Resilience Special Assessments for Housing Security: a Model for Mitigating Climate and Environmental Gentrification in New York City

Resilience Special Assessments for Housing Security: A Model for Mitigating Climate and Environmental Gentrification in New York City

by Stephen Migliore Erdman

B.A. Urban Studies and Visual Arts Fordham University, 2013

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER IN CITY PLANNING AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

MAY 2020

The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.

Signature of Author:______Department of Urban Studies and Planning May 20, 2020

Certified by:______Devin Michelle Bunten Assistant Professor of Urban Economics and Housing Thesis Supervisor

Accepted by:______Ceasar McDowell Professor of the Practice Chair, MCP Committee

Resilience Special Assessments for Housing Security: A Model for Mitigating Climate and Environmental Gentrification in New York City

By Stephen Erdman

Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 20, 2020 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master in City Planning

Abstract

Government spending will need to exceed billions of dollars in the coming years to protect New York City’s shores from climate-related storm surges and sea level rise. Calls for these resources to advance social justice alongside climate resilience have grown in recent policy dialogues as climate change threatens to worsen racial and economic exclusion in a city that is already severely stratified. Yet investing in adaptation in expensive neighborhoods with transit access, job opportunities, and high-performing schools may further exclude low-income people and people of color by preserving or exacerbating high housing rents. Likewise, similar investments in currently affordable neighborhoods risk triggering environmental gentrification and displacement. Given these constraints of a market-based property regime, how can cities protect communities from climate risk while ensuring that all people have access to high opportunity, resilient neighborhoods?

This paper argues that special assessments, a value capture tool, could extract resources from private property owners benefiting from public investments in climate adaptation to pay for an expanded supply of permanently affordable housing that will facilitate low-income residents’ long-term occupancy of climate-fortified areas. The paper provides a legal justification for this approach and a framework for how such special assessments in New York could be administered and calculated. Preliminary estimates based on these calculations suggest that special assessments could generate substantial new resources for the mass production of affordable housing. Such a prospect is reason for policymakers to explore implementing special assessments or using them as leverage when seeking to affirmatively further fair housing in communities historically resistant to such efforts. Likewise, this framework could amplify the movement for property tax reform in New York City, or otherwise support efforts to garner the resources and political will needed for bold climate and housing justice action.

Thesis Supervisor: Devin Michelle Bunten, PhD Title: Assistant Professor of Urban Economics and Housing

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Devin Michelle Bunten, my thesis adviser, for her wisdom, patience, and sense of humor, all of which was crucial as I reworked the arguments, calculations, and drafts that went into this final product. I am also grateful for the thoughtful feedback that Jesse Keenan and Zachary Lamb, my thesis readers, provided both at the early stages of my research process, and as this paper took its final form. Likewise, I owe thanks to Lawrence Vale and Justin Steil for their helpful input as I developed the initial ideas for this paper.

Thesis Readers Jesse Keenan, Ph.D., J.D., LL.M. Zachary Lamb, Ph.D., MArch Associate Professor of Real Estate Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning Tulane University Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Table of Contents

Abstract 2

Acknowledgements 3

List of Acronyms 5

Introduction 7

New York City and the Climate Crisis at Hand 10

The Dual Threat of Environmental and Climate Gentrification 14

NYC Policy Responses to Environmental and Climate Gentrification 18

Towards Transformative Climate Adaptation Policy: From Design to Housing 24

Case Studies: Adaptation Investments and the Question of Housing 27 Asbury Park, New Jersey 27 Coney Island, Brooklyn 30

Value Capture and Adaptation Investments 34

Resilience Infrastructure Special Assessments for Affordable Housing (RISAHs) 38

How Might RISAHs Be Implemented in New York? 41 Defining the Assessment District 41 Establishing the Assessment District 41 Calculating the Property Value Increase Associated with Adaptation Investments 43 Levying the Assessment: 180 Water Street 45 Justifying the Assessment Levied 52 Spending Assessment Revenues on Housing 54

Operationalizing RISAHs: Additional Considerations and the Role of Design 56 Designing for Density 56 Spatial Considerations of RISAH Districts 58

Replicability and Wisdom of Special Assessments 59

Conclusion: What about Property Taxes? 61

References 63

List of Acronyms

BID Business Improvement District CEQR City Environmental Quality Review CLT Community Land Trust DOF New York City Department of Finance EDC New York City Economic Development Corporation FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency FONSI Finding of No Significant Impact HNY Housing New York: A Five Borough, 10-year Plan HPD New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development LIHTC Low Income Housing Tax Credit MIH Mandatory Inclusionary Housing NFIP National Flood Insurance Program NPV Net Present Value NYC-EJA New York City Environmental Justice Alliance RISAH Resilience Infrastructure Special Assessment for Affordable Housing RPA Regional Plan Association SAD Special Assessment District SEQRA State Environmental Quality Review Act USACE U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ZQA Zoning for Quality and Affordability

1 A beautifully sustainable city that is the playground of the rich doesn’t work for us.

—New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, 2015

Whenever any environmental amenities actually do get put in our communities, they 2 are being put in there because we are being displaced...

—UPROSE Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre, 2015

1 Flegenheimer, M. (2015, April 21). New York City’s environment program will focus on income inequality. The New York Times. 2 Environmental Justice Alliance says de Blasio’s OneNYC plan falls short in combating climate change. (2016, April 5). WPIX.

Introduction

Unabated warming has made inevitable billions of dollars of spending to protect New York City's shores from the worst effects of climate-related sea level rise and storm surge inundation. The city has already pledged $28 billion towards climate adaptation 3 projects, and another $2 billion annually is expected to be necessary to fortify its infrastructure alone (Leroy and Wiles, 2020). Preliminary analyses suggest $36 billion or more might be needed to more fully prevent the many communities within the New 4 York Harbor region from being washed away. Concerns that all of this money is spent well – that it advances social justice alongside climate resilience – have grown as climate change threatens to worsen racial and economic exclusion in a city that is already severely stratified. Regional planning organizations have called for outer-borough communities to receive as much protection as wealthy Manhattan 5 neighborhoods, elected officials have demanded that adaptation resources correct for 6 chronic disinvestment in communities of color, and grassroots environmental groups have urged that ‘no neighborhood be left behind’ as the city’s resilience agenda 7 advances.

Yet simply investing in adaptation in lower income communities risks gentrifying them. Since the early 2000s, urban scholars have theorized that park upgrades have begotten an influx of wealthy, white residents in Harlem, western Brooklyn, and other historically low-income communities of color in New York (Checker, 2011; Pearsall 2012). Fears that environmental remediation and investments in sustainability have constituted a “green growth machine” that primarily serves the real estate interests of the ultra-wealthy (Gould and Lewis, 2018) have been substantiated by empirical evidence tying green development to the displacement of the poor (Rigolon and Nemeth, 2018). Seawalls, landscaped berms, flood gates, and other forms of climate adaptation and resilience infrastructure pose similar risks, as the rich may increasingly flock to areas protected by these investments (Keenan, Hill, and Gumber, 2018). Immense expenditures on adaptation might result in a “fortress urbanism” (Davis, 1990) that excludes low income people and people of color from “ecologically secure premium enclaves” (Hodson and Marvin, 2010). Given the constraints of a

3 According to the NYC Hazard Mitigation Tool webpage. 4 New York-New Jersey harbor and tributaries coastal storm risk management interim report. (2019). US Army Corps of Engineers. 5 Equitable adaptation: Building climate change adaptation capacity for Make the Road NY and Central Queens. (2019). Regional Plan Association. 6 March 12, & 2020. (n.d.). Speaker Corey Johnson issues sustainability report on concrete steps the city can take to adapt to and mitigate climate change. 7 NYC climate justice agenda. (2016). New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.

market-based property regime, how can cities protect vulnerable communities from climate risk while also ensuring that marginalized people are not displaced from their existing homes or have access to high opportunity, climate-fortified neighborhoods?

In this paper, I argue that special assessments, a value capture tool, could be used to extract resources from private property owners benefitting from public investments in climate adaptation to pay for an expanded supply of permanently affordable housing that will help ensure low-income residents’ long-term occupancy of climate-fortified areas. In expensive neighborhoods with transit access, job opportunities, and high-performing schools, I argue that adaptation investments will further exclude low-income people by preserving or exacerbating cost-prohibitive housing rents. Likewise, in currently affordable neighborhoods, investments meant to protect existing residents from climate vulnerability might displace them by triggering gentrification. I assert that the expansion of income-restricted, affordable housing development alongside adaptation investments would increase low-income residents’ access to housing opportunities in the former scenario, and ensure their continued housing tenure in the latter. To pay for this crucial influx of affordable housing stock, I propose using the proceeds from special assessments levied in conjunction with adaptation investments. I offer legal, structural, and economic justification for such an approach, providing a framework that New York and other coastal cities could incorporate into their climate adaptation policy arsenals.

This strategy rests upon the work of those already grappling with similar questions surrounding “equitable resilience” (Matin, Forrestor, and Ensor, 2018). Prior literature suggests that designers can reduce the risk of environmental gentrification by ensuring robust community engagement (Dixon, et al., 2015) or by cooperating with cities to attenuate projects’ designs so that they are “just green enough” and therefore less appealing to wealthy newcomers (Curran and Hamilton, 2012 and 2017). I offer an analysis of the limitations of applying this framework to adaptation investments and propose that designer-led community engagement can help engender the density increases and spatial analysis needed to facilitate the substantial production of new affordable housing.

Scholars and activists are increasingly urging cities to increase anti-displacement services and affordable housing development alongside adaptation investments (Vale et al., 2014; Anguelovski, et al. 2019; Cohen, 2019; Brennan, Mehta, and Steil, 2020). I affirm the importance of this strategy, both as a way of ensuring that low-income people enjoy housing security in the face of climate change and as a coalition-building opportunity that could help garner the political support required for bold climate and

housing justice action. Furthermore, I offer a specific way to amass the resources needed to pay for more affordable housing against the backdrop of chronic underfunding of low-income housing programs and the ballooning costs of resilience infrastructure.

In response to this scarcity of resources, some literature has recently recommended that cities consider using value capture strategies to pay for climate adaptation. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2020) specifically suggests that special assessments could extract resources from private property owners projected to benefit from resilience infrastructure to help pay for the infrastructure itself. I build upon this idea by offering a framework for how such special assessments might be calculated and administered in New York. I also provide a rough sketch of the structural and legal mechanisms that could justify using proceeds from these assessments to pay for affordable housing development in climate-fortified areas.

To develop this policy framework, this paper proceeds as follows: The first section summarizes the threat climate change poses to New York City and the recent history of the city’s climate policy. The second and third sections consider how the theories of environmental and climate gentrification apply to New York and how recent policy dialogues have engaged with these issues. The fourth section argues that a thorough response to climate and environmental gentrification requires expanded affordable housing production to accompany adaptation investments. The fifth section offers two contrasting case studies: one profiles how a resilience strategy defined by designer-led community engagement that failed to center affordable housing production has left Asbury Park, New Jersey, vulnerable to climate and environmental gentrification. The other provides insight into how public investments in adaptation helped leverage private resources for affordable housing development in Coney Island, New York, fostering a more holistic resilience approach. In the sixth and seventh sections, lessons from these case studies serve as a lens through which to envision how value capture mechanisms, such as special assessments, could be used to marry resilience infrastructure with affordable housing development. The eighth section provides an overview of the legal framework such a policy approach might rest upon, as well as a basic structure for how special assessments might be calculated, implemented, and used to pay for affordable housing. The ninth section considers the role of design in operationalizing special assessments and the tenth section weighs the replicability and wisdom of this policy approach. By proposing that special assessments create an intrinsic tie between adaptation spending and the mass production of deeply affordable housing, the paper suggests a new approach New York City might pursue to achieve greater economic, racial, and environmental justice in tandem with each other.

New York City and the Climate Crisis at Hand

Climate change presents a unique challenge for U.S. coastal cities, whose housing markets are among the tightest in the nation. More than 127 million people, or nearly 40 percent of the United States’ total population, live in coastal counties. Almost a third of these residents are at risk of direct displacement due to climate-induced sea level rise over the next 80 years, and nearly half are considered particularly vulnerable due 8 to their age, lack of English-language proficiency, or low incomes. Severely rent-burdened households are also disproportionately concentrated on the country’s coasts, with coastal cities boasting the highest housing costs in the nation.

Additionally, since 1980, the U.S. has sustained more than a trillion dollars worth of climate-related property damage due to flooding and tropical storms alone (Smith, 2020). This number is set to grow as migration to the coasts and associated development continues in the near term, and the frequency and severity of storms intensify in the long term. Coastal cities face the mammoth challenge of coordinating an ongoing response to these environmental and housing crises, as well as figuring out how to pay for it. Given the ongoing uncertainty of federal support for adaptation investments, state and local governments may struggle to come up with resources, especially in places like New York that are subject to tax expenditure limits and 9 balanced budget statutes. While the federal government is not subject to such requirements, its support for adaptation investments has proven unreliable. For instance, in 2020 the Trump administration “indefinitely postponed” further work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the New York-New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries Coastal Storm Risk Management project, the most comprehensive planning effort for 10 major adaptation investments in the New York metropolitan region. The scope and lengthy timelines of major resilience infrastructure projects leave their execution vulnerable to vacillating government priorities and perennial financing constraints.

