected by a detached esplanade serving as a breakwater.
When Ms. Meltzer asked whether, “the newly created land be mapped as parks,” Ms. Taylor replied, “governance is still being thought through, and has not been decided.”