Rebuilding with Resilience

Land ownership — Design teams can also facilitate implementation by considering the ownership of lands
needed to implement a project. Implementation of the ESCR compartment has been eased because of common
city ownership and control of the lands needed to construct the berm projects. Because the project can be built
mostly on city-owned lands, the grantee does not have to go through time-consuming and expensive efforts to
acquire additional lands through purchase or use of eminent domain, which can be politically controversial. The
city is also leveraging Con Ed investments in the region by ensuring the flood protection investments that Con Ed
is making to protect its facilities are integrated with the city’s investments.
Holistic resilience strategies—All of the grantees, including New York City, are having to consider
alternative pathways for implementing unfunded components of projects. The funding gap has limited the ability
of the grantees to holistically address their risks across the range of impacts they are likely to see under existing
conditions and with climate change. Because Sandy was a storm-surge driven flood event, the ESCR focused on
building flood structures to protect against storm surges. However, coastal flooding can block outfalls, preventing
proper drainage when surge events are accompanied by heavy rainfall events, which can exacerbate interior
flooding. While the grantee is working with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to
address interior drainage, there is not enough RBD money to implement these improvements. Thus to build the
holistic resilience approach envisioned by the project, city agencies are having to try to find and cobble together
other sources of funds, from a variety of programs, often with no clearly viable sources available. To achieve the
comprehensive resilience vision called for by the proposal, the grantees will need to find other sources of funding
and other mechanisms (regulatory or incentives) to implement unfunded components and future phases of work.
Green vs. gray infrastructure solutions—To address interior drainage flooding, the city is exploring gray
infrastructure solutions like storage tanks and pumps. While gray infrastructure solutions (both for flood protection
and stormwater management) may be easier to implement from an engineering and design standpoint, they do
not provide the community with the same environmental and social co-benefits that are provided by using green
infrastructure and natural systems. Although the BIG U proposal did not sufficiently address interior drainage
needs, it did call for broad deployment of green infrastructure solutions across public housing campuses throughout
the project area because of the multiple benefits that could be provided by these types of interventions. For example,
building from the ideas generated in the BIG U proposal, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has
developed a plan to better manage stormwater on NYCHA campuses throughout the city. Adjacent to the ESCR
project, NYCHA proposes to open up public housing campuses to surrounding neighborhoods and install a suite of
green and gray interventions that would store or retain up to 8-inches of stormwater during a 24-hour rainfall event,
reducing flood risks on NYCHA campuses and in the surrounding area during heavy downpours. 7 Although Sandy
was mostly a storm-surge driven flood event, intense precipitation events are anticipated to become more frequent
and more intense with climate change in the New York region. The interventions proposed by NYCHA could
preemptively address threats that will become more pronounced in the future. These improvements would also
provide myriad co-benefits by making public housing campuses safer and more inviting for residents and neighbors;
providing recreational and green space; and using natural systems to manage stormwater, improve water quality,
and reduce urban heat islands. NYCHA, however, is experiencing difficulty identifying appropriate funding sources
to support these investments and these options are not being pursued as part of the ESCR project due to a lack of
RBD funds. Some of these social and environmental co-benefits may be lost in implementation of the project, if
green infrastructure is not pursued as a mechanism for managing stormwater.
37 Chapter 2: The Big U | Rebuilding with Resilience GEORGETOWN CLIMATE CENTER