The (inequitable) impact of rising tides on NYC

by Monica Hersher
Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI) at Pratt Institute

Rising sea levels and changing weather patterns mean an increasing area of New York City Is likely to flood.

The risk in these floodplains is serious.

1.9 million New Yorkers call the 2050 high risk floodplain home.

These New Yorkers live in residential neighborhoods that crowd the New York City coastline.

Across most of the city’s coast, tens of thousands of apartments per square mile are likely to flood in the next century. Yet contractors continue to build up these residential communities. In Brooklyn Community District No. 2, the area that contains Williamsburg and Greenpoint, 20,000 new residential units have been constructed in the past decade. These neighborhoods, and the flood risk in them, are only projected to continue to grow.

Approximately 41,000 public housing units fall in these high risk coastal neighborhoods.

The environmental threat to affordable housing is particularly serious in Manhattan, where almost all NYCHA buildings in the southern half of the peninsula are likely to flood. Large NYCHA complexes in Coney Island, Canarsie, Red Hook, and the Rockaway region are also compromised. Apart from complexes available in central Brooklyn, NYCHA residents in the floodplain would need to relocate to northern Manhattan, the Bronx, or eastern Queens to stay within public housing. This could have a serious impact on job prospects and commuting time.

Many of the residents that live in and around NYCHA buildings earn less than 50K a year.

Some of the densest residential neighborhoods in the high risk floodplain are also the poorest: the Lower East Side, Chinatown, East Harlem, and Inwood in Manhattan; Fort Greene, Astoria, Coney Island, and the Williamsburg/Bedford junction in Brooklyn; Port Morris, Soundview, and Crotona Park in the Bronx; and Flushing and the eastern half of the Rockaway peninsula in Queens. Eleven out these thirteen areas contain NYCHA buildings. Tens of thousands of low-income New Yorkers also live in other less dense, non-NYCHA neighborhoods. These include College Point in Queens, Co-op City in the Bronx, Sunnyside in Brooklyn, and Charlestown, New Brighton, and St. George in Staten Island.

This is important because economic strain impedes environmental resilience. A limited income can make it more difficult to do things like buy flood insurance, evacuate, and relocate.

The economic burden is not shared equally.

Overall the majority of floodplain residents are White, but Black New Yorkers still shoulder a disproportionately high share of the burden in some areas. They also earn less.

RAMP works with a variety of community based groups to reasearch the adverse effects of environmental change in New York. The map below show the diverse landscape of organizations in New York.