The immediate and lingering destruction of Hurricane Sandy, which reached the southern coast of New Jersey in late October 2012 before it struck New York, offers a bleak preview of what the future might hold for the New York metropolitan region as its climate-related hazards intensify in the coming years. The storm destroyed at least 650,000 homes, causing up to $50 billion in damages, $19 billion of which was in New

8 National Coastal Population Report: Population Trends from 1970-2020. (2013). National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 9 More information on New York State’s budget process can be found at the Division of the Budget’s The Budget Process webpage. 10 Barnard, A. (2020, February 25). After Trump mocks a sea wall in New York, plan is abruptly shelved. The New York Times.

York City alone. The city experienced record storm surges, the worst of which rose more than 10 feet above ground level, inundating 17% of land within the five boroughs and claiming the lives of 44 city residents (Blake et al., 2013). While the city has since 11 coordinated the rebuilding and elevation of over 1,300 homes, approved flood 12 resilience zoning text amendments to regulate new development, and bought out and 13 relocated 800 of the most vulnerable households, much of the city remains susceptible to subsequent disasters (Koslov, 2016).

Elected officials in New York have enacted significant policies in recent years to reduce this vulnerability through climate change mitigation efforts. Beginning in 2007, the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a “Carbon Challenge” that urged the city’s universities and hospitals to commit to reducing their greenhouse gas 14 emissions by 30% in ten years. In April of 2019, that voluntary program morphed into a landmark package of six climate mitigation bills known together as the Climate Mobilization Act. Local Law 97, the centerpiece of the measures, was widely 15 celebrated among both local and national environmental advocacy groups for 16 requiring most large NYC buildings to reduce their emissions by 40% by 2030. Several months later, the New York State Senate passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (popularly known as “New York’s Green New Deal”), a set of complementary mitigation laws requiring the State to achieve net-zero emissions by 17 2050. In addition to these major legislative milestones, New York City has attempted to implement other mitigation strategies, such as increasing development density near 18 19 transit hubs, expanding bicycle lanes and pedestrian plazas, and instituting 20 congestion pricing in Manhattan, all policies aimed, in part, at reducing emissions

11 The Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery has coordinated state, local, and federal funds to assist over 12,500 Sandy-affected households through the various tools of its Build it Back Program. For more information, see the New York City Office of Housing Recovery webpage. 12 New York City adopted emergency flood resiliency zoning provisions in 2013 and 2015 and began the formal process of adopting permanent zoning text amendments in 2019. For more information, see the NYC Department of City Planning’s resilience zoning webpage. 13 See the New York City Office of Housing Recovery webpage. 14 New York City Mayor’s Carbon Challenge Progress Report. (2013). The City of New York. 15 Spivack, C. (2019, October 4). East Side Coastal Resiliency project moves forward, but concerns linger. Curbed NY. 16 For a summary of the legislation, see Climate Mobilization Act. (2019). New York City Mayor’s Office of Sustainability . 17 The full legislation is available at NY State senate bill s6599. (2019, June 18). NY State Senate. 18 For an overview of these transit-oriented development efforts, see Kober, E. (2018). Housing the next million new yorkers near transit. NYU Wagner Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management. 19 An overview is available at the NYC Department of Transportation Vision Zero Scorecard webpage. 20 Although NYS approved congestion pricing in March of 2019, implementation is currently uncertain due to pending review by the Federal Highway Administration. See Goldbaum, C., & Hu, W. (2020, February 25). Could the Trump administration block congestion pricing in New York? The New York Times.

from automobiles. Yet without federal and international cooperation, local mitigation measures will do little to protect New York City from the worst effects of climate change. Even if every country adhered to the pledged goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement, projections show that greenhouse gas emissions likely will still lead to an average global sea level rise of nearly 1.5 feet by 2100 and 3.5 feet by 2300 (Nauels, et. al 2019).

Given the all-but-certain scenario of a wetter New York in the coming decades, the city has committed to a slew of climate adaptation projects to insulate its neighborhoods from more frequent disasters. In fact, according to the city’s 2019 Hazard Mitigation web tool, since 2014 the city has pledged over $28 billion to fund hundreds of completed, planned, and ongoing adaptation projects, including those intended to 21 address coastal storms and erosion, flooding, and other impacts of severe weather. These projects range from the city-wide construction of curbside bioswales for stormwater runoff management to neighborhood-specific adaptation plans, such as the city’s Resilient Edgemere Community Plan, which has deployed buyouts, house elevations, a constructed berm, and other strategies to protect a low-income 22 community of color ravaged by Hurricane Sandy from future climate disasters.

Of all of these many initiatives, the East Side and Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency projects are perhaps the city’s highest-profile adaptation efforts so far. With early roots 23 in the city’s 2011 Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, these projects got a boost in 2013 when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced its Rebuild by Design competition to solicit innovative resilience infrastructure proposals in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. One of the winning proposals, dubbed “The Big U,” put forward conceptual designs for a 10-mile system of landscaped berms and other protective features that would wrap from 57th Street on Manhattan’s West Side around 24 to 42nd Street on its East Side. With $1.45 billion of federal and local financing in place, portions of the (drastically redesigned) project are now moving forward, with a 2.5-mile stretch adjacent to the Lower East Side neighborhood (known as the “East 25 Side Resiliency Project”) receiving City Council approval in November of 2019.

21 According to the NYC Hazard Mitigation Tool webpage. 22 For the city’s full report, see the Resilient Edgemere community plan. (2015). New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. 23 For the full report, see Vision 2020: NYC comprehensive waterfront plan. (2011). New York City Department of City Planning. 24 BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), One Architecture, Starr Whitehouse, James Lima Planning + Development, Green Shield Ecology, AEA Consulting, Level Agency for Infrastructure, ARCADIS, and Buro Happold comprised the original winning team that proposed the Big U. For more information, see NYC: The Big U. Rebuild by Design webpage. 25 For more information see the city’s East Side Resiliency Project webpage.

Similarly, in March of 2019, the city’s Economic Development Corporation released the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency Study, which has provided initial plans for developing four additional portions of the “U” stretching from the northern edge of Battery Park City to the southern end of the East Side Resiliency Project.

An early rendering of the East Side Resiliency Project, as envisioned by Bjarke Ingels Group and the Rebuild by Design team. Source: Bjarke Ingels Group

An updated rendering of the East Side Resiliency Project used in public engagement materials in 2019. Source: NYC Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency

The Dual Threat of Environmental and Climate Gentrification

The implementation of these major public works projects has not been without controversy. As the East Side Resiliency Project advanced towards approval last fall, elected officials and local groups asserted that the city’s sudden, dramatic revisions to the project’s design lacked transparency, scrapped years of community collaboration, 26 and unnecessarily sacrificed existing trees and natural resources. While the de Blasio administration defended the changes as necessary for the project’s feasibility and 27 timely completion, the plan’s revisions have nonetheless fueled skepticism of the project. Additionally, beginning with the earliest iterations of the project more than a decade ago, community groups worried that parks development on the East River waterfront might exacerbate gentrification and housing displacement in the Lower East Side neighborhood. At the time, Hester Street (HST) and Organizing & Uniting

26 Spivack, C. (2019, October 4). East Side Coastal Resiliency project moves forward, but concerns linger. Curbed NY. 27 See Fact sheet: De Blasio administration announces faster, updated plan for east side coastal resiliency. (2018, September 28). The Official Website of the City of New York.

Residents (O.U.R.) were among the grassroots organizations that came together to issue “A People’s Plan for the East River Waterfront,” which expressed community concerns that the new park might spark high-end amenities and development that would make existing low-income residents feel out of place in their neighborhood, if 28 not lead to their displacement outright.

These anxieties reflect a persistent concern in New York City regarding environmental gentrification. Environmental gentrification is the theory that “green” and “sustainable” projects, such as brownfield remediation, waterfront reclamation, and public park upgrades often trigger neighborhood change and associated property appreciation at the expense of low-income renters. Checker (2011) coined the term to describe a trend of city-sponsored parks upgrades in Harlem that seemingly favored the interests of developers and property owners over the input of existing residents. Pearsall (2012) argues that park development and resilience initiatives, including the development of Brooklyn Bridge Park, also amplified gentrification in western Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

While many of New York’s recent landscape projects have been widely celebrated for contributing to a “greening” renaissance in the city that has provided recreational and economic benefits to its residents (Song, 2013; Witty and Krogius, 2016), environmental gentrification critiques have intensified in recent years. The High Line, the city’s internationally acclaimed linear park, has been criticized for contributing to the whitewashing of the city, in that the racial makeup of its users does not reflect the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood, the borough, or the city as a whole (Reichel, 2016). Gould and Lewis (2018) even argue that green development efforts in Gowanus, Brooklyn, have constituted a “green growth machine” that co-opts public support for sustainability to remediate and package land for the consumption of a wealthy, largely white, elite.

Rigolon and Nemeth (2019) offer empirical evidence that supports these qualitative accounts of environmental gentrification in New York City, finding that the introduction of parks, especially linear parks and those located close to a city’s downtown, are predictors of gentrification. Analysis of major urban landscape and resiliency projects elsewhere in the U.S., such as the Beltline in Atlanta, Georgia (Immergluck and Balan, 2018) and green stormwater interventions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (Anguelovski, et al., 2019), also affirm the phenomenon of environmental gentrification observed in New York City. The recent history of major greening projects in the city coupled with

28 A people’s plan for the east river waterfront. (2009). O.U.R. Waterfront Coalition.

mounting pressures within its housing market has put the risk of environmental gentrification on the minds of many New Yorkers, animating the current discourse surrounding resilience infrastructure.

Climate change will only compound the issue. A growing body of research suggests that climate change will intensify existing housing market constraints, potentially worsening a housing crisis that has already plagued many New Yorkers. Bunten and Kahn (2017) theorize that sea level rise might intensify income stratification of neighborhoods as richer households with the resources to insulate themselves from climate risk continue to flock to desirable coastal areas, while poorer households seek refuge in cheaper, inland communities. Keenan, Hill, and Gumber (2018) refer to this possibility as the “cost burden pathway” towards “climate gentrification.” They also define two alternative modes through which sea level rise might alter property values and displace low-income residents. Through the “superior investment pathway,” resilient neighborhoods (such as those at higher elevations) may appreciate more dramatically relative to nearby vulnerable neighborhoods (such as those at lower elevations). In coastal cities where pricey waterfront property is most at risk of inundation, residents of cheaper, inland areas may find themselves priced out of their homes as demand for dry land increases. Similarly, through the “Resilience Investment Pathway” climate fortifications, such as seawalls, may render previously affordable neighborhoods “superior investments,” and contribute to environmental gentrification.

The way climate gentrification unfolds in New York will be shaped in part by unavoidable decisions made regarding which vulnerable areas will be saved and which will not. New York City has already begun to confront these choices. While some neighborhoods, such as those in Lower Manhattan, have been earmarked for resilience infrastructure, others are being bought out, demolished, and allowed to return to a natural state before eventually succumbing to rising waters. Early examples of this approach of “planned retreat” in the city have been largely voluntary, such as Staten Island’s Ocean Breeze and Oakwood Beach’s participation in the New York State buyout program (Koslov, 2016).

Yet looming risk and scarce resources are likely to invite a future where neighborhood condemnation is forced upon some communities. Congress has typically appropriated between five and seven billion dollars annually to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency charged with planning and implementing major resilience infrastructure, including a network of potential projects in the New York metropolitan region. Yet, the agency has a backlog of $98 billion worth of projects nationally, posing

29 a funding gap that even wealthy cities like New York will likely struggle to close. Cities may soon find themselves devising criteria for prioritizing communities for fortification, given their inability to protect everyone (Hodson and Marvin, 2009).

Teicher (2019) notes that critiques of the implementation of Oscar Newman's theories of “defensible space” (Newman, 1972 and 1995) may apply to major adaptation projects, as notions of “fortress urbanism” (Davis, 1990) reemerge due to the rationing of resilience infrastructure. Just as Los Angeles and other cities drew upon Newman’s Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design system to exclude low-income people from revitalized downtowns, the construction of landscaped flood berms with all of the trappings of 21st-century urbanism could signal to low income people and people of color that they are not welcome, or even help price them out of fortified communities altogether. The resulting “ecologically secure premium enclaves” (Hodson and Marvin, 2010) might provide climate security for privileged residents but do little for the needs of the most vulnerable who have been excluded.

These concerns align with literature that argues for expanding the notion of ecological and physical resilience to address unequal social vulnerabilities that climate change might worsen. As cities create hardier waterfront landscapes, streetscapes, and building stock, they must also ensure that their people are able to “bounce back” from the layered shocks of climate disaster (Adger, 2000; Pelling, 2003). Holistic resilience, therefore, considers “social-ecological systems” as interconnected and seeks to fortify them to retain their collective functionality in the face of unexpected threats (Folke, Hahn, Olsson, and Norberg, 2005).

Yet this connection between ecological and social resilience often suffers from conceptual vagueness due to resilience’s status as a “boundary object,” or concept that is used in loosely related ways across multiple, divergent disciplines (Brand, Simon, and Jax 2007; Vale, 2013). Consequently, urban resilience measures rooted in the disciplines of engineering and ecology often emphasize cities’ physical fortification but fail to ensure that marginalized people are as equipped as others to withstand the challenges of climate change (Vale, 2013). Conversely, “equitable resilience” should take the pursuit of social justice as its starting point and foster social-ecological systems that benefit all, but especially the most vulnerable (Matin, Forrestor, and Ensor, 2018).

