Columbia GSAPP LiPS: Tammy Lewis

So, the work that I'm going to present today is an outgrowth of some other work that I've done on green gentrification and resilience gentrification and climate gentrification. And in looking at gentrification and urban issues, I've brought the sociological lens of looking at environmental justice. So, in all of the work that I'm doing, I'm asking, who's winning? Who's losing? Um, you know, when we're trying to uh respond socially to environmental problems, how does our social response either exacerbate inequality or reproduce inequality or in some very rare cases actually ameliorate inequality. So, today I'm going to talk about um what we did in New York City after Hurricane Sandy in terms of policy and what that means for inequality in the city and long-term development. How many of you here today were actually here for Hurricane Sandy? Okay, so some of you experienced this firsthand. So, I'm sure we're going to have some interesting conversation when I'm done. So, let me start in. So, what The context that frames my discussion today is that we see a socio-ecological paradox. And on one side of this paradox, we have population growth moving from inland to the coast. 1970 to 2010, the population in coastal counties in the United States rose 40%. If we look at this globally, two out of three megacities are located on coast. So, we have this move to the coast and at the same time, we have climate change. And we have predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that sea level rise and climate change is going to get worse. So, we're kind of setting up a recipe for disaster. Going to really quickly run through some indicators of climate change. Just so we know this is a real thing in case there's any question left. Uh we have carbon dioxide increasing over time. This is driving our climate change. We have this resulting in hotter land masses, resulting in hotter oceans, resulting in sea level rise. So, what does this mean for urban coasts? I'm going to look today at New York City uh as an example of this paradox. I took this picture from the top of the World Trade Center. And the reason I think I I I use this in this talk is to really remind people that New York City is a city of water. We are surrounded by water. Um 8 million people um in in the metro area with 400,000 in the 1% flood zone. The 1% flood zone is the zone that has a 1% chance of flooding in a given year. It used to be called the 100-year flood line, right? Um 2.2 million are people are predicted to live in that flood zone by 2100. This is not just because sea level is rising, but because of what I told you on the first slide. We're moving toward a sea level rise, right? So, we're kind of setting this up for ourself. In the 10 years that followed Hurricane Sandy, New York State I'm sorry, New York City real estate values in the flood zone increased by 44%. So, New York City is an example of the global climate change paradox in which the population is moving toward more and more precarious areas. Let me show you some more fine-grained data about sea level rise with New York City. Uh in New York, we have the New York City Panel on Climate Change, which is our local equivalent um of the IPCC. And what you see in New York City is a sea level rise is happening here even faster than it is in the rest of the globe. But part of that has to do with the way the bite is shaped with the Hudson River and the ocean. This is a map that was from before Sandy. This was generated in 2009. And what this shows is that our flood zone keeps being um revised upward, right? So, in 2009, uh we're looking at the red area. Then purple is the current estimate. Orange is the estimate for 2050. And yellow is the estimate by 2100. So, this is just the flood flood zone area. The area that is susceptible to storm surge is even greater. I don't have a little pointer, but this that people are complaining. Okay. And we'll be up there. And I want you to pay some attention to the area down here because this is the case on that map. This is the Rockaway Peninsula, Jamaica Bay, Staten Island. So, we'll be coming back to a map like this. Okay. Little bit more information about New York City locally. When you hear the term sunny day flooding, you probably think of Miami because that's what's usually in the news, right? You see pictures of beautiful sunny Miami. Um but this is Jamaica Bay. I took this picture from the A train. The A train runs uh from the Rockaway Peninsula through Jamaica Bay um up into Queens and Brooklyn. And the king tides, that's the high tides in New York City routinely flood parts of Jamaica Bay. This disrupts people's uh capacity to get to school and work and doctors uh appointments. It restricts emergency city um services. And this is a result of the sea level rise in the city. And the point of me showing this to you is we already have this. This is already happening. This is not something that's going to happen in the far off future. People are dealing with this now. So, let me take you now to my academic argument that I'm going to make about these cases. So, using New York City to show you this, we're basically making the argument that we are currently in a moment of crisis. And this moment of crisis provides