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The image is from the New York panorama created for the Word's Fair 1964 and last updated in 1992. The Queens Museum has left the World Trade Center twin towers in place despite the tragedy of 9/11/2001

Rutgers University-Newark Professor Jason Barr said deadly flooding will happen more often and working-class people will be cut off from jobs if dramatic action isn’t taken. 

He understands the cynicism toward his project, but said the time for design for action is now.

“Doing nothing is much more expensive than doing a big project,” he said.

“In all climate change adaptation, we are going to be weighing the cost of inaction versus the cost of action,” Barr said.

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The image is from the New York panorama created for the Word's Fair 1964 and last updated in 1992. The Queens Museum has left the World Trade Center twin towers in place despite the tragedy of 9/11/2001

“Of course, I want some buildings for billionaires — that would raise the money to help subsidize the affordable housing,” said Rutgers University-Newark Professor Jason Barr. 

“But an authority would own the land and have full control of the long-term leases. That would allow large tracks devoted to middle- or low-income housing.”

When the remnants of Ida dumped heavy rain on greater New York, dozens of people lost their lives and subway lines — the lifeblood of commerce in the city — were heavily damaged by flooding. 

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The image is from the New York panorama created for the Word's Fair 1964 and last updated in 1992. The Queens Museum has left the World Trade Center twin towers in place despite the tragedy of 9/11/2001

New York city has started a major climate resiliency project along Manhattan to help reduce future flood risk.

“If we’re going to spend billions of dollars on this, why not create more of the most valuable real estate in the world?” Rutgers University-Newark Professor Jason Barr asked.

Barr said the value of the new land could leverage a new subway line, parks, infrastructure and most important of all — mixed-use housing with a strong percentage of it affordable.

 Barr has heard much “it can’t be done” skepticism and incorrect claims that the vision would end up as a giveaway to billionaires.

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“New York started in Lower Manhattan and it expanded the shoreline many times there, from the time the British took over. 

Other cities are doing large infill projects. 

Hong Kong, suffering from housing affordability and being land constrained, is doing 2.5 times my suggestion — 1,700 hectares,” said, Rutgers University-Newark Professor Jason Barr, whose vision for New Mannahatta includes absorbing Governor’s Island.

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While some communities’ answer to resiliency will include retreat, Rutgers University-Newark Professor Jason Barr’s answer for New York is a resounding — EXPAND! 

The economist created quite a stir when his January 2022 New York Times Op-Ed urged incoming Mayor Eric Adams to expand Lower Manhattan substantially by reclaiming land — 1,760 acres to be exact — from New York Harbor. 

Barr suggests the city’s housing crisis could be answered with 250,000 new residences — a good chunk affordable.

Barr, who points out that New York has a history of expanding by expanding the shoreline, even has a name for his new city tacked onto the city — New Mannahatta.

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“After years of planning, some 40 homeowners will have the opportunity to move to the new community that they’ve named Audubon Estates,” the Advocate reported, noting many Pecan Acres residents are low- to moderate-income and moved to the area after previously living on nearby sharecropping land.

The new town is about two miles from the oft-deluged Pecan Acres.

Once all residents move from Pecan Acres, the area will be restored to a wetland that could help mitigate regional flooding.The Advocate reported that Pecan Acres was built in the late ‘60s and ‘70s on a parish dumpsite that previously was low-lying swampland, making it vulnerable to floods. 

Many in the neighborhood couldn’t afford flood insurance, which is needed to obtain federal grants for flood repairs.

Efforts to curb flooding in the Baton Rouge-area town by installing pumps and other measures failed.

The inability of pumps and infrastructure to resolve flooding could be a canary in the coal mine warning that retreat could be the only ultimate solution in below or barely above sea level cities in Florida and Louisiana.

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In Louisiana, where sea level rise is erasing land each year, relocation of entire cities is an option. 

In early 2021, the state Community Development Department broke ground on a 22.5-acre plot aimed at resettling people from a flood-plagued neighborhood that earned the nickname “Flood City.”

The Advocate newspaper in Baton Rouge reported that the small community of Pecan Acres has flooded 17 times in the past 30 years. 

The state earmarked about $19.4 million for the resettlement effort, funded through a mix of federal and state grants used for disaster and relocation initiatives.

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“Instead of removing trees to construct — move the trees and/or build around them. Add more nature to your buildings — people in Italy are building vertical forests,” Aida Curtis observed.

“Use more nature-based solutions for flooding: permeable parking lots, invest in the public spaces around your projects and invest in renewable energy for your building.

Create wider sidewalks — permeable to store water, with the ability to support large trees to create shade.”

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“We came up with a series of hybrid solutions, nature based — that would add living shorelines, natural breakwaters, near-shore artificial reefs, and raised seawalls. It would add 39 acres of open park land for the citizens of Miami,” said Aida Curtis,

who also generated visuals of how bad the seawall would look — to further the argument for more equitable nature-based solutions.

Inland, Curtis’s landscape architecture and planning encourages development and other rules that truly create a sustainable network through all of Miami’s diverse communities.