29 Army Corps of Engineers: FY2020 appropriations. (2019). Congressional Research Service.

NYC Policy Responses to Environmental and Climate Gentrification

Translating the ideals of equitable resilience into clear policy objectives that address climate and environmental gentrification has remained elusive. Even as considerations of environmental and climate gentrification have expanded in the literature, New York City has been slow to integrate such concerns into resilience policymaking. When the city released OneNYC, the de Blasio administration’s 30-year sustainability blueprint, the mayor announced that “Environmental sustainability and economic sustainability 30 have to walk hand in hand.” The plan itself proclaims to “demonstrate a model for inclusive growth and CLIMATE ACTION with a focus on...PROMOTING JUSTICE by recognizing, and repairing the damage caused by, historic oppression of communities of color, migrant communities, youth, and other frontline and marginalized communities.” Each of OneNYC’s eight goals and their 30 related initiatives have the stated objective of promoting a holistic vision of equitable resilience.

Yet neither the 2015 OneNYC plan nor its 2019 update refers to the risk of environmental or climate gentrification by name, or even in concept. While the plan firmly acknowledges the importance of promoting housing security, it does not articulate the unique challenges of achieving housing justice in a high cost, coastal city slated for major adaptation investments. Instead, its housing approach largely resembles the strategies of previous mayors, even though climate change has introduced new housing challenges that might warrant more incisive techniques. Even though OneNYC seeks to curb illegal displacement through serious commitments such as “guaranteeing legal counsel to all New Yorkers facing eviction by 2022” and 31 “creating a new office to coordinate anti-harassment efforts,” the many New Yorkers who do not live in rent-stabilized apartments remain susceptible to entirely legal displacement, as landlords simply raise rents in pace with market trends. Resilience infrastructure will potentially accelerate this kind of displacement unless it is paired with more forceful anti-displacement efforts.

OneNYC confronts this challenge by parroting the affordable housing commitments the administration had already made in its Housing New York plan (HNY), which it released several months before OneNYC. HNY follows the tradition upheld by the city’s previous four mayors, who each issued formal targets for affordable housing production and preservation. The plan closely tracks the structure and substance of the Bloomberg administration’s New Housing Marketplace plan, which committed to the creation or

30 Flegenheimer, M. (2015, April 21). New York City’s environment program will focus on income inequality. The New York Times. 31 See page 11, OneNYC 2050: Building a strong and fair city. (2019). The City of New York.

32 preservation of 165,000 units of affordable housing in ten years. The de Blasio plan 33 ambitiously upped this target to 200,000 units in 10 years (and later, to 300,000 units 34 in 12 years), financing an average of 25,000 affordable units annually, a rate that has outpaced that of any previous mayor. The plan also promised that a greater proportion of these units would be affordable to households with low and extremely low incomes. So far, nearly 80% of the plan’s units, up from 68% under Bloomberg, were made affordable to households earning no more than 80% of the area median income 35 (Schwartz, 2019), which in New York City is currently $79,590 for a household of four.

Yet despite these expanded housing targets, nearly a third of renters in New York City—more than half a million households—continue to be severely rent-burdened (Schwartz, 2019), meaning they spend more than 50% of their gross incomes on rent. Likewise, more than 78,000 New Yorkers were homeless in January of 2019, a near 36 all-time-high for the city. Rents in New York continue to rise faster than wages (Long, 2017), forcing more and more low-income households to relocate, or risk eviction and homelessness due to missed rent payments. Critics of HNY assert that the plan does too little to address these staggering statistics, dedicating too few of its units to households with the lowest incomes who are most at risk of displacement and 37 homelessness.

32 NYC new housing marketplace plan. (2010). New York City Department of Housing Preservation 33 Housing New York: A five borough, ten year plan. (2014). New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. 34 Housing New York 2.0. (2017). New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. 35 HPD maintains an updated matrix of AMI brackets on its website. 36 According to the HUD 2019 Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Programs Point-in-Time Count conducted on 1/28/2019. This includes both sheltered and unsheltered individuals in the city. See HUD 2019 Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Programs Homeless Populations and Subpopulations—COC NY 600. (2019). U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 37 The Association for Neighborhood Housing Development has long pushed the de Blasio administration to create more units affordable to people at lower AMIs. See its recent report: Maximizing the public value of New York City- financed affordable housing. (2019, October 8). Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.

As of March 2020, more than 60,000 New Yorkers were sleeping in the city’s shelter system. Thousands more remained unsheltered. Source: Coalition for the Homeless

Additionally, it is unclear if merely adding HNY’s city-wide housing commitments onto OneNYC constitutes a sufficient response to the specific threats of environmental and climate gentrification. A growing number of housing advocates have begun to critique the unit-counting metrics central to HNY’s approach for valuing the total number of units produced above and beyond where the units are located, who the units serve, and what social problems the units help address. For example, the Citizens Housing Planning Council, one of the city’s leading housing think tanks, has begun to urge 2021 mayoral candidates to embrace housing goals with policy objectives sharper than unit counts, such as improving New Yorkers’ health outcomes or reducing racial inequities. 38 In a similar vein, housing strategies tailored more narrowly than those included in HNY and OneNYC could better ensure that adaptation investments do not displace or exclude people from specific places feeling the acute effects of neighborhood change.

New York City environmental justice advocates underscore these concerns that HNY and OneNYC fail to meaningfully address the worst effects of climate and environmental gentrification. Upon the plan’s release, Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn's oldest Latino community-based organization

38 A new lens for NYC’s housing plan. (2020, February 9). CHPC New York.

39 and an active member of the city’s Just Transition movement, remarked, "Whenever any environmental amenities actually do get put in our communities, they are being put in there because we are being displaced, and they are being put in there to support the kind of growth that is really that gentrification growth, but not to address the needs of 40 the most vulnerable in New York City.”

Yeampierre’s concerns about environmental and climate gentrification were formalized in a 2016 report from the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance’s (NYC-EJA), a grassroots environmental justice consortium of which UPROSE is a member. In calling on the city to strengthen its commitments to environmental justice, the report highlighted the risk that OneNYC’s Community Parks Initiative, which seeks to ensure that at least 85% of New Yorkers live within walking distance of a park by 2030, might exacerbate gentrification and displacement. NYC-EJA was especially concerned that the initiative prioritizes neighborhoods experiencing population growth for new parks development, worrying that growth might be correlated with zoning density increases and new, luxury construction, a potential indicator of gentrification in some neighborhoods. Green investments in these areas might, therefore, intensify a 41 displacement feedback loop. In a 2018 follow-up report, NYC-EJA also expressed concern that the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s “Private Property Incentive Program,” which offers financial support to property owners who invest in enhanced stormwater capture infrastructure on their properties, might contribute to “greentrification.” The report urges the city to think critically about how it deploys incentives to avoid this unintended consequence, but it makes no specific 42 recommendation for how the program is implemented.

Since OneNYC was released, other community groups have urged the city to consider additional policy approaches not included in the report. In 2018, the Pratt Center for Community Development, an affiliate of Pratt University, published a report urging the city to modify the City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) process and related technical manual to better consider displacement risk associated with development and zoning decisions subject to the city’s discretionary authority. CEQR is the New York City process used to evaluate the effect of major land use actions on the

39 UPROSE, as part of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, is a member of the Climate Justice Alliance, a national organization formed to advocate for the principles of a “Just Transition” (Rosemberg 2010), which seeks to ensure that climate action works to replace the current “extractive” economy with a holistically equitable “regenerative” one. See the Climate Justice Alliance’s Just Transition webpage. 40 Environmental Justice Alliance says de Blasio’s OneNYC plan falls short in combating climate change. (2016, April 5). WPIX. 41 NYC climate justice agenda. (2016). New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. 42 NYC climate justice agenda: Midway to 2030. (2018). New York City Environmental Justice Alliance

environment under the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA). Development that is undertaken directly by city agencies or that requires zoning approvals, public funding, city-owned land, or other public involvement is usually 43 subject to CEQR review and approval. While CEQR currently requires an analysis of displacement risk, the Pratt report argues that the standards included in the CEQR technical manual are woefully inadequate and therefore too often issue a “finding of no significant adverse impact” (FONSI), providing projects the green light to continue moving forward.

The report calls for CEQR to be modified to 1) Require analysis of a project’s potential disparate impacts on affected racial and ethnic groups; 2) Expand the definition of “population at risk” of direct displacement (which currently only includes tenants living in 1-4 unit buildings) to include tenants living in multi-family buildings of any size 3) Expand the definition of areas threatened by indirect displacement (which currently only applies to the narrow band of areas with stable rents but adjacent to neighborhoods where rents are rising) to include areas where rents may already be rising and displacement could be exacerbated, and areas where rents are currently stable but gentrification might be triggered (Becker, Conte, and Widdison 2018). While these recommendations seem in part premised upon the concern that new construction development risks raising rents in surrounding areas, (a theory that recent research findings continue to contradict (Li, 2019)), the Pratt report recommends a process where this and other evidence could be analyzed in the context of a specific project to assess associated displacement risk.

If adopted, these recommendations could dramatically change the criteria used to certify the city’s various discretionary actions as compliant with CEQR and SEQRA regulations, which could have major implications for city-initiated neighborhood rezonings, city-financed infrastructure projects, and the redevelopment of city-owned land. All of these types of city-sponsored initiatives have increasingly been criticized as sparking or exacerbating existing displacement pressures, even when the stated goals of the action are to expand the production of affordable housing. For example, controversy surrounded the city’s adoption of its Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program because it would increase permitted density to entice development that would be subject to the MIH income-restricted unit percentage requirements, a 44 strategy critics feared would accelerate gentrification.

43 For an overview of CEQR, see the NYC Office of Environmental Coordination CEQR basics webpage. 44 Warerkar, T. (2016, February 8). NYC’s controversial new affordable housing proposals, explained. Curbed NY.

In February of 2020, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and immigrant-led advocacy group Make the Road NY issued a “Climate Action Manual” with additional sustainability and resiliency policy recommendations for New York. The manual draws upon the belief that climate action should repair injustices within the existing extractive economy (Rosemberg, 2010) to analyze how recommendations for climate mitigation and adaptation can be best merged with the concerns of labor, housing, and other 45 movements. The document builds upon the RPA’s May 2019 “Equitable Adaptation” report, with the notable addition of an entire section dedicated to addressing displacement and climate gentrification.

The RPA report urges that “environmental improvements and green developments be balanced with displacement protections,” advocating for a series of housing security policies, many of which were partially endorsed in OneNYC, including 1) Adopting the Pratt Center’s recommendation for modifying the CEQR process; 2) Enacting a “Good Cause” eviction bill proposed by State Senator Julia Salazar earlier in 2020 that would limit rent increases to 1.5% of the consumer price index and provide right-to-lease-renewal protections for most renters 3) Increasing the maximum income threshold for the city’s Universal Action Program, which since 2017 has provided a right-to-counsel guarantee for low income New Yorkers in need of legal services as they face eviction and 4) Earmarking technical assistance and city-owned properties for Community Land Trust development, which the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development began to incorporate into its suite of housing programs 46 in 2017.

This review of recent climate policy dialogues suggests that grassroots environmental and housing groups, major planning organizations, and the city government itself (albeit to a lesser extent), have all acknowledged the threats of climate and environmental gentrification. Still, a clear strategy for addressing these issues directly has yet to emerge. The city’s response has largely consisted of a restatement of city-wide affordable housing commitments, but lacks a more targeted, neighborhood-based approach. The NYC-EJA has warned that some of the city's climate and sustainability programs might trigger environmental gentrification but has only raised these unintended consequences as potential issues, refraining from making any clear recommendations. The Pratt Center’s analysis of the CEQR process’s pitfalls underscores deficiencies in the ways the city considers displacement risk; but, it is

45Equitable adaptation: Building climate change adaptation capacity for Make the Road NY and Central Queens. (2019). Regional Plan Association. 46 Equitable adaptation climate action manual: Policies for a more sustainable and resilient New York. (2020). Regional Plan Association.

unclear how the proposed changes to the process’s technical guidance might mitigate climate and environmental gentrification other than by stopping projects altogether through stricter displacement metrics. And the Regional Plan Association’s report has done little more than urge the city to continue and expand programs it has already begun to roll out. While its recommendations include meaningful and necessary housing justice initiatives, most have already been embraced to at least some degree by city or state government officials, would move forward independent of future climate mitigation or adaptation measures, and do little to increase the housing market’s share of affordable units.

Towards Transformative Climate Adaptation Policy: From Design to Housing

The challenge of achieving equitable resilience in light of environmental and climate gentrification presents a conundrum for New York City as it seeks to fortify both its ecological and human capital. Beyond current policy dialogues, what is the next policy frontier for better confronting climate change in a way that achieves concrete, equitable outcomes for all New York residents?