us with an opportunity. Sea level rise and storm surge ends the coast right now. And we're making public policy decisions now that are going to impact the future of how we live among the coast for centuries to come. So, we really need to look at our public policy because it is going to shape our development paths. And the lens I'm going to bring it onto this is to look at how it shapes social equity as well. So, how do our policy uh policies affect equity? And one of the things we're going to see in the cases is that some policy models lock us into a particular development model which is maladaptive. So, this talk is really a plea for future planners to please think carefully about the policy choices that we're going to make. Okay, back into some New York City stuff. So, Hurricane Sandy um and Hurricane Katrina which was were in New was was in New Orleans in um 20 2005 um really big tipping points in the US for thinking about adaptation policy. Right? We have two major hurricanes hitting major cities um in the US. And for those of you who were here, you probably uh depending where you were experienced some of these problems in after Sandy. Right? We had 11 days without telecommunications in certain areas, 2 million people without power. Train tunnels out of service. The Rockaways just when I say just, I mean within months, just finished the renovations that they did to clean up after Sandy. Right? We're it's 2026. They finished in in late 2025, right? Um and the hospitals were put out of service. So, this was a really big wake-up call uh to policy makers that we need to do something to address this. Sandy was not a hurricane when it hit uh New York. It was actually a superstorm. Um but what it did do was it pushed water up through the harbor. It pushed water up through the Rockaways. And it had enormous storm surge. In some areas, the storm surge was about 5 m. It was like 16 ft uh for those of us on the English system. Um and and it triggered a lot of planning. Additionally, the neighborhood level impact really depended on where you were. So, environmentally, it depended on how how high up you were, if you were elevated or not. It depended on how close you were to the shore. It also varied in its impacts based on people's social location, right? Race, class, gender, and disability. A lot of the people who died were people who had disabilities. Um and the homes were destroyed and damaged, and the flooding cost the city billions of dollars. So, what we're going to look at with public policy then is how the government responded to this enormous disaster in terms specifically of Sandy. So, governments are the key responders, and they focus the direction of the recovery. Their decisions have long-term impacts. Now, if you're a politician, as Mayor Bloomberg was at the time, if you're a politician, you know what you want to do? You want to make your constituents happy. So, sometimes there's a real knee-jerk response to these things because you want everything to get back to normal. Um you want to deal with the immediate stress and anxiety and economic losses. But, that's not always the best. Um we really think that these moments require some reflection and long-term planning. So, what are some of the possible responses? Now, I'm going to take you to some ide- what Let's say I'll just call ideal types, right? How could we possibly respond? This is obviously an oversimplification, but here's four possible strategies for how we might respond. The The picture on the left is just do nothing, right? Take the disaster, let it recede, take it again, don't do anything. Um that's one way governments could respond. Another way, on the top, resist, is that what we could do some massive engineering, right? We can build walls, we could do what they call shoreline armoring. Now, if you notice that resist model, there's no beach left. Right? When you resist with a with a seawall, you lose your beach. Okay, that's another possibility. A third possibility is to accommodate, right? So, you accommodate the flooding. You build differently. You say, "It's going to flood here, so let's just build in a way that enables the water to come through or a way that protects us." Um the way the government encourages accommodation is through changing busi- building codes, right? And changing regulations. They can also provide financial assistance for accommodation. And the fourth possible response would be to retreat, which is to say, "Doesn't make sense for us to live so close to this uh source of problem. Let's move back." Now, obviously retreat is quite difficult. Uh it requires a coordinated um movement of people away from rising waters. So, we're going to discuss each of these four scenarios because we saw elements of this as responses to different places in Sandy. So, back to our uh map. Okay, in map, the the blue part is the 1% So, just remind you again. So, I was saying to you, Rockaway Beach, the A train runs through. Okay? So, let me speak. >> Yeah. >> We're going to look at at four cases. We're going to look at Edgemere, which is in the far Rockaway. That's the case of do nothing. We're going to look at Rockaway. They did lots of coastal Yes. In Broad Channel, they accommodated by changing their building codes, issues. And in