New York Needs a Bailout

A somewhat desperate wish list.

if joe biden wants to start saving the world from fire and flood, he might want to start in New York. Ours is a city with urgent needs, specific plans, and a record of urban innovation. After enduring four years of loathing from a son of Queens, New Yorkers are hoping we can finally talk to an out-of-towner who understands. Biden campaigned on a $2 trillion promise to confront climate change as a clear and present threat. If he can somehow pry cooperation out of the Senate—which looks like it may stay under Mitch McConnell’s control—New York should send him an initial “Build Back Better” to-do list with three items on it: Build Gateway, fix

nycha, and green the shoreline.

There are good reasons to launch a new era in New York. More than 400,000 people live within the floodplain here, and that number will likely double by 2050—not because the population has grown but because the floodplain has. Big cities concentrate pollution and economic activity, so every baby step toward a carbon-neutral metropolis pays multiple rewards. That era begins with Gateway, a tunnel under the Hudson to take the strain off the two ancient, crumbly tubes feeding Penn Station. It’s costly—$10 billion, plus $2 billion to upgrade the old tunnels—and the Obama administration promised to pay for half of it, New York and New Jersey the rest. Trump, motivated by vindictiveness and mystified by the idea of strangers sharing a vehicle, shelved it. Biden, the Whistle-Stop Kid, rider of the rails, can be counted on to get it done.

And not to stop there: Our train network, by far the most efficient and cleanest way of moving freight and carrying passengers, needs to grow, and that will take more than an enthusiastic president and a compliant Congress. Obama’s plan to launch high-speed rail with a Tampato-Orlando segment flamed out when Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, killed the project and returned the government’s $2.4 billion. That won’t happen in New York. And although fixing and expanding public transit costs a lot, not fixing or expanding it costs more. Smooth passage into and out of Manhattan lubricates the flow of Wall Street’s money nationwide: Imagine the Wall Street crisis if the Hudson tunnels failed. Gateway is where economic and environmental benefits align.

Once Biden has started digging the great hole beneath the Hudson, he can turn his attention to public housing, where environmental and social crises meet. The New York City Housing Authority’s 326 complexes are mostly antiquated contraptions that keep their energy use in check mainly via broken boilers. Last spring, nycha residents, confined by the pandemic in moldy apartments with busted exhaust fans, died from covid-19 at twice the citywide rate.

nycha’s perpetual plight has attracted plenty of design creativity and some financial innovation but never enough actual money to get the the elevators fixed. nycha has started tackling the problem, except that announcing (say) a $105 million contract for energy upgrades when you’re facing a $32 billion repair bill is like totaling a fleet of cars and then springing for a new set of spark plugs.

There are valid objections to the “New York first” scenario: our bog of bureaucracy, geological pace, and stratospheric construction costs. Then there’s the fact that $2 trillion is a lot of money but probably not enough to go around. The rest of the country—flood-prone midwestern towns, burned Western states, currentdeprived Puerto Rico, heat-scorched cities, poisoned rivers—needs attention too. But even in the context of a national effort to cope with a global crisis, New York’s size, complexity, and resources make it a lab for large-scale urban adaptation. Like Miami, Houston, and New Orleans, New York can remain livable only by ringing itself with a system of spongy defenses: wetlands, permeable pavers, cisterns, green buffer zones. Landscape architects have been applying these techniques for years in pinpoint interventions, but it’s going to take an all-out mobilization to cope with rising waters in a region threaded with highways and train lines, and fragmented into overlapping jurisdictions and innumerable private parcels.

Other built-up nations do manage to shape the landscape in vast chunks. The Dutch spend $1.5 billion every year preparing for climate change—a significant investment for a country with a population smaller than the New York metropolitan area. In China, an egregious carbon belcher but also a leader in climate-change mitigation, the landscape architect Kongjian Yu has designed ways to demolish concrete channels, terrace riverbanks, plant grasses and trees, and create new wildlife habitats: the so-called Sponge City. New York’s goal can be the same—a network of urban coastal greenery that softens, cools, and cleans.

Last year, Mayor de Blasio rolled out an ambitious proposal to waterproof Manhattan, which included plunking an artificial island in the East River to keep the Financial District dry. That decidedly unspongelike solution was met with a murmur of Yeah, right, in part because federal funding was futile then. Maybe, though, it was a message in a bottle, addressed to a future administration: We’re thinking big, and we’ll be ready when you are.