Some urban scholars suggest the answer lies in modifying the designs of resilience infrastructure. Specifically, Curran and Hamilton advise that cities adopt a “just green enough” approach to design by attenuating urban greening projects to avoid engendering unintended market consequences like environmental gentrification (Curran and Hamilton, 2012 and 2017). This framework leaves much to be desired, as it implies that a degree of disinvestment might be necessary to keep affordable neighborhoods affordable. Furthermore, while eliminating the trendiest design elements of adaptation infrastructure with aesthetic or recreational components (such as landscaped berms) might reduce their appeal to wealthy potential newcomers, many resilience investments (such as flood gates) are purely functional with few design attributes that could be dampened. A lack of design latitude similarly applies to many building-level adaptation strategies, such as locating boilers on the upper floors of buildings. It is unclear how these types of adaptation investments could be designed to be ‘just resilient enough’ to protect low income neighborhoods, but ‘not too resilient’ as to entice an influx of rich people that would alter the housing market. Do low income households need to accept a degree of risk to avoid displacement?

The pitfalls of a ‘just-green-enough’ theory illustrate some of the limitations of purely design-based approaches to achieving equitable resilience. While landscape design has been championed as the solution to some of the greatest challenges of contemporary urbanism (Waldheim, 2006) and as such has been positioned at the

forefront of urban resilience efforts including major initiatives like Rebuild by Design, recent literature has begun to critique this assumed role of design in resilience. Vale and Lamb (2019) have asserted that “while ‘green urban design’ is highly responsive to the geophysical dimensions of natural hazards, these approaches are largely blind to the social dimensions of uneven vulnerability.” Fleming (2019) similarly casts doubt on the field of landscape architecture’s self-confidence, arguing that green urban design has demonstrated little success in achieving equitable resilience, despite receiving substantial resources and media attention.

Against this backdrop of the shortcomings of design-based resilience approaches, a growing body of literature has embraced the creation and preservation of affordable housing as an alternative way to achieve equitable resilience. Vale et. al (2014) argues that affordable housing production, coupled with resilience investments, might serve as an antidote to the ‘vagueness’ of social resilience. If vulnerable residents can be firmly anchored in their communities through the long-term assurance they will be able to afford to live there, they will be better equipped to withstand the shocks of climate change. Anguelovski, et al. (2019) similarly endorses the creation of affordable housing alongside the development of adaptation infrastructure as a way to stymy environmental and climate gentrification.

This literature affirms the recent expansion of affordable housing production in New York under HNY and OneNYC, but more work needs to be done to better coordinate housing goals with resilience planning. Brennan, Mehta, and Steil (2020) offer one practical approach, suggesting that state and local governments modify their Qualified Allocation Plans (which govern the awards for low-income housing tax credits, the largest source of financing for affordable housing development in the United States) to encourage resilient affordable housing construction techniques and a strategic distribution of affordable housing in climate-vulnerable areas. New York City could 47 revise its allocation plan accordingly to reward developers that seek funding for LIHTC projects in areas benefiting from adaptation investments.

Yet, LIHTC is a finite resource already fully baked into the assumptions underlying existing housing goals in New York. On its own, LIHTC is incapable of adequately addressing the magnitude of the city’s housing needs (O’Reagan, 2017). Furthermore, LIHTC-based housing strategies, like most of New York’s housing-as-resilience efforts

47 The city’s current qualified allocation plan prioritizes projects that provide supportive housing units, are located in the city’s neighborhood study areas, and otherwise further current policy objectives. See New York City 2020 Qualified Allocation Plan. (2020). NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development .

to date, reinforce pitfalls of the existing market-based property regime, where affordable housing is privately owned and can eventually be deregulated and commodified despite ongoing needs for permanent affordability (DeFilippis, 2004). Future policy should view the challenge of climate change as an opportunity to “reconfigure the structures of development” as the city works towards transforming broken social and ecological systems (Pelling, 2010).

Cohen (2019) provides an alternative vision for using housing as a resilience strategy that approaches this ideal of transformation, advocating for the production of 10 million units of public housing nationally in ten years as the country transitions to a carbon-neutral economy. This bold proposal for the United States to embrace a public housing model it has so decisively shunned has clear advantages over the LIHTC approach: namely, deeper, longer-term affordability. The enormous scale and public control of the housing created would also foster a new economy surrounding resilient housing production. It would ensure that the public interest, rather than the interests of a handful of private developers, governs the long-term use of affordable housing assets.

Cohen suggests that such a dramatic policy shift could be achieved if climate and housing advocates would form a lasting coalition to reinforce each others’ goals (Cohen, 2019). He argues that New York’s Green New Deal only garnered the political support needed to pass when the interests of the state’s powerful affordable housing lobby were folded into the proposed legislation. If the housing and environmental movements could sustain this alliance, they could secure the political will needed for a national framework of equitable resilience.

Still, it is unclear if such a coalition will be enough to secure the resources needed for such a massive housing initiative. The Trump administration has repeatedly proposed steep cuts to federal housing programs, leaving national housing advocates on the 48 defensive in recent years. Historically, Congress has also been reluctant to fund robust housing construction beyond the tax incentive measures offered through the LIHTC program (Collinson, Ellen, and Ludwig, 2016). It is unclear if the city can cover the resulting funding gap on its own. The de Blasio administration has already allocated more than double the amount of annual city resources for housing development than the prior two mayors combined, dedicating more than $5 billion of tax levy and $8 billion of tax-exempt bond revenue since 2018 (Schwartz, 2019). Additional funding commitments large enough for transformative housing development

48 See the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s analysis of President Trump’s FY 21 Budget Request.

will require the continued health of the city’s tax base and sustained political interest in housing programs.

Case Studies: Adaptation Investments and the Question of Housing

Creating substantial, deeply affordable housing options for low income people in resilient neighborhoods with access to transit, high functioning schools, jobs, and other opportunities will require coastal communities to deploy creative solutions and careful planning as climate change intensifies. The following two case studies illuminate the shortcomings and successes of local responses to this challenge in New York and its surrounding metro area. Lessons from these case studies can help inform the development of further strategies for effectively promoting equitable resilience.

Asbury Park, New Jersey

Asbury Park, New Jersey, an oceanfront town two and a half hours from New York by train, is a relevant example of where adaptation planning and design have failed to adequately protect a low-income community from environmental and climate gentrification. A major seaside resort for much of the 20th century, Asbury fell into physical and economic decline beginning in the 1960s. Race riots in the 70s exacerbated white flight from the area, and a pattern of disinvestment left much of the town abandoned and in disrepair. By the late 2000s, Asbury’s population began to 49 rebound. In 2015, the New York Times announced Asbury’s “revival” to the world, taking note of a wave of new development along the town’s previously neglected 50 boardwalk. Much of this construction has been spearheaded by iStar, a corporate real estate developer responsible for major development projects throughout the New 51 York metropolitan area.

In the context of this reinvestment, Asbury was the subject of a Rebuild by Design 52 finalist submission led by Sasaki, with Rutgers University and Arup engineering as partners. The proposal included models for resilience intervention across various shoreline typologies in New Jersey. Sasaki noted that because Asbury is located within the New Jersey “headlands” typology, where the higher elevation mainland meets the

49 Bagli, C. V. (2015, July 31). Asbury park, long neglected, shows signs of rejuvenation. The New York Times. 50 Gage, G. (2019, July 25). How iStar helped revitalize the Jersey Shore. Reit Magazine. 51 iStar Financial’s most famous project may be 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the New York City’s tallest residential building. See iStar’s webpage for more information. 52 An overview of the Sasaki Team’s submission is available on the Rebuild by Design website. See Resilience + the beach. (n.d.). Rebuild by Design; Sasaki.

ocean directly, it is more naturally resilient than towns situated on barrier islands or inland bays. The design team, therefore, offered Asbury as a community that could be further fortified to preserve seaside businesses and recreational activities, as other parts of the state’s coast succumb to sea level rise over time. To foster such ongoing commercial development, Sasaki proposed that Asbury’s rigid, linear boardwalk be broken into more organic forms and integrated with the natural beach and dune system, creating a wildlife habitat that would protect the boardwalk amusements from 53 future inundation.

A reimagined, resilient boardwalk in Asbury Park. Source: Sasaki

The architecture team heralded the extensive community outreach it conducted while formulating its design as crucial to the submission’s success, arguing that the cultural understanding they helped foster within the community has strengthened Asbury’s social ties. In an article published in conjunction with a resiliency conference following the conclusion of the competition, the team remarked:

Our team’s collaboration has contributed to building a new type of resiliency—one that not only protects the beach, but also enhances social capital and connectivity...Asbury Park is an engaged, informed, activist community which has thrown its support behind our project in a compelling and inspiring way...efforts at grassroots outreach produced unprecedented returns in terms of open dialogue, sharing of issues and concerns, high attendance at public events, strong local identity, and a community who surprised us by turning our questions around and asking: “How can we help? How can we do

53 Further information and images are available on Sasaki’s website’s Rebuild by design page.

more?...in the year that has followed Rebuild’s conclusion, the Asbury Park community has shown that the seeds of increased collaboration and greater resiliency planted during the competition have had lasting impacts (Dixon, et al., 2015).

Gina Ford (2016), a former member of the Sasaki Rebuild by Design team and now a professor of design at the University of Texas - Austin, has doubled down on these vague claims that design can foster community participation as a resilience strategy. Addressing the American Society of Landscape Architects, she writes,

As we look forward and consider the significance of climate change, demographic shifts, and income inequality...Landscape architects who understand social networks and cultural fabrics are needed to both inspire participation in this critical dialogue and build governance toward lasting, meaningful, and sustainable change...The world is more in need of us now than perhaps ever before.

Yet an affordable housing crisis unfolding in Asbury Park has called into question Ford’s insistence that designer-led community engagement has the unqualified power to foster equitable social resilience. As of 2019, 44% of Asbury households are estimated to identify as black and 27% as Latino and nearly a third of all households 54 are estimated to fall below the federal poverty line. Concern has grown that new development in Asbury has attracted wealthier, whiter households that might displace these low income people and people of color, many of whom remained in the city during its periods of hardship. Today, news reports about gentrification in Asbury abound. In a May 2019 New York Times article, Asbury’s deputy mayor affirmed, “What you’re seeing now is revitalization, but also gentrification...We’re constantly figuring out how to make sure the black, gay, artist and small-business community who 55 came here before this revitalization can remain here.”

While Asbury’s city government adopted a redevelopment plan calling for 3,200 new waterfront housing units in 2002, the city instituted no related affordability 56 requirements. The recently formed Asbury Park Affordable Housing Coalition has been pushing the city government to amend the 2002 masterplan (which is still in effect) so that it includes provisions for income-restricted housing. But as of 2019, the

54 U. S. Census Bureau quickfacts: Asbury Park City, New Jersey. (2019). U.S. Census Bureau. 55 Lasky, J. (2019, May 15). Asbury Park, N.J. : A seaside community reborn. The New York Times. 56 Garbarine, R. (2002, March 3). In the region/New Jersey; a new plan to revitalize Asbury Park waterfront. The New York Times.

57 city had yet to adopt any kind of affordable housing ordinance. In the meantime, unrestricted commercial development proliferates in areas along the boardwalk, but these luxury amenities remain out of reach for many of Asbury’s long-time residents.

The social networks fostered and celebrated through the Rebuild by Design team’s outreach may have been impactful on some level, but these ties will mean little if they are broken by the displacement of the city’s most vulnerable residents. The Sasaki plan reinforces climate gentrification in Asbury by emphasizing development suitability due to its naturally resilient headlands location, and by proposing design interventions well suited to protect commercial real estate interests but without adequate consideration of existing residents’ housing security. The team’s oblique approach to fostering social resilience through community engagement lacks force in light of the city’s intransigent response to affordable housing advocacy. Rather than flashy design proposals that reinforce a neoliberal design+development regime, the city needs meaningful, resilient housing action that could facilitate improved lives for vulnerable people.

Coney Island, Brooklyn

In contrast to Asbury Park where reflexive calls for affordable housing development are struggling to keep up with market changes, the redevelopment of Coney Island has benefitted from early, sizable affordable housing production coupled with resilience investments. Coney Island, another major beachfront resort destination that experienced severe disinvestment through the late 20th century, has begun to see significant new development within the last decade. The city government has been responsible for facilitating much of this revitalization. In 2009, the city issued a comprehensive rezoning for Coney Island to coordinate the neighborhood’s redevelopment. While not without its flaws, the rezoning included early measures to incentivize the production of affordable housing. A large swath of the western portion of the neighborhood riddled with vacant, underdeveloped land was included in a new inclusionary zoning district. Developers within the district who opted to dedicate at least 20 percent of their buildings’ floor areas to below-market housing would be eligible for zoning height and density bonuses. In total, the rezoning sought to create 58 roughly 4,500 new homes, nearly a quarter of which would be income-restricted.

57 Fry, C. (2019, April 19). Asbury Park battles to stay affordable during resurgence. Jersey Digs. 58 For an overview of the rezoning see Coney Island comprehensive rezoning plan—Approved. (2009). New York City Department of City Planning.

In the ten years since the rezoning was approved, more than 300 units of affordable housing have already been constructed, including 135 units of supportive housing that serve chronically homeless households with disabilities and formerly homeless veterans. Another 700 affordable units are under construction, and additional units are 59 in the city’s development pipeline.