Ocean Beach, they had managed retreat. I'm going to take you through each one of these cases as an ideal type, and then look at what happened. Where are these places at now, 10 years later? What were the equity impacts of these different policy decisions? Right. First case is the do nothing example. And one of the things I want you to see in the top picture here is the mix of housing in Edgemere. You have little bungalows, and you have public housing. Um Here's Edgemere. Um And so, the ideal type of this idea of do nothing is that in the political economy we live in, in a neoliberal political economy, if the government does nothing after uh a a disaster, things are basically left to market forces. Right? So, that means that private actors address the problem on their own. Private actors in this case would be homeowners, renters, insurance company insurance companies, and real estate developers. And so, in a do nothing kind of environment, the ability to recover depends on things like family finances, right? Uh Depends on whether or not you have insurance. It depends on how much um insurance payout you get. It depends on your real estate value. Those sorts of things. And it also depends on your capacity to access things, right? So people with limited finances are are kind of um on the weak side of the do-nothing model. Um so they're either forced to sell or if they're they're renters, they're they're forced to move or if their landlords aren't doing anything, they can't don't have the capacity, they stay in molding homes. So in the do-nothing model if you have more money, you do better. Now, I've got some stats here on Edgemere. Edgemere's a poor community with relatively high family poverty rate and a relatively low home ownership rate. Um as we have in most of New York. Um The other thing about Edgemere is it had been historically kind of ignored by the city. Um you guys are planners, right? So you know the city moved public housing out to the edges, right? So this is a socially invisible corner of New York City. Out of sight, out of mind. Um it's a place that already had intergenerational poverty. Um and following Sandy although there were public policy interventions to support repair and rebuilding, the people in Edgemere were not able to access this. Two reasons. One, they didn't have the social capital. And the second reason was it was a very bureaucratic process. Right? And so So experience was very different than the other end of Rockaway and Breezy Point where people had more social capital and capacity to deal with the bureaucracy. Um so what happened in Edgemere is that the residents were really left to absorb their economic losses and this is in a community that's already 42% uh below poverty. So renters had to rely on their landlords and many remained in molding damaged housing for years. Um it was uh there were a lot of stories last year in the times about uh people who are still in Sandy in the same exact homes that were totally flooded. Now after Sandy we see something interesting and and this builds on some of what I've seen with climate gentrification. What happens after uh disasters is that some of the residents you know, pick up and leave. They take their losses and relocate or they abandon their homes. And what often happens is that you have wealthier in-migrants. Right? So after a climate disaster the place is demolished and then it gets rebuilt with people who have the money to do it. Um this is a form of climate gentrification. In Edgemere in 2022, so if you compare that uh the poverty rates, the poverty rate declined to 25%. And so it attracted in people who had greater means. There are now more housing units in Edgemere and slightly more people living in this flood-prone zone. Housing was in Arverne, if you're familiar with the area. This area was already being built before Sandy and it was built with climate resilience in mind and it withstood the storm. All right. So, that's my first case, Sandy. Basically, we didn't do anything. All right, people were left on their own. Second case, Oakwood Beach. Anybody from Staten Island? Nobody's willing to admit they're from Staten Island. No. Okay. Um Managed retreat as an ideal type is the purposeful, coordinated movement of people away from harm's way. There are a lot of obstacles to managed retreat, beginning with the actual term. People don't like the the term retreat because it implies some sort of defeat. So, sometimes you see other terms to use that talk about this like strategic relocation, uh managed realignment, and transformative adaptation. These are all, you know, synon- synonymous with managed retreat. Theoretically, managed retreat could be used as a strategy prior to a disaster, but that is not how it's been used in the United States. We have used it as a reaction rather than a planning tool. Now, managed retreat is a very hard sell. Politicians do not want to see people moving out of their districts, right? They're losing people, they're losing a tax base. Um there's lots of jurisdictional problems with managed retreat. It's very complicated bureaucratically. Um and finding places for people to live is quite difficult, right? We already have a housing shortage in New York City. If you're going to move people away, where