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In Miami, Landscape Architect Aida Curtis, principal of Curtis+Rogers Design Studio, has been immersed in resilient design, decades before the city became synonymous with ground zero for climate disaster — 

both the slow variety from sea level rise and the immediate knockout punch from the killer winds and storm surge of increasingly frequent hurricanes. 

She stresses that mitigation can be beautiful and practical.

After Hurricane Irma, a federally funded study proposed a 10- to 30-foot-high floodwall that would run along the Miami’s picturesque bayfront spanning from downtown Miami, south across the Miami River (with floodgates) and to the Manhattan-like Brickell Area.

 Curtis’ firm was hired to illustrate alternatives to what most saw as a hideous wall.

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USGBC's David Abell said to become LEED certified, cities must assess their green and gray infrastructure and their relationship to equity.

“We help them mine data to ensure decisions are centered around equity. 

We want to ensure that communities historically left behind are addressed in all aspects of quality of life — including infrastructure investment,” he said.

USGBC's Hilari Varnadore said the USBGC also wants to make sure cities are working with diverse groups — so neighborhood solutions are tailored to the needs of the residents, not a top-down approach that often fails. 

The steps to LEED certification also make sure cities are working collaboratively with regional nonprofits and foundations capable of leveraging dollars with grant funding.

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“Houston and Billings, Mont., are very different places with different climates and population scales, but they are in the same group with each other,” 

the United States Green Building Council’s Hilari Varnadore said, noting that winning sustainable land-use, growth and building policies are exportable.

“In Hoboken, N.J., they came in on our pilot program and did major resilience work to mitigate flooding and storms.

They redid their waterfront. 

On the surface, it looks like parks and a beautiful urban space.

Beneath that is an amazing level of infrastructure to maintain their housing, commercial and viability against climate change.”

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The United States Green Building Council’s David Abell said Louisville, Ky., has worked with the National Institutes of Health to study how greenspace improves public health. 

The Green Heart Louisville initiative, also supported by The Nature Conservancy, looks at trees as medicine.

USGBC's Hilari Varnadore said the LEED for Cities program allows diverse cities and counties to share best practices for mitigating heat, flooding, storms and related climate issues while also tackling issues of socioeconomic and other inequalities.

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“The southwest is an area looking at heat,” said David Abell, senior manager, LEED for Cities at USGBC.

“One thing I’ve seen is a lot more urban tree master plans. 

In Phoenix [a LEED certified city,] they are planning a tree/ shade inventory. 

Cities are investing in sidewalks, shelters, connectivity — things people need to get to transit.”

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David Abell, senior manager, LEED for Cities at USGBC, said climate response can be as simple as adding more street trees and adding shaded bus shelters to make transit use more comfortable in extreme heat. 

He noted that Miami-Dade County, which has LEED Cities Gold certification, has a full-time heat officer to address issues in an area where the number of extreme heat days increases each year.

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The United States Green Building Council’s Hilari Varnadore said Orange County, Fla., which includes Orlando, has done an excellent job of color coding its areas of need.

She said the coding helps prioritize everything from economic intervention to infrastructure spending to focusing on climate adaptation in vulnerable areas.

“The countywide or citywide report identifies strengths and weaknesses. It helps steer land-use policy. 

Compact, mixed-use, transit-oriented development helps a community to be resilient against flooding and storms,” she said. 

“The LEED city accreditation process encourages reclaiming brownfields and measuring the energy performance of buildings — which can make a city more sustainable while addressing inequity.”

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“We require local governments to collect performance indicators: median household income, educational attainment, many other factors. 

They feed that and other data to see how they are doing. 

Then they analyze the socioeconomic data and map it out,” said Hilari Varnadore, USGBC’s vice president for Cities. 

“On a map it’s so obvious to see disparity and disinvestment.”

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The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) promotes sustainability through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green rating for everything from buildings to entire cities. 

The nonprofit’s LEED for Cities program encourages sustainable and resilient communities.

Hilari Varnadore, vice president for Cities, heads the USGBC’s efforts to certify entire cities, or counties, as LEED rated. 

More than 160 U.S. cities have qualified and one dozen international cities have gone through the process.

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The Congress for New Urbanism advocates for walkable, compact, mixed-used, transit-oriented communities. 

An article in its Public Square online magazine summarized the environmental benefits of walkable places, adapted from the “Cities Alive” report by Arup, a multinational engineering and design firm. 

The sustainable/resilient benefits include: reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, improving water management and urban microclimates, encouraging transportation that isn’t automobile-dependent and minimizing land use — 

because it is easier to focus adaptation infrastructure on compact development versus sprawl.

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“Should I elevate my home? 

Should I move away?

Should I vote for city bonds to elevate levies, to harden infrastructure? 

This helps shift climate change discussion from the emotional to the ‘what’s the cost of no action vs. the cost of action?’” said CoreLogic’s Tom Larsen.. 

“We can work for better building codes, micro levies, growth patterns. 

Analytics can help put climate science into the balance sheet — there’s a big loss coming from climate change, so how do we reduce that loss?”