The production of many of these units was tied directly to the city's investments in climate infrastructure in Coney Island. Beginning in 2014, the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) has shepherded roughly $180 million in capital spending to elevate streets that flooded during Hurricane Sandy, increase stormwater management and sewer capacity, and create new parkland that can retain water in the event of a flood. This is part of over $2 billion in resiliency initiatives underway in Coney 60 Island. Recognizing that these expenditures are of great value to private landowners in the area, EDC leveraged the value of these projects to negotiate a series of agreements with iStar (the same developer active in Asbury) regarding its multiple 61 development interests along the Coney boardwalk, including a new amphitheater, the 62 renovation of a historic restaurant and event space, and the development of waterfront housing.

Specifically, EDC negotiated an “option” agreement with iStar that required it to participate in the new inclusionary housing program when it developed a massive vacant parcel of land it owned along the boardwalk adjacent to the amphitheater and restaurant sites. EDC leveraged cost-sharing measures related to the resilience projects it was funding that would benefit iStar’s various projects to ensure that a 63 portion of the waterfront housing iStar was building would be affordable. As a result, the city secured the production of hundreds of units of affordable housing alongside new, high-quality amenities, all protected by major, ongoing adaptation investments. While much more needs to be done for Coney Island’s most vulnerable residents, especially those living in deteriorated conditions in the neighborhood’s numerous NYCHA-controlled buildings, the concept of leveraging resilience investments to produce affordable housing demonstrated in Coney Island is one that the city should consider deploying more widely.

59 Coney Island rezoning 10-year progress report. (2019). New York City Economic Development Corporation. 60 Coney Island creek resiliency study. (2014). New York City Economic Development Corporation. 61 The Ford Amphitheater opened in 2016. See its webpage for more information. 62 The historic Child’s Restaurant was constructed in 1923, but lay vacant for 50 years until it reopened as part of the Ford Amphitheater complex in 2016. See Rosenberg, Z. (2017, May 17). Coney Island’s landmarked Childs Restaurant reopens after renovation. Curbed NY. 63 These agreements are memorialized, in part in the Memorandum of Option by and between New York City Economic Development Corporation, ISTAR Financial, Inc., and Bath Site LLC.

A rendering of “Surf Vets Place,” an affordable housing building with onsite social services for 82 formerly homeless households and 53 low-income households created in part through EDC’s “Option Agreement” with iStar. The large tower includes hundreds of additional units of affordable housing. Source: Concern for Independent Living and Stephen B. Jacobs Group.

Streets in Coney Island that the city has elevated or reconstructed to be resilient to flooding. Number 6 is Surf Vets Place, and numbers 3 and 7 indicate the location of more than 600 additional units of affordable housing that have either recently completed or are under construction. Source: NYC Economic Development Corporation

While Asbury Park demonstrates that cities cannot rely solely on design and community engagement strategies to enact equitable resilience, Coney Island highlights the importance of incorporating affordable housing development early on in the planning of neighborhood investments. But how easily can the Coney model be replicated elsewhere? In Edgemere, Queens, the city government also coupled resiliency investment with significant affordable housing construction. But this was made possible in part by city control of over 100 parcels of land in the neighborhood, 64 which represents an unusually high number of underdeveloped city-owned lots.

In areas without large swaths of publicly controlled land, combining green investments with housing may prove more difficult, even if the city explicitly endeavors to do so. In

64 Resilient Edgemere community plan. (2015). New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Washington, D.C., for example, planning for the 11th Street Bridge Park project included the creation of an “Equitable Development Plan” that encouraged the creation of new affordable housing opportunities in areas at risk of environmental gentrification due to the project. While the plan has facilitated a modest number of affordable homeownership opportunities and the organization of a community land trust, as of January 2019, the trust had yet to acquire any properties to create deeply affordable housing for area residents most at risk of displacement, in part because the land near the park is too expensive (Bogle, Diby, and Cohen, 2019).

Value Capture and Adaptation Investments

What, therefore, can cities do in places where there may be few, if any, underdeveloped properties, or in neighborhoods where the cost of land is already beyond the budget available for affordable housing development? How might New York facilitate affordable development in cost-prohibitive areas like lower Manhattan that are slated for the city’s largest public investments in resilience infrastructure?

In January 2020, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy issued a report that offers potential tools that might help answer these questions. In light of the staggering cost of climate resilience infrastructure that often serves as a barrier to its creation, the report explores using various value capture strategies, such as impact fees and special assessments, to extract resources from private property owners to pay for adaptation. Key to such a strategy is demonstrating the positive effect adaptation spending can have on property values. Putting a positive spin on environmental gentrification, the report lists examples of the value-generating potential of new parks, green roofs, and other green development, asserting that adaptation investments will have a similarly positive effect on property values, which could be used to justify value capture. It also asserts that even if resilience infrastructure merely preserves rather than raises property values in light of climate risk, value capture might still be warranted. James Kostaras, senior fellow at the Institute argues in favor of using “some increment of the land value that is being preserved and protected by climate adaptation interventions...as a source of funding to mitigate the impact of flooding and other climate-driven events” (Flint, 2020).

The kinds of value capture strategies the Lincoln Institute proposes are meaningful because they are progressive. That is, in climate vulnerable areas, people who tend to be wealthier, such as owners of valuable land, would be charged large sums of money in comparison to people with less wealth, such as renters, to help pay for adaptation. Such a disparity is justified because property owners oftentimes stand to gain the most

financially from the development of resilience infrastructure. For example, increased flooding poses a relatively small threat to renters’ financial assets, save for any damage caused to their personal belongings. Beyond lease obligations, renters are also free to leave climate-vulnerable areas once they decide that the nuisance of repeated flooding outweighs the benefits of remaining. On the other hand, property owners risk seeing their wealth diminish as repeated flooding devalues their property. Rather than having the freedom to easily abandon climate-vulnerable areas as flooding increases, property owners may find it harder to sell their land or may be forced to sell at a loss. Property owners, especially those in New York and Manhattan, also tend to be wealthy in 65 absolute terms, and therefore are capable of contributing resources towards adaptation investments without risking their financial solvency. How might an initiative like the East Side Resiliency Project, for which the public is currently expected to foot 66 the entire $1.45 billion bill, be altered to ensure that those with a particular financial interest in its completion contribute to its financing?

Special assessments, a long-used public infrastructure finance tool the Lincoln Institute highlights, could offer a specific framework for achieving this kind of value capture. Conceptually, special assessments are fees that governments levy on particular property owners to pay for infrastructure that will benefit them. They are particularly useful for local governments because usually, they are legally distinct from taxes. This is of critical importance to state and local governments that are subject to tax expenditure limits (TELs) or other barriers to reflexively expanding taxes, such as whether the idea is popular among voters and elected officials. Both special assessments and taxes are imposed upon members of the public by the government to pay for something the government has deemed necessary for the public benefit. But unlike tax expenditures, special assessment projects must have a localized benefit distinct to the subset being assessed, even if the general public benefits indirectly from the resulting resources. Special assessments are also more often used to pay for physical infrastructure improvements, such as sidewalks or sewer repairs, while taxes pay for the full range of services a government might provide. This may be partly due to the relative ease of tying physical improvements to property value increases that specific owners may experience (Briffault and Reynolds, 2016).

Distinguishing special assessments from taxes is important because it means that they are not subject to New York State tax uniformity regulations. These statutory

65 Barbanel, J. (2015, February 3). Mapping the wealth of New York City by housing values. Wall Street Journal. 66 For more information on the cost and scope of the project, see the East Side Coastal Resilience Project’s webpage.

requirements stipulate that “All real property in each assessing unit shall be assessed at a uniform percentage of value (fractional assessment)” with the exception that cities with more than a million residents may enact tax classes with differing assessment 67 ratios. In New York City, there are four main tax classes, each with their own assessment ratios (the percentage of a property’s market value that is taxable) and tax rates (the level of taxation applied to a property’s assessed value):

Class68 Assessment 2019-2020 Annual taxes owed on a property Ratio Tax Rate69 with a $1 million market value

1 (residential properties up to 3 6% 21.167% $12,700 units and condo buildings up to 3 stories)

2 (all other primarily residential 45% 12.473% $56,129 property)

3 (utility property) 45% 12.536% $56,412

4 (commercial and industrial 45% 10.537% $47,417 property)

Special assessments are not necessarily subject to these constraints. Instead, the way they are calculated can be determined on a more ad-hoc basis that applies only to the relevant geography, regardless of tax class or even certain existing tax exemptions. This flexibility would enable the city to charge only the specific properties that benefit directly from resilience infrastructure to help pay for its creation, without raising taxes wholesale.

In the United States, special assessments were first used in 1691 in New York to pay for a street drainage system and later for broader infrastructure repairs, including road improvements and sewer upgrades. Other states followed New York’s example, with special assessments reaching peak popularity during the infrastructure boom of the 1930s. While special assessments’ efficacy declined as property values plummeted during the Great Depression, state and local governments gradually returned to the strategy during the latter half of the 20th century. Still, while special assessments are used today in all 50 states, their levies comprise less than half a percent of all state and local revenues (Zhao and Larson, 2011).

67 From New York consolidated laws, real property tax law—Rpt § 305. (n.d.). Findlaw. 68 For more information on tax definitions, see the NYC Department of Finance tax definitions webpage. 69 See the NYC Department of Finance tax rates webpage.

After the Great Depression, New York City typically administered special assessments through New York State-established Special Assessment Districts (SADs) to generate funds for downtown revitalization projects. In the 1970s, the state legislature replaced SADs by empowering New York City itself (and other municipalities) to establish Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that would administer special assessments under BID regulations (Rogowsky and Gross, 2000). Today, the vast majority of special assessments in New York City are administered through this BID structure.

Special assessments have often been challenged in court on the grounds that they are either prohibited by state tax regulations or even violate the U.S. Constitution. Federal challenges are typically premised upon the ‘takings’ clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires that “No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Federal case law has provided a framework for defending special assessments against such constitutional claims. In the 1987 case Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that exactions that governments may levy upon a property owner must share an “essential nexus” with the benefit a property owner is seeking from the government, or the burden they are imposing. In the case of Nolan, the court ruled that California had failed to argue that requiring a beachfront property owner to provide a public beach access easement shared an essential nexus with a construction permit the property owner requested from the state.

In the 1994 case Dolan v. City of Tigard, the court ruled that in addition to satisfying the essential nexus test, exactions must also be “roughly proportional” to the benefit a property owner receives or the public burden they impose. For example, if a town charges a sewer capacity fee to a developer as a condition for approving a construction permit the developer is seeking, the fee must be no more than roughly equal to the cost the government will incur to increase sewer capacity for the proposed development.

Various state courts have upheld the legality of special assessments premised upon incremental property value increases under the framework that Nollan and Dolan established (Briffault and Reynolds, 2016). For example, in McNally v. Township of Teaneck (1977), the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that projected increases in property value associated with the installation of a neighborhood’s street curbs were a satisfactory way to justify the rough proportionality of fees the township had imposed upon homeowners to pay for the curbs. Importantly, these cases provide precedents

for charging property owners different fees to fund the same project, based upon the specific value increases they are estimated to enjoy. The courts have also demonstrated some leeway in how governments establish valuation methodologies so that they are not overly burdensome to administer (Briffault and Reynolds, 2016).

This preliminary review provides a basic framework for how special assessments might be calculated and sized in accordance with legal constraints. Further analysis of relevant New York State case law will help shield the actual implementation of special assessments to pay for resilience infrastructure from inevitable legal challenges.

Resilience Infrastructure Special Assessments for Affordable Housing (RISAHs)

It is important to note that the use of special assessments by themselves to fund resilience infrastructure would mean that only the wealthiest communities could be cost-effectively saved. In other communities, a history of disinvestment means that property values alone may not provide sufficient funds to build adaptation infrastructure, even though such communities are also worth saving. Briffault and Reynolds (2016) note that special assessments used to fund street paving in Prattville, Alabama during the 1970s led to paving in front of 97% of white residents’ homes, but only 66% of black residents’ homes, due to disparities in property values that fell along racial lines.

Similar property value differences in New York that persist due to the legacies of segregation, redlining, and municipal disinvestment in communities of color could result in fewer of these places being protected through a special assessment strategy. Additionally, while the Lincoln Institute expressed optimism regarding the prospect of using special assessments to pay for resilience infrastructure, they also offered a word of caution. Robin Hacke, Executive Director of the Center for Community Investment warns: “as values rise, so does the risk of displacement. Cities must prioritize affordability and invest in projects that protect the community’s ability to remain in place” (Flint, 2020).

As a remedy to these issues, rather than using value capture to pay for the adaptation projects themselves, special assessments could instead be used to pay for affordable housing development in conjunction with resilience investments. In this way, “resilience infrastructure special assessments for housing” (RISAHs) could be deployed to formalize the kind of housing + resilience synergy that was met with success in Coney Island and that urban scholars have championed as a concrete path towards equitable resilience.