are you going to move them to? Um and then there's also equity issues with managed retreat. Whose houses do you buy? Whose houses don't you buy? Right? Which areas do you offer this? Which areas do you not offer this? There's been some really fabulous large-scale studies on this, and one study found that black populations are less likely to receive buyouts and manage retreat. And when they do, they receive disproportionately less money for their property than when they do receive buyouts. So, this is an equity issue as well. Now, where manage retreat does occur, people like it in the sense that it provides space for recreation, and it also provides for a resilient shoreline. Okay, Oakwood Beach. So, Staten Island is New York's least densely populated borough, and it regularly gets flooded along the coast. It was very hard hit by Sandy. Uh it uh maintained or it it received the highest storm surge of any borough, and 24 of the 43 immediate deaths in New York City occurred in Staten Island. The community of Oakwood Beach had had lots of flooding over and over and over again, and they were very open to manage retreat, and this is kind of this is an unusual uh circumstance. Um they were only willing to be moved if that land was going to be put back into nature because they did not want anyone to have to go through what they had been through. So, there's a high homeownership rate in Oakwood Beach, really high for New York City, 95% rate. That's uh you know, sky-high. Um and the the homeowners formed the Oakwood Beach buyout committee, and they secured buyouts from both the city and the state. There were two different programs. 504 homeowners received their pre-market values for their homes. And they also received incentives. So, there was a 10% incentive for them if they would stay in the state, and an additional 5% incentive for them if they would stay in Staten Island. So, that cost $203 million to move those those people. Oakwood Beach is the only case that we're looking at that actually lost population. Um so, they lost both units, population units, housing units, and they lost uh a total population. This is a uh rare situation where coastal precarity has been reduced because people and their assets are no longer in harm's way. Right. Last case. No, not last case. Third case. Sorry. Anybody ever take the A train to Rockaway? Go to the beach. Go down that that thin strip over the water. This is Broad Channel. It's really awesome right now. Bay is frozen. The bay is almost completely frozen. Uh if you've ever taken the ferry to Rockaway, the ferry comes over here. It's the ferry is suspended. It is frozen. It's actually a marvelous time to take a ride on the A train and just take some pictures. It's really cool. Channel. So, we're using Broad Channel to look at accommodation. Let's remember stilting and other things. So, as an ideal type, governments can require communities to accommodate by creating zoning regulations, so making people move back, or by using building codes. And in the case of Broad Channel and in New York City, we changed our building codes after Hurricane Sandy. So, what these building codes often do is require builders to move utilities from basements to roofs, right? So, if you have your heating and cooling in the basement, what they say is move it to the roof. Other thing they do is um require stilting, right? And if you require stilting, that, you know, clears out um allows the water to to run under. The National Flood Insurance Program, which uh is run by the feds, promotes accommodation and mitigation in this way through grants that come to areas after disasters have occurred. Um And these practices were widely implemented post-Sandy, and they were available throughout all of New York City, but they were really used most in Queens and in Brooklyn. Um One of the issues with equity here though is a lot of money to raise your house. And this is something my uh my collaborator Ken Gould and I wrote about, and we're calling it resilience gentrification, right? So, in order to be able to have a resilient structure, you have to have enough money to raise your home 14 ft. Now, let's look at Broad Channel. Um throughout New York City, 12,500 homes um were elevated. And in this little strip in Jamaica Bay, there were 250 of them. And they were if they were going to apply for this grant, they had to raise their home somewhere between 10 and 14 ft. Now, in Broad Channel, there's also high home ownership. And so, this worked out for wealthy homeowners who could afford to put their homes up and who had access to funds on the front end because you didn't get this money until you did the work, right? So, planners, think about that. How do you provide funds for people, right? Because this was basically a reimbursement program. That has an equity impact. So, after Sandy, we saw here that not all the homes in Broad Channel were raised. Uh rent people who rented couldn't necessarily raise their home. They had to rely on landlords and landlords had to decide if they were going to do it. Um it's basically a private solution to a public problem, right? So, it's saying, "Hey, we have this public problem, but if you want to deal with it, go deal with it and we'll help you out." Um and this picture I