Donovan Richards is the right leader to take on the climate crisis
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Councilmember Donovan Richards. Photo by Jeff Reed/City Council Photography
By Councilmember Justin Brannan
Eight years after Superstorm Sandy, we are still in awe of the destruction. The damage wrought by Sandy was immense. Nearly 20% of the city was flooded, decimating neighborhoods along New York City’s 520 miles of coastline where nearly 90,000 buildings were damaged, and more than 44 people died.
In New York City, everything from the World Trade Center and the FDR Drive to Flushing Meadows Park and LaGuardia Airport were built on foundations of landfill atop marshland. All of this creates very challenging environments for us to manage. That’s why even today, the MTA must pump over 10 million gallons of groundwater out of the subway every day to keep tracks and tunnels from flooding. Following Superstorm Sandy, the hardest hit areas of Manhattan were back up and running quickly. But for those of us in shoreline communities, many of which are working-class neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, recovery has taken years, and it is still ongoing.
Superstorm Sandy revealed just how vulnerable and unprepared we were for a storm of this magnitude. Donovan Richards and I were both elected to the City Council after the storm hit, and as we both represent shoreline communities, we had to deal with the aftermath. Donovan has rolled up his sleeves and met these challenges head on. He has built the Rockaways back with more affordable housing and over one billion dollars in infrastructure improvements while understanding that a storm of this magnitude will very likely be seen again in our lifetimes and so we must be prepared.
Many of the worst immediate effects of sea level rise are a result of poor city planning such as building public housing in difficult to access and easily flooded areas like Red Hook and the Rockaways. So much of our public housing and critical infrastructure, like our electricity and food distribution, are located in coastal areas that are at high risk. And things are only going to get worse for these areas if we don’t take action now. We cannot shrug our shoulders and punish working families and our most vulnerable for shortsighted city planning decisions made decades ago. According to FEMA, by 2050, more New Yorkers will be living in the 1% floodplain than residents of any other U.S. city. Using a high estimate of 6.5 feet of sea level rise by 2100, the fringes of Lower Manhattan and the South Bronx, sections of the North and East Shores of Staten Island, parts of Canarsie, and almost all of Broad Channel, Howard Beach, Brighton Beach, and the Rockaways would be inundated by high tide on a daily basis. Daily. That means every single day.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also created other challenges in dealing with climate change and the impact on our communities. While carbon emissions have dropped 8% during the pandemic, partly due to stay-at-home orders, we certainly cannot rely on this drop to continue over the coming years. The pandemic has also put our city and state into a precarious financial situation that will make recovery even more difficult should additional storms or disasters arrive here in quick succession.
However, even eight years later nothing like a comprehensive strategy exists today, and when defense is carried out piecemeal, it invariably reproduces the city’s inequalities by protecting wealthy areas first. There is a complicated nexus of players and projects but little cohesion, as no one single agency handles flooding in NY and there are no centralized resiliency funding structures. Instead we must deal with bureaucracies like FEMA, HUD, the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, and the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency – agencies that dole out money on a project-by-project basis.
We need leaders in office who are going to take on these environmental concerns and lead our city so that when the next storm happens, we are prepared. It’s going to take a blend of hard and soft techniques in order to protect ourselves. Hard barriers such as seawalls, like the proposed Staten Island East Shore, will be important, but they can cause erosion and can fail. We will also need soft barriers like living breakwaters that absorb storm surge with oyster reefs.
In addition to fortification, we will have to make the difficult decisions of managed retreats, such as the buyouts that took place in Staten Island’s Oakwood Beach. This requires us as elected officials to consult with community members more closely about the needs of their neighborhoods throughout the flood mitigation planning process. But, resiliency measures alone will not solve the problem, as such measures must be done in tandem with climate change reduction measures and curbing carbon emissions. None of this stuff happens in a silo and all of it calls for a holistic approach.
New York’s flood-prone neighborhoods are largely working and middle class. Climate change will expose the consequences of overdevelopment and neglect of the coasts, of environmental racism and displacement, and of our economic and cultural reliance on our coasts and waterways.
As we work to mitigate the risks of climate change, it is imperative that we elected leaders like Donovan Richards who understand not only the immensity of the challenges of rising tides but the critical importance of environmental justice to protect all of the city's people. Donovan knows what it’s like to face these challenges because he’s done so for the past 8 years, and I know he will continue to take on these issues with the partnership and meaningful involvement of the vulnerable flood-prone communities most affected by climate change.
Councilmember Justin Brannan represents parts of Brooklyn and is chair of the Committee on Resiliency and Waterfronts
