COASTAL CHALLENGESManhattan’s Flood Walls Are Almost Done. What Sill Mamdani Do Next?
New York City has more than 500 miles of coastline. The new mayor wants to invest in coastal resilience, but he will have to decide which areas of the city to protect.
New York City has more than 500 miles of coastline. The city’s coastal zone is home to around 1 million people as well as billions of dollars of residential and commercial property, and no two miles of the waterfront are quite the same. The marshy areas of southern Queens, the housing projects in waterfront Brooklyn, and the towers of Manhattan’s Financial District are all vulnerable during high tides and major storm events, and each of these areas is vulnerable in a different way.
The city learned these lessons the hard way in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy sent almost 14 feet of storm surge up New York Harbor and flooded thousands of structures across the five boroughs. In the aftermath of the disaster, the city embarked on one of the most ambitious climate adaptation efforts in U.S. history. Leaders spent billions of dollars to elevate and armor the lower reaches of Manhattan with flood gates and berms, rebuild the destroyed beaches in Queens, and buy out homes in the low-lying neighborhoods of Staten Island.
Each stage of this effort faced delay and controversy, but the post-Sandy effort is now almost complete. The elevated East River Park in Manhattan is now partly open to sunbathers and tennis players. Farther down the island, construction crews are installing rolling-track flood walls that will be deployed during major storm surge events. These flood defenses will be operational by the 2027 hurricane season, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already laying the groundwork for what comes next.
Last month, the mayor announced a major expansion of the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, promising to add almost 70 new staff members to a unit that had been on a shoestring budget under prior mayor Eric Adams. The first members of this new team will deploy the flood gates and clear the coastal zone in the run-up to big storm events.
“There was this huge investment of over a billion dollars to build these gates, and once you build it, you have to maintain it,” said Lisa Garcia, the new commissioner for the Department of Environmental Protection, which will oversee the flood system. (Garcia was the director of Grist’s climate solutions lab from 2019 to 2021 and later worked as a regional administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency.)