Legally justifying an “essential nexus” between 1) funding affordable housing development and 2) special assessments charged concerning the benefits afforded by adaptation projects could be accomplished through a variety of mechanisms. One strategy could rest on the Pratt Center for Community Development’s recommendations to modify the City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) process to better quantify displacement risk. CEQR already requires displacement risk to be analyzed before development requiring city discretionary approvals can move forward. If these provisions were revised per the Pratt recommendations, it might be easier for the true environmental consequences (in terms of potential displacement) of such projects to come to light. But rather than solely kill projects that risk displacing people, this enhanced CEQR review would open the door for RISAHs to serve as a way to mitigate projects’ adverse displacement impacts, rendering them eligible for the development green light of a ‘Finding of No Significant Impact’ (FONSI). In low or mixed income communities, RISAHs could serve as a meaningful way to mitigate the potential environmental and climate gentrification the project might spark. In high income communities, RISAHs could help mitigate the displacement risk associated with exacerbated downstream flooding that might occur as a result of seawall construction. In both scenarios, the costs of mitigating displacement would essentially become part of the overall adaptation project’s expenses that special assessments would help cover.

Incorporating these types of environmental mitigation costs into the overall capital budget for infrastructure projects is not a novel concept. The National Environmental Protection Act, New York State Environmental Quality Review Act, and New York City CEQR regulations often require projects to incur such expenses before they can move forward. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) New York and New Jersey Harbor & Tributaries Focus Area Feasibility Study accordingly incorporate some examples of these costs into its estimates of the major adaptation projects it has envisioned, even at this most preliminary and conceptual stage of evaluation. In fact, USACE cost estimates for “environmental and cultural mitigation” range from $27 million (for option 2: one massive floodgate spanning Sandy Hook to Breezy Point) up to $1.38 billion (for option 5: a series of localized adaptation measures throughout the harbor region). These costs are associated with the projects’ negative externalities, including damage to the ecology of marine habitats, disruption of maritime transportation, threats posed to endangered species within the study area, damage or destruction of historic landmarks, and the loss of coastal views and other aesthetic impacts. Mitigating the loss of affordable housing could be categorized as a similar expense in a project’s budget.

Increased risk Adaptation investment Displacement cost reduces value is proposed is added to budget

RISAH district Properties are charged up to $ is used in district is established the value benefit expected for affordable housing

In many areas, there will be immense public pressure on politicians to allocate the financing needed for climate adaptation protections. It is far less likely there will be the necessary momentum needed to create meaningful affordable housing; in fact, strong anti-housing sentiment likely will stand in the way of substantial affordable housing production, or at least render it more expensive and time-intensive to produce (Scally and Tighe, 2015). RISAHs could leverage enthusiasm among the politically enfranchised who desire resilience infrastructure to help ensure much-needed production of below-market housing. Likewise, in the spirit of the kind of housing+climate coalition-building Cohen (2019) champions, RISAHs could entice housing advocates to fight for adaptation, rather than oppose it on environmental gentrification grounds. RISAHs would also help avoid creating the kind of exclusionary ecological enclaves (Hodsen and Marvin 2010) that special assessment districts and associated adaptation projects might otherwise foster. In a best case scenario, rather than needing to weigh the tradeoffs of a “just green enough” approach, designers could feel empowered through a RISAH structure to maximize the amenity value of resilience projects landscape and urban design as a way to boost property values, and in turn, generate more resources for housing production. The result could be

neighborhoods with beautiful, high quality amenities, ample protection from climate risk, and housing that is accessible to people of all incomes.

How Might RISAHs Be Implemented in New York?

To better envision the potential of RISAHs in New York City, it is helpful to consider the kinds of steps the municipal government would need to pursue to implement such a program.

Defining the Assessment District

One of the first steps would be to define the special assessment’s geographic reach. The Lincoln Institute warns that this process might be more complicated for adaptation projects than for transit or other infrastructure that is often funded through special assessments because the relevant areas may be more expansive, the benefits property owners experience may vary more significantly across these large areas, and no clear standards currently exist to determine how these factors might affect assessment sizes. However, defining spatial benefits of climate resilience infrastructure could in some ways be simpler than for transit or other investments. While planners implement a variety of metrics to define transit reach, such as the half- or quarter-mile radii, or other buffer zones, these are arbitrary cut-offs used to visualize the relative ease of access to transit and have been disputed as a standard (Cervero and Guerra, 2013). In contrast, at a fundamental level, resilience infrastructure zones can be rooted in more objective measures, such as elevation and projected flood vulnerability, both of which have a long history of being quantified through Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood maps and other systems for evaluating risk. Local governments would still need to decide if and how to charge properties that only benefit indirectly from the protection adaptation affords nearby transit, businesses, and other amenities, but at the least, baseline catchment boundaries could be rooted in objective measures. 70

Establishing the Assessment District

In New York, the BID model is likely well suited for RISAH purposes. BID use has not been restricted to commercial districts, but has also been proposed as a catalyst for property value management in primarily residential districts (Briffault and Reynolds 2016). Per New York State statute, to form a BID, municipalities must define the

70 Nonetheless, further discussion of additional considerations regarding catchments areas is included in this paper’s “Operationalizing RISAHs” section.

district’s boundaries, the proposed improvements and their maximum cost and other financing information, rules and regulations for the district, and other administrative details. They must also provide “a list of the properties to be benefited, and a statement of the method or methods by which the expenses of a district will be imposed upon benefited real property, in proportion to the benefit received by such 71 property, to defray the cost thereof.”

The statute permits BIDS to collect and expend resources on a wide range of projects that will 1) “restore or promote business activity in the district,” such as the “installation of landscaping,” or “rehabilitation or removal of existing structures as required”; 2) “provide for additional maintenance or other additional services required for the enjoyment and protection of the public” such as “enhanced sanitation services” or “services to enhance the security of persons and property within the district”; and 3) 72 provide for the ongoing maintenance of such improvements. While resilience infrastructure is not expressly listed as an example of a permitted project, it could easily be argued that such activities serve as an investment in the protection and security of the businesses and people within the district’s boundaries.

The establishment of a BID associated with climate infrastructure might be contentious, so it is important to consider the legal protocol in place for moving a BID forward. State statute73 would require:

1) Proponents of the district to submit the proposed district plan to the city planning commission, city council, the relevant community board, and the borough board and borough president (if the district spans multiple community boards); 2) The City Planning Commission to host a public hearing and submit a report to the mayor, borough president, and city council indicating its approval or disapproval of the district’s formation; 3) The City council to issue a resolution in support of the district; 4) Property owners within the district to file objections to the council’s resolution if they so choose. If at least 51% of owners file objections (or if owners of what amounts to at least 51% of the total assessed value of property in the district file objections) the district’s creation will not move forward;

71 See §980-A regarding Business Improvement Districts available at The Laws of New York; Consolidated Laws, General Municipal Article 19-A § 980-980-Q. 72 §980-C 73 §980-D-F

5) The City council to publish in the local newspaper and mail to property owners and tenants in the district a summary of its resolution and notice of a public hearing on the plan’s adoption; 6) The City council to ensure the plan’s compliance with the relevant laws and vote to adopt it.

While these steps may seem bureaucratic, lengthy, and risky, they are similar in length and process to the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) that dictates land 74 use and zoning approvals for hundreds of development projects annually. A notable difference is the ability of a plurality of property owners to kill the proposal, a threshold that would require organizing and outreach to effectively convey the benefits of creating a RISAH district (namely, the delivery and maintenance of property-saving adaptation infrastructure). Furthermore, the use of RISAHs to enable both affordable housing and climate adaptation would likely yield broad City Council support, in a city where elected officials have increasingly championed both issues in recent years.

Calculating the Property Value Increase Associated with Adaptation Investments

As part of the RISAH district’s establishment, the city would need to describe how the assessment would be calculated. Bunten and Kahn’s (2017) model of climate change’s theoretical effect on the quantity and durability of housing stock in coastal areas is useful for thinking through the factors that might determine such a process. Drawing upon their framework, we can consider the net present value (“NPV”) of a building in a climate-vulnerable location as a function of the sum of its revenues and costs over time, so that:

∞ ∞

NP V = ∑ κt revenues(vulnerable) − ∑ κt costs(vulnerable) (1) (1+r−g +d)t (1+r−g +d)t t=1 1 t=1 2 where “훋” is the probability that a property remains above water as sea levels rise, “r” is the interest rate, “g₁” is the growth rate of revenues, “g₂” is the growth rate of expenses, “d” is the depreciation rate of the building stock, and “t” is the year, from 1-∞.

The building’s revenues can be further represented as: revenues = δ * revenues(good) + (1 − δ) * revenues(bad) (2)

74 An overview of ULURP is available at the NYC Department of City Planning’s ULURP webpage.

and its costs can be represented as: costs = δ * costs(good) + (1 − δ) * costs(bad) (3) where revenues(good) and costs(good) are a building’s income and expenses in “good years” (those without climate disasters), revenues(bad) and costs(bad) are income and expenses in “bad years” (those with climate disasters), and the term“1-δ” represents the probability that a climate disaster (such as a storm surge) destroys the building, halting the revenue it generates until it is repaired or replaced, so that revenues(good) > revenues(bad) and costs(good) < costs(bad) .

The probability that a vulnerable building avoids temporary damage from a climate disaster represented by δ in equations (2) and (3) is distinct from the probability that a building is spared from being rendered uninhabitable forever by sea level rise, represented by 훋 in equation (1).

For properties in climate vulnerable areas, adaptation investments increase (or preserve) net present value by increasing δ and 훋. In this way, comparing the NPV to NPV₁ (the net present value assuming the building is protected by adaptation investments) reveals the maximum amount that could be charged as a special assessment, where

∞ ∞ NP V ₁ = ∑ κ₁t revenue(protected) − ∑ κ₁t costs(protected) (4) (1+r−g +d)t (1+r−g +d)t t=1 1 t=1 2 and κ₁ > κ , δ₁ > δ so that

Special Assessment ≤NP V ₁ − NP V (5)

These basic equations for income-producing properties could offer a framework that municipal governments could adapt as they seek to implement RISAHs. Additional work would be needed to establish a process for assessing non-income producing properties, and for evaluating the residual value of land and air rights apart from their existing built assets. But the concepts included in these equations serve as a starting point for these considerations.

Levying the Assessment: 180 Water Street

To illustrate the principles of this formula, let’s apply it to a property that would be the beneficiary of value created by one of the seawalls proposed through the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s Lower Manhattan Climate Resiliency Study. Assumptions and numerical values will be rooted in this study, and other contemporary sources where noted.75 The example will favor conservative assumptions to whatever extent possible.

Let’s consider the multi-family rental building at 180 Water Street in lower Manhattan. Originally constructed as an office building, 180 Water was converted into a residential property in 2017 and boasts luxury amenities including one of the Financial District’s 76 only rooftop pools. According to the building’s Certificate of Occupancy, it has 574 apartments.77

180 Water Street. Source: MetroLoft

75 Many of the assumptions used in this example simple for the purpose of illustrating the concepts behind the special assessment. City governments would need to further refine these assumptions if they were to implement a RISAH policy. 76 Mazzarella, M. (2017, November 1). Penthouse collection debuts at 180 water street; luxury rentals with downtown views from $3,295/month. CityRealty. 77 Building information can be found through the NYC Department of Buildings webpage.

The cheapest 1-bedroom apartment currently available to rent is listed at just over $3,700 a month. According to the New York City Department of Finance’s tax assessor records, the building’s monthly income is $2,312,070, and its monthly expenses are $752,580.78 In the event of a flood, let’s conservatively estimate that repairs to the building would cost no more than the annual cost of an actuarially fair flood insurance premium, per the National Flood Insurance Program. Given 180 Water’s characteristics, let’s estimate thes repair costs to equal 30-years worth of $1,220 annual payments.79 Let’s also assume that in a year with a major storm, the building is put out of commission for one month, losing all rental income for that period. While bringing the building back up to full service might take much longer than a month, it is reasonable to assume that the building might not lose all of its rental income for the full period of damage. Given these assumptions, we can calculate the building’s revenues and costs as follows: revenue(good) = income * 12 costs(good) = expenses * 12 revenue(bad) = income * 11 costs(bad) = expenses * 12 + repairs so that revenue(good) = $2, 312, 070 * 12 = $27, 744, 840 costs(good) = $752, 580 * 12 = $9, 030, 960 revenue(bad) = $2, 312, 070 * 11 = $25, 432, 770 costs(bad) = $752, 580 * 12 + ($1, 220 * 30) = $9, 067, 560

78 Building-level tax assessment data can be found at the NYC Department of Finance Property Tax Public Access web portal. 79 See April 2020 NFIP flood insurance manual: Appendix j: Rate tables. (2020). Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Let’s assume that 180 Water Street is currently within a 500-year flood plain. The Lower Manhattan Resiliency Study indicates that by 2050, the property will be well within the 100-year flood plain.