picked two reasons, but just one I'll tell you. Um and that is that you can see that building that was raised, the building that wasn't raised, this building that wasn't raised is for sale. Right? So, people don't necessarily want to stay in the situation if they can't afford to take care of it. So, that's what happened with accommodation, a private response. All right. The fourth ideal type is massive coastal reconstruction, also known as resist. Right? So, we are going to resist the water. We're going to hold back the ocean somehow with a seawall, right? Uh and a seawall that just keeps getting higher and higher and higher. This is a really common response to coastal climate disasters and the threats of disasters around the world. And so, we've basically taken on climate change as an engineering prob- problem. How are we going to engineer our ways out of this? Um so, you'll see, you know, harbor-wide seagate, barriers, dikes, berms, groynes, artificial dunes, all these ways of armoring the coast. And it appears to be the dominant way that we're dealing with this. Uh and the standard approach to protecting real estate on the coast. The very, very high cost of this is justified by the cost of real estate on the other side of the wall. Okay, so we're saying, "We're going to do this cuz look at the value of this real estate. We need to protect this commercial home the commercial buildings and these residential homes." And it so, in some ways, uh coastal engineering offers the least social change. Right? We're just going to say, "No, no, no, we just build this wall, everything back here is fine." Um so, the idea is we're not going to seed land, right? We're we're going to hold the line. In Rockaway Beach, I showed you the picture, it's a it's a a peninsula. And it's a linear community between the ocean and Jamaica Bay. It's the longest beach in New York City and it's where we face the ocean, right? That is our face to the ocean. Within 2 months after Hurricane Sandy, um Mayor Bloomberg says, "We're going to build back the boardwalk." Okay, Rockaway Beach was dis- totally destroyed by um Hurricane Sandy. And Bloomberg's like, "We're going to build it back better and stronger, right?" This is 2 months after this happened, right? Um people were built in Rockaway, right? This is great. Um and so, um it actually took 5 years for that what had been a boardwalk to be rebuilt. Have any of you been to the Rockaways, gone down there swimming? Can anyone describe the boardwalk to me? Yeah. Huh. Used to be a boardwalk, like made by boards, right? You could walk under it, go to the beach, people walk on top of it. The boardwalk that we got from Bloomberg is a concrete wall that has greenery on both sides, um and it has concessions. It has these restaurants. Like, the concessions were like, "Open up, open up. We need, you know, our economic development back." So, it took until, let me get my dates right, it took 5 years for that to be built back, okay? And it cost $385 million. Right? Pretty big chunk of money. What then happened was a few years after that, there were erosion problems and we were seeing high tides. And so there was a second project called the Atlantic Coastal Resiliency Project that started just 3 years after the boardwalk was done at a cost of $400 million. Right? So this engineering project, the first one that we're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll build it back." Cost a ton of money. Then we're like, "That didn't last very long." Um and there are now parts of the boardwalk that are below the um the dune in front of it. So you can no longer stand on the street and see the ocean. You have to climb up to get to the boardwalk to be able to see the ocean. So it's a very uh different approach. The project also included um the second project, building these groynes. So those are the rocks that are out into the ocean and massive sand replenishment. There's 18 groynes built along the boardwalk, which is about 5 and 1/2 miles long. And um It's all right. They make it sand artificial dune. We have a wall, but now it's under a dune, so it looks really nice, right? Cuz this is an economic uh driver in New York City. All right. What's happened now? So the population of Rockaway Beach is growing and densifying. Um though as I indicated there are questions about the efficacy of the engineering project and certainly about the costs. One of the things that happens in engineering these projects is they're modeled on what our predictions are for sea level rise today. But if any of you are following any of this modeling, things are happening faster than we think and so they have to keep going back to them. So this case we have this sea wall essentially and it is a public response to a public problem. So in some ways even though it's incredibly costly everybody who lives behind the sea wall is treated in the same way. So it it's got kind of a a mixed equity thing cuz it if you live in Rockaway you know, it doesn't matter where you live behind the sea wall. Uh it might have an equity uh point of problem if you're living in Harlem and you're paying for what's going on uh in Rockaway. So let me talk about some of these policy um outcomes. There's a and there's there's three big takeaways I have in