Trump Slashes Millions in Seaport Resilience Funding as Report Underscores Local Risks
The Regional Plan Association (RPA) – an independent non-profit civic organization that develops ideas to improve the economic health and environmental resiliency of the New York metropolitan area – has issued an analysis of the impacts that rising sea levels and future extreme-weather events may have on housing in the City. The report’s study area is New York City, along with Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties. While local need is most acute in coastal suburban communities, the report contains sobering metrics about Lower Manhattan.
“Our climate and housing crises are deeply intertwined, and we can’t solve one at the expense of the other,” says Moses Gates, one of the report’s authors and the RPA’s vice president of housing and neighborhood planning. “Through smart and targeted interventions, we can make progress on them in tandem, and by doing nothing, both will only grow worse.”
This analysis, titled “Averting Crisis: Zoning to Create Resilient Homes for All,” projects that Lower Manhattan (defined here as Community Districts 1 and 2, which means the area south of a jagged line formed by West 14th Street, the Bowery, Canal Street, and the Brooklyn Bridge) by 2040 may see 287 homes lost to flooding, along with another 262 made uninhabitable by sea-level rise, and 83 more damaged by a 100-year storm. (For devotees of statistical date, this zone corresponds to Public Use Microdata Area [PUMA] 3810, as designated by the U.S. Census – one of 55 such zones throughout New York City.)
According to the City’s online database, the Equitable Development Data Explorer, this zone contains 78,995 housing units. The “Averting Crisis” report predicts that PUMA 3810 will need an additional 23,708 homes by 2040 to keep up with local population growth and deteriorating housing stock. But, the RPA analysis notes, current zoning will allow for the creation of only 5,316 new homes.
The RPA report recommends zoning reform to allow denser housing, code updates so that buildings will be able to withstand extreme weather, and upgrades to the capacity of sewer systems to treat greater amounts of wastewater and stormwater.
The report also urges coastal protections such as new land elevation and sea walls. The same day this report was published, however, the Trump administration canceled FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which eliminated more than $300 million in federal funding to New York for disaster preparedness, flood mitigation, and infrastructure upgrades. Communities across New York State are affected. In Lower Manhattan, more than $42 million was cut from the Seaport Coastal Resilience project.
As “Averting Crisis” notes, “the highest percent of the potentially affected population reside in the urban core and regional downtowns, with about 63 percent of at-risk residents in higher-density urban areas.”