$10B plan to save city from rising ocean

Mayor de Blasio proposed extending the South Street Seaport area by two city blocks into the East River, part of a $10 billion effort to fend off rising sea levels as a result of climate change.

“We had to find something that would work, no matter how expensive or ambitious it was,”he said Thursday at a press conference downtown.

The plan, part of a resilience study released Thursday, calls for extending the shoreline by a maximum of 500 feet, or two city blocks. The new segment of shoreline, which would be 20 feet or above current sea levels, would serve as a flood barrier during storms, but it could also be home to buildings, including private development, de Blasio acknowledged.

But it will be necessary to keep lower Manhattan from being underwater, he argued, saying the city’s study had found that by 2100, 20% of the streets in area would experience daily tidal flooding, even in sunny weather.

“This is the existential threat. This is the core issue we all must face as aggressively as humanly possible,” de Blasio said.

The plan, announced six years after Hurricane Sandy swamped the city, may sound familiar to some New Yorkers — in 2013, Mayor Bloomberg proposed a similar project dubbed “Seaport City.” That plan would have leveraged private development on the new land to pay for the massive expense of building it.

De Blasio said whether the new land would contain private developments depended on whether the federal government would pony up any cash for the plan.