terms of these cases. Fifth I just want to think about like where are people moving? Managed retreat is most effective in moving people away from harm's way. As of reconstruction, the resist model actually moves people into harm's way. Um and of the four policy approaches, managed retreat was the only one that actually decreased the population. So it's only one that really dealt with that socio-environmental paradox I laid out at the front end. And the other policy approaches are really just putting more and more people in harm's way. So that's that's the first thing I want to talk about just like in terms of where population moves. The second thing is about inequality. Right? So, when we have household-level solutions, it depends on what your household is like in terms of whether or not you're going to be able to use these solutions. Right? So, homeowner-based solutions help wealthy people more than they help renters. Uh Broad Channel was able to make changes and structurally mitigate, but people who lived in Edgemere were not, and that's because of a difference in social class. On the other side of this, high home ownership in Oakwood Beach enabled those people to move together, but that was also a special case in the sense that they had suffered many, many times from um flooding. And finally, as I said before, this map of coastal reconstruction protects everyone, but it promotes growth in precarious places. Now, I just want to go back to Rockaway to make my final point. I told you about these two phases of this engineering in Rockaway. Right? In phase one, it was the boardwalk. Phase two was adding all this other stuff. What we see in Rockaway is that there's going to be recurrent and unpredictable costs. Right? This all happened in a very short time frame. Over and up the first phase was going to be the only phase. Actually, I put phase up there. Phase isn't the right thing. I was There are phases. They thought that was just is be the thing. And then they're like, "Oh, wow, that didn't work. We need to do this other thing." And it's only a matter of time until the next thing comes. Now, let me orient you in this picture. This space Going into this space is a condo, okay? What's happening in Rockaway is that because we now have this boardwalk and this safety, you're getting densification. Developers are coming in, buying these rather large single-family homes, taking them down and putting up condos. There's three such developments with it. This is about um Beach 116 has two of them, two new ones. And this is about uh I think Beach 120. These are all in a really small little area. And so, what we see is uh kind of ironic because the resist strategy is moving more people into flood zone one. Right? If there's a hurricane, this place is going to be destroyed again. Um so, we see that there's a public side subsidy of private investment. It encouraged densification. And it This is going to be a long-term problem. And we kind of we're thinking about this in terms of a cycle of perverse uh investment, right? So, the public is putting up these walls. Then, there's private investment because it's safe. Then, we use the real estate values to say we need to invest in it cuz we need to protect the real estate values. And so, you just kind of get into this cycle of um densification and also just think about the public funds that are going to this and not other things. Right? It cost What did I say? I think $250 million to move all those people out of Oakwood Beach. This is already costing millions and millions dollars. We're at at $800 million on this. All right, so I started big. I went to New York and now I'm going back out again, right? So, this is happening all around the world, okay? Um 50% of the world's population lives on coast. Most of our major cities are on coast. 2.15 people live in the coastal zone. If we look just in New York City and I'm not New York City, I'm talking in New York. City in these zones in Miami and in New York. Uh We've got like 3.5 million people currently exposed at assets of $540 billion. Um so, this is a lot of people and a lot of money we're talking about. Let me show you some examples from around the world, maybe from some places where you all are from. The Dutch are the experts in engineering, right? The Dutch live at sea level. They have been doing this kind of work for years and Dutch engineers have been deployed around the world to do this work elsewhere. Um this is uh massive engineering in Zeeland. And this is a project that uh in the late 1900s of $13 billion and now and now they need to redo it because they were basing it on projections from the late 1900s. Every little centimeter of this project is costing millions and millions of dollars. So, they're going to have to redo all this in a very short time. Um Here are some other examples. Uh Houston This is interesting. I just checked this cuz when I originally wrote this paper, uh Houston wanted to put in the Ike Dike as of the hurricane that hit Galveston, and it was um predicted to be $37 million. Now, I started writing this paper like I don't know, a couple of years ago. I checked it yesterday, and now they think it's going to be $57 billion. That's just like in a couple of years. Um and they estimate that it's going