Designers Call for Coordinated Effort To Improve New York City Region's Flood Resistance
Seven months after miles of New York and New Jersey waterfront were slammed by Superstorm Sandy’s surge, the area's design and planning groups are calling for the creation of a pan-regional entity to organize and lead the effort to deal with flood-resilience and climate change. They also are trumpeting the need for other reforms to eliminate myriad obstacles to climate adaptation, including the creation of a so-called Waterfront Lab to test innovative systems to make flood-prone areas more resilient.
“There is a disaster of different levels of government and some parts of the same government not talking to each other,” said Mark Ginsberg, a principal of the local Curtis+Ginsberg Architects LLP, at the "Future of the City" symposium, held on May 12 in New York City and hosted by the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY).
The problems go beyond barriers to flood-resilience. “New York City’s zoning resolution is old, cumbersome and difficult to understand by professionals and lay people alike,” added Jill Lerner, 2013 AIANY president. “Zoning does not take into account the threat of climate change, and transportation and zoning issues are not being coordinated,” said Lerner, a principal with the local architect-planner Kohn Pedersen Fox.
The AIANY forum was held to introduce two 42-page reports just published by AIANY: Post-Sandy Initiative—Building Better, Building Smarter: Opportunities for Design and Development and A Platform for the Future of the City.
AIANY is using the reports to make sure its voice is heard as local, state and federal government officials plot the next steps to make infrastructure, buildings and the waterfront more resistant to flooding. This week, the New York Dept. of City Planning is expected to release its second round of proposed post-Sandy zoning changes. The Dept. of Buildings is expected to issue proposed building-code changes in the next month or two.
AIANY felt especially left out of the post-Sandy conversation because New York State Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s 30-member NYS 2100 Commission, which issued a report earlier this year on ways to improve the resilience and strength of the state’s infrastructure in the face of natural disasters and other emergencies, did not include a single architect.
To spread the gospel of the design community, AIANY is distributing the reports to local, state and federal government officials and politicians, including the candidates currently running for New York City mayor. “AIANY has identified the 2013 citywide elections as the moment to advance the discussion about the connection of design and public policy,” write Lerner and Rick Bell, AIANY’s executive director, in the foreword of the "Future of the City" report.
Mayoral hopefuls were invited to the May 12 forum, but none came, said Bell.
For the Sandy report, to present a united front, AIANY engaged seven other local design and planning groups to jointly explore solutions for sustainability and resiliency in areas of transportation and infrastructure, housing, critical and commercial buildings, and the waterfront.
The undertaking, led by the AIANY’s design for risk and reconstruction committee, engaged more than 150 volunteers from AIANY, the American Council of Engineering Cos., the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, the New York State Association of Affordable Housing, the American Planning Association, the Regional Plan Association and the Structural Engineers Association of New York.
At the forum, there was criticism of the Federal Emergency Management Agency because its regulations governing the design and construction of housing in flood zones are geared more toward the suburbs and do not fully take into account flood-proofing in the densest urban environment in the U.S. “FEMA lacks material for New York City,” said Ginsberg, co-chairman of the initiative’s housing working group. “We need a FEMA manual for multifamily housing.”
Though FEMA design standards, city building codes and zoning, and federal accessibility guidelines each address flooding to some degree, they are not coordinated and, at times, they contradict each other, says the report.
A huge problem is that some 80,000 buildings in FEMA’s new flood zones don’t meet FEMA requirements for National Flood Insurance. To qualify, thousands of homeowners will have to raise their buildings. Elevating a house could cost 50% to 100% of its value, said Ginsberg, who added that the fix is unaffordable for most homeowners.
For housing, “efforts should be made to develop more affordable flood-proofing options [than raising structures], such as active barriers,” says the report.
In addition, FEMA gave no thought to the accessibility rules under the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, said Ginsberg. “If you raise a house five feet, you would need a total 70-foot-long ramp with landings to meet the law,” he said. To make matters worse, New York City’s building code has banned lifts for people with disabilities.
The AIANY initiative is recommending that New York City permit handicapped lifts in flood zones and that wet flood-proofed buildings have an emergency exit at the first floor above the flood elevation. In addition, as an alternative to flood-proofing individual buildings, the code should allow block-wide or neighborhood-wide flood-proofing.
Though the report offers dozens of design, zoning, code and policy recommendations, funding sources for the proposed initiatives are not addressed, except broadly. “Funding will be an ongoing issue,” said landscape architect Denisha Williams, a principal of Being Here Landscape Architecture & Environmental Design and co-chairwoman of the initiative’s waterfront working group.
"We have [as a community] a limited pot of money and lots of ideas, with a very limited discussion of how much money we have and what we want to do,” added Ginsberg.
As far as research and development is concerned, the report says, “The work of the Waterfront Lab could be an important contribution to how the city assesses new proposals that have never been put in place here—efforts that could advance flexible and sustainable waterfront planning and design for the future—based on best practices around the world.”
The lab could study proposals for sea walls and wave walls, natural and armored dunes, permeable waterfront parks in floodplains and model waterfront districts with distributed infrastructure, among other systems.
“We see the projects as being funded from both conventional and innovative funding sources amalgamated from the public sector as well as public-private partnerships backed by private and philanthropic resources,” said Williams.
As food for thought, the document offers various examples of flood control. Among these examples is Tokyo’s cavernous, underground flood-diversion facility, called G-Cans Project or the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel. The world’s largest underground floodwater-diversion facility, it is designed to fill with water during typhoon season and heavy rains.
Another flood-mitigation system is an underground parking garage at Museum Park in Rotterdam that accommodates 1,500 cars or, when necessary, can contain 10 million liters of water.
For resiliency, “a full-spectrum response is necessary,” said architect Illya Azaroff, founding partner of +LAB, Brooklyn, N.Y., and co-chairwoman of the AIANY design for risk and reconstruction committee.