Location of 180 Water Street within 100-year floodplains. Adapted from: NYC Economic Development Corporation

This means that while there currently is at least a 0.2% chance that the property is flooded by a storm surge in any given year, over time this risk rises to at least 1%. Therefore, let’s assume δ is 99.8% and 1-δ is 0.2% in year 1, but by year 51, δ is 99% and 1-δ is 1%. With the introduction of a seawall, let’s assume δ rises to 100%80 so that year 1 revenues and costs are: revenue(vulnerable) = δ * revenue(good) + (1 − δ) * revenue(bad) cost(vulnerable) = δ * costs(good) + (1 − δ) * costs(bad) revenue(protected) = δ₁ * revenue(good) + (1 − δ₁) * revenue(bad) cost(protected) = δ₁ * costs(good) + (1 − δ₁) * costs(bad)

80 A perfectly reliable seawall is assumed for illustrative purposes. In practice, it may be necessary to use a δ that is slightly less than 100% to account for seawall performance variability.

revenue(vulnerable) = 99.8% * $27, 744, 840 + (0.2%) * $25, 432, 770 = $27, 740, 216 cost(vulnerable) = 99.8% * $9, 030, 960 + (0.2%) * $9, 067, 560 = $9, 031, 033 revenue(protected) = 100% * $27, 744, 840 + (0%) * $25, 432, 770 = $27, 744, 840 cost(protected) = 100% * $9, 030, 960 + (0%) * $9, 067, 560 = $9, 030, 960

Let’s further assume: an interest rate (r) equal to the 10-year average of 30-year, fixed mortgage rates,81 which was 4.04% as of April 30, 2020; a rate of income growth (g₁) of 2%; a rate of expenses growth (g₂) of 3%; and a depreciation rate (d) equal to the IRS standard depreciation rate for commercial properties of 2.564%.82

Lastly, while the Lower Manhattan Resilience Study predicts that by 2100, 180 Water will be inundated daily with up to three feet of water during high tide, effectively 83 rendering the property worthless, it expects no significant regular inundation by 2050.

81 See Freddie Mac. (2020, May 14). 30-year fixed rate mortgage average in the United States. 82 The literature suggests IRS depreciation assumptions exceed the rate of economic depreciation. For the sake of favoring conservative assumptions, this model uses the IRS rate instead of a smaller, more accurate rate. For more information on the economic rate of depreciation for multi-family properties, see Fisher, J., Brent, S., Jerrold, S., & Webb, R. (2005). Analysis of Economic Depreciation of Multi-Family Property. Journal of Real Estate Research, Vol. 27(No. 4), 355–369. 83 A fully flooded property may still have some theoretical value, but how to quantify this remains an area of further speculative research.

Location of 180 Water Street within the 2100 high tide flood area. Adapted from: NYC Economic Development Corporation

So for years 1-50, let’s assume 훋 equals 100% and from years 51-100, 훋 declines from 84 100% to 0% at a constant annual rate. With a seawall, let’s assume 훋 remains at 100% indefinitely.85 Therefore:

∞ ∞

NP V = ∑ κt revenue(vulnerable) − ∑ κt costs(vulnerable) (1+.0404−.02+.02564)t (1+.0404−.03+.02564)t t=1 t=1

= $331,700,954

∞ ∞ NP V ₁ = ∑ κ₁t revenue(protected) − ∑ κ₁t costs(protected) (1+.0404−.02+.02564)t (1+.0404−.03+.02564)t t=1 t=1

= $352,043,098

84 Year 50 is an arbitrary threshold used here based on data included in the Economic Development Corporation’s report. Improved vulnerability data, as provided by First Street’s models described later in this paper, could be used to provide more refined calculations. 85 As was the case for δ, it may be necessary to use a value less than 100% for 훋 to account for seawall performance variability.

The difference of the two NPVs yields a value of $20,342,143, or just over 6% of the property’s current value. While this represents the largest special assessment that could be charged, the city government might choose to only charge a fraction of this calculated value to insulate itself from legal attacks asserting the assessment is not “roughly proportional” to the value received. The government may also provide the property owner with payment plan options that would permit one-time lump sum payments, or smaller payments over time, potentially with accrued interest.86

The following chart summarizes the special assessment formula and how it applies to 180 Water Street:

Variable Value(s) 180 Water Notes Source(s) income Estimated monthly income (rent) $2,312,070 NYC DOF tax assessor data expenses Estimate of regular, monthly $752,580 NYC DOF tax expenses (maintenance, operations, assessor data taxes, debt service, etc.) repairs Equals 30 years of actuarially fair $1220*30 Zone AE ; FEMA: 2020 NFIP annual insurance premium Post-FIRM, Rate Tables payments Regular Program, Basic Coverage, Maximum building and contents

κ Probability of avoiding regular 100% (years FEMA Flood inundation 1-50) maps, Declining NYC EDC from 100% Projections -> 0% (years 51-100) 0% (years 101- ∞ )

86 Governments would also need to decide if assessments occur only once in relation to the adaptation project’s initial construction, or if subsequent, periodic assessments could also be levied in relation to the infrastructure’s ongoing maintenance. Additional legal analysis is needed to determine if there is a sufficient legal nexus between ongoing maintenance and assessments used to pay for affordable housing development, or if these subsequent charges would need to be spent on maintenance itself.

κ₁ Probability of avoiding regular 100% NYC EDC inundation with seawall projection

δ Annual probability of no flood 99% Declining FEMA Flood from 99.8% maps, NYC EDC ->99% projection (years 1-50); 99% (years 51- ∞ )

δ₁ Annual probability of no flood with 100% NYC EDC seawall projection

r Interest rate 4.04% 10-year Freddie Mac average of 30-year, fixed mortgage rates as of 4/30/20

g1 Rate of income growth 2% < expenses Standard in the growth literature

g2 Rate of expenses growth 3% > income Standard in the growth literature

d Depreciation rate 2.564% Annual rate IRS depreciation of rules for depreciation commercial for properties commercial property over 39 years

These calculations provide a conceptual model for RISAHs, a version of which could be refined and adapted by the New York City government or other municipal governments to begin to quantify special assessments. Advanced estimation strategies are under development and could help city governments incorporate more refined assumptions into their assessment calculations. For example, in March 2020, First Street Foundation announced that it is getting ready to release a “National Flood Model,” which will be capable of calculating and quantifying flood risk across individual properties throughout the United States. The model will integrate the major climate-induced flooding types (tidal, precipitation, riverine, and hurricane storm surge), and variations in how much wetter or drier specific geographies are projected

to become over time. The model layers additional spatial data, including elevations, historic flooding, and planned resilience infrastructure to generate property- or neighborhood-level assessments of inundation statistics through 2050 and relative flood risk. First Street is also planning to incorporate this information into “Flood Factor,” an online visualization tool that could help members of the public assess climate risks as they make decisions about investing in their homes (Seiberg and Porter, 2020). Expert-produced models like these could help city governments create their own special assessment assumptions and corroborate the value capture amounts they calculate. Improved data may also enable city governments to justify less conservative assumptions, resulting in larger assessment values.

Justifying the Assessment Levied

Regardless of the assumptions used, property owners will likely contest the amount of their assessments. A review of the literature regarding Hurricane Sandy’s effect on New York City property values provides empirical evidence that could serve as a starting point for defending the RISAHs calculated.

Borate’s (2018) preliminary analysis of the market for single-family homes in Staten Island found that the value of properties within severely damaged areas declined by as much as 24% compared to values before the storm and that values were slower to bounce back than those of properties outside of severely damaged areas. Regarding sale prices of small residential properties in New York City, Gibson, Mullins, and Hill (2018) found that those that experienced flooding during Sandy saw prices decline by 8-13%, and those that were not flooded but were subsequently included in FEMA’s 2013 floodplain maps declined by roughly 18%. Ortega and Taspinar (2018) found an immediate resale price penalty of 17-22% for properties damaged by Sandy. While this depreciation lessened somewhat over time, even properties within flood zones that were not damaged experienced a sustained 8% drop in resale values.

Much of the existing research of Sandy’s effects on property values focus on single-family homes, or other smaller-scale residential properties affected by the storm. Questions may arise, therefore, regarding the applicability of these findings to higher density properties, properties not directly affected by the storm, and/or properties closer to the city center that would be protected by the proposed Lower Manhattan resilience infrastructure. However, Barr, Cohen and Kim’s (2017) analysis of repeat sales for nearly all open market transactions from 2003-2014 found strong evidence of post-Sandy depreciation for each of these three property types. In fact, they find that for all property types, including multi-family residential properties, the resale value of

those closest to the city center (the Empire State building) reacted more negatively to the storm. The same was true for census tracts with better transit access and higher resident incomes. The researchers attribute this correlation to the greater mobility of higher-income people whose preference for proximity to the city center might respond more readily to shocks than lower-income residents who reside in peripheral neighborhoods out of necessity.

Changes to insurance premium rates may also be used to justify assessments. The National Flood Insurance program (NFIP) was created by Congress in 1968 and has been periodically updated in the intervening decades. Today, the program requires properties within NFIP “Special Hazard Flood Areas” (such as 180 Water Street in zone AE) to purchase flood insurance through the federal government, or after 1983, through private “Write Your Own” insurers. Properties built before inclusion in Special Hazard Flood areas are eligible for subsidized rates that are roughly 40% less than “actuarially fair” rates charged to unsubsidized properties developed after inclusion in the maps. Since 2005, the NFIP has accrued more than $30 billion in debt, as the frequency and severity of flooding have increased, and the number of active policies has ballooned (Gibson, Mullins, and Hill 2018).

Just before Hurricane Sandy struck the New York Metropolitan region, Congress passed the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, which sought to eliminate subsidies for premiums through incremental increases. While public outrage led to the passing of the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 that slowed the rate of subsidized premium increases, Biggert-Waters perhaps represents the first stage of insurance premium increases that will further burden property owners in flood-prone areas (Gibson, Mullins, and Hill 2018). Early estimates predicted that flood insurance premiums would increase 5-10k annually for single-family properties, not inside the 2007 risk areas map, but included in the maps that took effect in 2015 (Rand 2013). The prospect of continued increases to actuarially fair rates may further help substantiate potential resilience special assessments that a government might levy.

This review of Hurricane Sandy’s effect on New York City property values and changes to the National Flood Insurance Program suggest that the real financial damage property owners may experience as climate change worsens may range anywhere from several thousand dollars to 8-24% of a property’s value. In the case of 180 Water Street, we calculated a roughly 6% decline in property value, an amount below the lower end of these empirical findings.

Spending Assessment Revenues on Housing

It is exciting to consider how much funding for expanded housing security initiatives in climate-fortified areas RISAHs could potentially generate and what kind of impact these resources could have. The Economic Development Corporation estimates that across the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resilience Study Area, 37% of properties will be at risk of a 100-year storm surge by the 2050s, representing a total assessed value of 87 $13 billion. Implementing a special assessment equal to only half of the 6% of current value calculated in the 180 Water Street example would generate up to $390,000,000 of resources for affordable housing uses in lower Manhattan alone.

Combining these funds with existing state and federal resources (such as LIHTC) in accordance with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s (HPD) new construction development programs could potentially pay to 88 build nearly 2,000 units of deeply affordable housing from the ground up. Spending this money preserving existing affordable units could stretch it even further. While the cost of extending the life of existing affordable housing varies greatly according to a number of factors, including the affordability programs originally used, the physical condition of the building, and the willingness of the building owner to negotiate extended affordability with the city, recent preservation efforts in nearby neighborhoods may indicate the scope of what is possible. In 2015, HPD committed $220 million to extend the affordability of 5,000 units of housing at Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood (Schwartz, 2019). Assuming slightly more expensive costs, the RISAH funds estimated here could preserve nearly 8,000 units of existing affordable housing. Alternatively, this money could also fund roughly 700 housing vouchers, assuming a rate of $2,930 a month for a 89 two-bedroom apartment (equivalent to the federal small area fair market rent for 180 90 Water Street’s zip code) for a term of at least 15 years. This new voucher source

87 Lower Manhattan coastal resiliency study. (2019). New York City Economic Development Corporation. https://edc.nyc/project/lower-manhattan-coastal-resiliency 88 HPD term sheets are currently written to provide $80,000-$150,000 of city subsidy per unit of new construction housing, depending on the program used and the affordability level of the unit. See HPD’s term sheet webpage for more information. 89 HUD calculates and updates annually a database of small area fair market rents used for federal housing programs. 90 Additional Fair Housing law enforcement may also be needed in this scenario, to reduce illegal landlord discrimination on the basis of source of income to ensure voucher tenants can access apartments in the assessment district.

could help reduce pressure on federal Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher waiting lists, 91 which are tens of thousands of applicants long at any given moment.

Housing policy experts would need to determine exactly how these funds could be best deployed in the specific geographic district subject to a RISAH. In some areas, new construction of affordable housing may be the most prudent use, given the relative availability of land and the needed zoning density for multi-family housing. In other areas, preservation of existing affordable housing might be more relevant, giving the existence of income-restricted housing stock that is at risk of being deregulated. Or, in some places RISAH funds could provide a meaningful infusion of cash for much-needed capital repairs due to the accumulation of years of deferred maintenance 92 across the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) portfolio.

The significance of these and other possibilities under a RISAH framework is that they could be achieved at a much more meaningful scale than otherwise might be possible in such an expensive housing market due to current political and financial constraints. While existing incentive programs such as Affordable New York and the city’s voluntary inclusionary housing program generate a few hundred units annually in neighborhoods south of Central Park (Madar, 2015) they are often too few and too dispersed to enable meaningful social networks to form among people of different income brackets. The scale that RISAHs could afford would enable even more lower-income tenants to gain access to exorbitantly high-income neighborhoods, which could have profound implications for New York’s ability to affirmatively further fair housing under the Fair 93 Housing Act.