to cost 20 years to build. Well, you can kind of figure this out. What's it going to be like in 20 years? We think we know, but we're not really sure. Uh Lagos Thanks for bringing that up cuz that's actually a a note I wanted to make. In the Netherlands, they paid for this with their oil dollars. I didn't know that about um the Ike Dike. In Lagos, they're paying for this with their uh fossil fuel dollars, right? It's kind of It's rich, right? Um Lagos also moving people to flood zone one. And so, what we see around the world is that we are armoring the coasts to protect economics, to protect real estate. And the capital commitment that we're making in these places is a choice, right? When we're putting our money toward this engineering, we're not putting it toward other things. Um we could be putting it toward relocation. We could be putting it toward transformation away from a fossil fuel economy. I could think of a lot of things. Education. Um, we could go down that line. Um, so these pictures are just to show you like we're not alone in this. How many of you know about what's happening uh in New York City with the Harbor Gate system? This is another proposal where they will put these huge I don't want to get into talking about these gates for long. So, we can gauge the cure. So, the So, it may not go up into the main island, but it's So, I estimated a $57 million current Well, when I don't want to say currently. I haven't checked lately, but that was my last estimate. So, sealing off the sea from island cities or coastal cities is really expensive. And ultimately, I feel like I am a sociologist, not an environmental scientist, but I feel like we can safely predict that we are going to have to retreat at some level. Um, I don't know that it will be managed or voluntary. So, last slide. This is where I throw it into your court, right? This is your problem now, okay? So, New York City has a housing crisis. Coastal real estate is precarious. It's really expensive to protect the coast. And ideally, in in a in a ideal world, we're going to be protecting all people, right? Not just rich people, but poor people, disabled people, people with less access. So, the real question is um how do we deal with these paradoxes in in the real world? And so, that is all I have to say for now. And I am happy to take questions. >> Wait. I think I'm waiting. Certainly. private sector always discipline home have really uh literally free market. But, at the same time, of course, it's like Oh, if I were to say in time Um it it also gives a fair that if you uh convert kind of Is that like It's like stock prices as where insurance is facing. Something like that. Okay. >> Love that question. It's a great question. Anybody here studying flood flood insurance? Okay. The insur- the the flood insurers are the ones who are dealing with us, right? And I mean, I'm not going to You guys are going to have a talk about wildfires later in the semester, and I would love to hear what they have to say about that. But, um if you're reading the news, you'll see that people can't get flood insurance in Florida anymore, right? There's it's very difficult to get flood insurance and what's happening is the insurers who like they package insurance they're losing money. And so in some ways I can't believe I'm saying this the market's going to fix that, right? In a way, but what it means for people who are moving at the coast is you can only afford to move at the coast if you can afford to lose everything. Right? So you can't like a an average home buyer is not going to move to the coast without that insurance. But something I took out of my presentation that deals with your second question and so let me just bear with me for a second. I want to show you something. California I'm actually doing a project in California right now cuz they have a really interesting policy mechanisms um and they actually suspended it after the fires which is quite a shame. But California anyone in here from California? Wait. All right, California there's a lot California has different coastal issues cuz they have erosion, right? You've seen like the pictures on the news of the houses like falling into the water after uh major precipitation events. But what California has is the California Coastal Commission and this agency actually has control over development along the coast. When you want to build something along the coast you need to apply to them and they have like a really rigorous application process and they can grant you the application to build or not. And they have the strategy of rolling easement and what that means is they they they did this with some hotels. So they said we're going to let you build your hotel on the coast but if the uh edge of the cliff comes within 50 ft of you know, the building you have to move the building back. So, you always have this 50-ft barrier. And if you can't move the building back anymore you can't have the hotel there. Now, they have a proposal to do this with homes, right? So, the same kind of strategy. But, it's a little different because they're trying to protect homeowners. So, they're saying listen when it comes to you know, 25 ft you need to sell it to us. We're going to use municipal bonds to buy your house and then we're going to lease it to you. Right? So, we're going to let you live there. We're going to take a little bit of the bite out of it for you. But, then when it comes to 20 ft, you're out of there. Right? And so, it's kind of a softer strategy of proactive managed retreat. So, I'm a fan of California Commission. There's some other things going on like this in New Zealand. Um I was watching the fires pretty closely cuz a lot of those areas were on the coast. And guess what happened after the fires? Gavin Newsom was so much wanting to appease his constituents that he said we're suspending the California Commission's oversight of this. If you had a house there, rebuild. So, it didn't exactly work in that situation, but I think it just kind of kind of doubles down on this argument that I'm making that we make these knee-jerk um decisions right after disasters that have this create this lock-in. Right? They the amount of work that people put into establishing the California Commission, they did it during the '70s. They had to have um you know a vote across the state a prop proposition the whole thing and then it was just kind of thrown under the bus by Newsom in that situation. Answer your question? >> Uh yeah. >> Okay. Long answer, sorry. So I'm I'm saying there's precarious growth. Is that what you you Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I mean by precarious growth in that situation, I mean those people are living in flood zone one. Right? So it's precarious ecologically, not socially. Right? So it's not as if like we're putting like a homeless shelter there, right? In the sense of like vulnerability of the people moving there. But what I'm saying is ecologically speaking, it is precarious. Does that Does that answer your question? Okay. So in in this case what we're seeing is that economics is kind of trumping the ecological system. Right? We're saying the economics of real estate more important than the logic of ecology. Yeah, the It's a false protection, absolutely. >> I understand. But this is >> I hear what you're saying. I'm None come to mind. The closest thing I can think of though is kind of the rewilding of dams. Right? And and I mean dams are put up for really different reason. Um but certainly people are displaced in that process and uh but I I can't think of any off the top of my head. There is an area, let me see if I think it's in my Yeah. This is also in the Netherlands. This is a constructed dune that is I I don't have the data in front of me. 7 km long. Dying. And this was a response to massive flooding. They could could have done walls here, but instead they did this artificial dune. Um disaster, the flood did the work of a chemical, right? So, it wasn't intentionally taken down. It was like climate demolition. Um I can't I can't off the top of my head think of any that were intentionally you know, done. But certainly, I think it's that's a really interesting question and that what would we need to do if we were acting proactively to make things like this work, right? You could think of I mean, going back to the California strategy, you know, imagine there's a precarious area and uh it you think about a long-term process of how you make it less precarious. Right? In Orchard Beach, they bought everyone out, they moved. Right? But, you could think of a way of doing this over time, right? So, like one house at a time when people are ready to sell. Um and then, you know, you clear that out. But, I I do think the temporal piece of this really matters. Um climate demolition happens fast, but as planners thinking about how can we plan for this is a really good way to to start thinking about that. Yeah. I mean, I think the city absolutely recognize these groups, especially when they like named themselves, right? So, for example, the Oakwood Beach uh buyout group, right? That was a group of community members came together, called themselves something, and the state and the city recognized. Now, let me give you a counter example. A similar kind of group formed in Edgemere. And then, the city came in with a plan for how to uh this was like in 2016, how to rebuild Edgemere, and that community group said, "No, that's not what we said." And the city said, "That's what we're doing." And so, I think it really does matter the social power of the community, right? And in Edgemere, as you know, there's more renters than Oakwood Beach, those were all homeowners. So, social power matters there, too. Um but certainly, the gut the the state, when they don't have a handle on these situations, do negotiate with these and I would say more like when they're formalized groups, I don't think they're dealing with them so much as like loosely coordinated networks, right? They want to deal with the entity and then the problem that arises in that is who does this community group represent? Who does it not represent? Like there were people in Oakwood Beach who didn't want to sell their homes. And I showed you a picture there's one home there. That's somebody's home. They they did not want to participate. Now I read an interview with a person who lives there and they complain that there are no social services. Some people you you know, but there's absolutely questions of representation in those situations.