As a new source of funding, perhaps RISAHs could even entice the city government to expand truly decommodified models of affordable housing, such as Community Land Trusts (CLTs), which have only been developed at a small scale in New York City so far. This is partly due to the high cost of land as well as the city’s concern that CLT operators do not have the experience and capacity to develop public land slated for major affordable housing development. If RISAH funds could provide a gateway for the expansion of CLTs or other radical housing models that give low income people and

91 Gannon, D. (2018, May 10). The city will issue new Section 8 vouchers for the first time in two years. 6sqft. 92 Pereira, S. (2019, December 20). City warns nycha could need double the cash for repairs in coming years. 93 For more on the city’s efforts to affirmatively further fair housing, see the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s “Where we Live” webpage.

the public an ongoing stake in the governance of land,94 perhaps the city could begin to realize a truly transformative vision of resilience.

Operationalizing RISAHs: Additional Considerations and the Role of Design

Implementing RISAHs would trigger a number of additional policy challenges beyond those described in the framework outlined above. While this paper has amplified criticisms of landscape and urban design’s contributions to environmental gentrification and the shortcoming of the fields’ approaches to equitable resilience, designers would play crucial roles in overcoming some of these additional obstacles.

Designing for Density

It is inevitable that in many areas where RISAHs might be implemented, zoning density would need to be increased to enable a substantial influx of new affordable housing. Density increases tend to be controversial, especially in wealthier communities, and especially when affordable housing would be enabled by such zoning changes (Scally and Tighe, 2015). Yet in many high opportunity areas that might be earmarked for public investments in adaptation, such as wealthy neighborhoods full of single-family homes along Long Island’s North and South Shores that have resisted affordable housing development in the past, these changes would be critical to enable the creation of multi-family, low-income housing.

Even within New York City proper, a place far more tolerant of both density and affordable housing than most other communities in the United States, many city residents have been wary of recent attempts to increase density to facilitate the creation of more affordable housing. In 2015, the de Blasio administration commenced the process of modifying the city’s zoning code with a series of changes known collectively as “Zoning for Quality and Affordability” (ZQA) and “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing” (MIH). The proposals were intended to reduce zoning barriers, and in some instances permit taller, larger buildings, to enable more affordable housing to be created across the city.

The process was initially hampered by the mammoth task of communicating a long list of highly technical, granular zoning changes to skeptical communities across the entire city, as ZQA and MIH would have city-wide implications. When the proposals first

94 For more information on Community Land Trusts and other models of decommodified, collectively controlled land, see DeFilippis, J. (2004). Unmaking Goliath: Community control in the face of global capital. Routledge. Ch. 4 “Collective Ownership of Housing,” pp. 87- 111.

began their public approvals process towards the end of 2015, all five of the city’s borough boards and borough presidents and a majority of its 59 community boards voted to reject one or both policies, in part because of fears surrounding an influx of 95 taller buildings in neighborhoods wary of added density.

MIH and ZQA’s initial rejection was an embarrassment for the administration and for a period of time suggested that the city’s inability to successfully explain critical policy to the public might threaten the success of the mayor’s ambitious affordable housing 96 development goals. Yet ongoing community engagement coordinated by the Department of City Planning, an agency largely composed of planning professionals with design training, gradually helped clarify the purpose and expected effects of the policies. Through countless presentations that relied on visual representations of the proposed changes, subsequent iterations of ZQA and MIH eventually received the various layers of approval required for formal adoption in June of 2016.

Conceptual images used in public meetings to convey the proposed Zoning for Quality and Affordability zoning text amendments. Source: New York City Department of City Planning

95 Ngo, E. (2015, December 20). Communities in uproar against housing plan. Newsday. 96 Grynbaum, M. M., & Navarro, M. (2015, December 10). Mayor de Blasio seeks to rebuild momentum for affordable housing plan. The New York Times.

Successful implementation of RISAHs would require innovative strategies for generating broad public support for similar zoning efforts that in some instances might require even more drastic density increases than ZQA and MIH. Urban designers would likely need to play an important role working with communities to envision what this density might look like and where it might be best situated within a RISAH district. The process would be crucial for ensuring that development occurs in a way that centers community stakeholders’ concerns and interests, while still achieving the density needed to deliver transformative levels of affordable housing.

Urban designers are well equipped to strike such a balance. If designers could generate the same kind of enthusiasm for RISAHs and the density they might require that the Sasaki team elicited for its resilience proposals in Asbury Park, it is plausible that lasting community ties premised upon a collective understanding of the need to address pressing social and environmental challenges could be forged. In a best-case scenario, the success of designer-led community engagement surrounding density increases could help contribute to the kind of coalition building between climate and housing advocates needed to advance both causes.

Spatial Considerations of RISAH Districts

Implementing RISAHs would also require further consideration of their spatial implications and how they can be best leveraged under the goals of a RISAH policy. A major challenge regarding the implementation of adaptation strategies such as berms, levies, and seawalls is that by protecting one territory from flooding, water is diverted to other areas up- or downstream from the resilience intervention (Yarina, 2018). Such a phenomenon might have grave implications in coastal urban areas where networks of adjacent communities may not all receive the same level of investment in adaptation and communities left unprotected may suffer even worse flooding risk due to their neighbors’ constructed resilience. In New York, for example, the East Side Resiliency Project has already been upgraded from a floodable berm to an impermeable seawall, 97 which might worsen storm surges for nearby communities during future climate disasters.

The RISAH framework this paper puts forward relies upon this relationship to establish the legal nexus between charging special assessments in a place like Lower Manhattan and using the money on affordable housing development to mitigate negative

97 Bennington-Castro, J. (2017, September 19). Walls won’t save our cities from rising seas. Here’s what will. NBC News.

environmental impacts associated with the project, such as increased displacement risk elsewhere in the city. Yet much more work is needed both to fully consider the actual scope and nature of displaced flooding risk and to determine how affordable housing development should fit into this picture.

Landscape architects are well equipped to conduct such analyses, given that their discipline is a bridge between human and ecological systems. In the tradition of Ian McHarg, landscape designers would be poised to deploy the tools of suitabilities analysis (McHarg, 1969) and site and systems mapping that has emerged from this tradition to evaluate the downstream effects of resilience infrastructure on surrounding communities. These kinds of studies would also be useful for determining if affordable housing funded through RISAHs should be in the same ‘resilience zone’ as the projects they are attached to or, in some cases, if it would be wiser (yet still legally justified) to have this housing located elsewhere. For instance, while some communities may be targeted for climate adaptation and associated RISAHs, perhaps it would be more suitable to locate the resulting affordable housing someplace better served by transit, closer to jobs, or with less underlying climate vulnerability. Landscape designers could assist with conducting the kind of analysis that would demonstrate the legally necessary, rational relationship between the 1) location generating the RISAH resources and 2) the location receiving the resulting affordable housing development. Designers’ skill sets would also be useful for facilitating the complex inter-community engagement processes that would be necessary to coordinate such a chain of development. The outcome could be a more efficient and effective expenditure of RISAH resources.

Replicability and Wisdom of Special Assessments

Given how unusually lucrative properties are in Lower Manhattan, it is likely that RISAHs in other neighborhoods might not generate nearly as much money as was projected above, especially in places that already have substantial affordable housing stock that might be exempted from RISAH payments. This may be true to an extent, but producing new affordable housing in neighborhoods farther outside of the center city is also cheaper, with the cost of land being the biggest declining variable, and vouchers and even construction costs also being somewhat less expensive. Additionally, in suburban communities outside of New York, RISAHs could serve as somewhat of a bargaining chip that helps governments entice communities that have been resistant to affordable housing development and integration, but who are interested in being the recipients of climate resilience infrastructure, to open their doors to more serious desegregation efforts. While RISAH charges and affordable housing

requirements could also discourage some anti-housing communities from supporting new resilience infrastructure, governments would have the latitude to determine how to strategically deploy the policy to avoid such outcomes.

Still, RISAHs are not a panacea for New York’s housing woes; while significant, the resources they generate would be finite and could not take the place of sustained government support for housing initiatives and other racial and economic justice legislation, services, and programs. City officials would need to exercise caution when implementing RISAHs and weigh the tradeoffs of what policy objectives they could actually help achieve in particular parts of the city.

For example, questions have arisen regarding whether BID funds have replaced city agency expenditures in the areas that have them, resulting in no net increase in investment in a neighborhood (Rogowsky and Gross 2000). If RISAHs resulted in cuts to existing city budgets for affordable housing production, the entire value of the program could be rendered moot. Likewise, in some areas, the levying of special assessments might be a burden for low and moderate income homeowners. How these fees are applied must be considered with the vulnerability of various populations in mind. They should not create additional barriers to homeownership and wealth accumulation for low and moderate income households and people of color. Likewise, they should not threaten existing homeownership of these and other groups.

Furthermore, there are also specific concerns that some BIDs wield too much power over their districts and are fundamentally undemocratic. For example, the city’s largest BID, which encompasses areas surrounding Grand Central Station, has been embroiled in controversy for most of its existence due to the fact that most of the district’s residents (all of those who are not business owners) do not have representation on the BID’s board. Because the board controls many services provided within the district, including trash removal, public security, homeless outreach, and other governmental functions, there are concerns that the BID has supplanted democratic governance for undemocratic institutions. The board also controls the nearby 34th Street and Bryant Park Bids, raising fears that too much of midtown Manhattan’s routine operations are beyond the purview of public control (Briffault and Reynolds, 2016). It is conceivable that if BIDs were set up to administer RISAHs, their sheer size (which would likely be much larger than the typical BID’s associated commercial corridor) and the scope of their related adaptation infrastructure might further cede democratic and public control to private stakeholders.

Conclusion: What about Property Taxes?

Given all of these concerns and the relative complexity of establishing and administering RISAHs, it becomes prudent to ask: Should the city just tax property owners more instead? Increasing property taxes would certainly be an easier policy to administer as a way to harness wealth to automatically generate resources for worthy causes such as affordable housing. It would also be more transparent, clearer, and more easily understood by the public. There would potentially be fewer overhead costs, less litigation, and fewer equity concerns. RISAHs of course have the advantage of not being subject to tax uniformity regulations, enabling specific property owners to be charged commensurate with how much adaptation infrastructure is deemed to benefit them relative to others. RISAHs are also generally exempt from state tax expenditure limits, and might be more politically palatable to implement than sweeping tax increases. But these advantages intrinsic to special assessments might not outweigh their shortcomings, especially if meaningful property tax reform has the potential for moving forward in New York City.

New York University’s Furman Center and its affiliates have contributed significant research in recent years underscoring major opportunities to bolster the city’s tax revenue through revised tax policy. The center notes that some of the city’s highest value properties in its most expensive neighborhoods are significantly undervalued by the Department of Finance’s methodology for estimating the market value of co-ops and due to existing caps on annual ad-valorem tax increases.98 Related research also highlights that the current tax structure favors homeowners over other property owners, and that existing tax assessment caps are regressive and often benefit new, as opposed to existing homeowners. These findings have both spatial and racial implications in a segregated city like New York (Hyashi, 2014).

In 2012, the Citizens Budget Commission outlined several options for how these inequities could be remedied while still increasing the city’s overall tax revenues.99After several years of limited traction, these longstanding policy concerns received a new platform when Mayor de Blasio convened the New York City Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform, a body charged with the task of reviewing all aspects of the city’s tax policy and proposing changes to make the system simpler and fairer, without

98 Been, V., Hayashi, A., & Yager, J. (2013). Shifting the Burden: Examining the Undertaxation of Some of the Most Valuable Properties in New York City. NYU Furman Center. 99 Hayashi, A. (2012). Options for Property Tax Reform: Equitable Revenue Raising Reforms for New York City’s Property Tax. Citizens Budget Commission.

reducing the city’s revenues.100 In January 2020, the Commission released its first proposals, which would raise taxes for many of the city’s homeowners, especially those living in higher value neighborhoods.

While such changes could engender the kinds of equitable outcomes that feel so elusive due to seemingly scarce resources, the chance they are ratified remains deeply uncertain. So far, state legislators (who need to approve the reforms) have been lukewarm to the proposals. It is unclear if Mayor de Blasio still retains enough political capital to broker a deal with tax reform’s skeptics before his term expires.101

Given the crossroads tax reform currently faces, perhaps RISAHs could be most valuable as a way to help sway public opinion towards supporting these progressive measures. Perhaps the threat of special assessments could be used as a tool to negotiate more equitable outcomes, including the adoption of improved tax policy, in climate-vulnerable areas. Perhaps at their most fundamental level, RISAHs could help show us what a world might look like if we were able to harness more resources to fund worthwhile programs that have never been operated at the scale they deserve.

Regardless of whether RISAHs are implemented outright or used as part of a broader resource-negotiation strategy, local governments must be resolute in their commitment to a vision of environmental justice that centers safe, affordable housing for the most vulnerable members of our communities. In some instances, it may be necessary for local governments to threaten to leave wealthy property owners to their own devices for climate protection if they hinder attempts to ensure that resilience is combined with robust housing security measures. If too little is done to change the current paradigm of resilience investments, we can assume that adaptation infrastructure will be created in a way that excludes many of the people who need protection and support the most, and who are least equipped to withstand the shocks of a warming planet. An alternative to this highly stratified future is possible but will require creativity and bold action to ensure that equitable ecological and social resilience meaningfully advance, hand-in-hand.

100 For more information, see the Commission's webpage. 101 Fitzsimmons, E. G., Haag, M., & Mays, J. C. (2020, January 31). Battle lines quickly form over radical property tax proposal. The New York Times.

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