How Hoboken Is Responding to Climate Change

Tiffany Hanssen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Brian today. This September in New York City was the wettest in over a century. It rained on 14 out of the past 30 days in September. That's according to NY1. That's practically 50% of the month. Of course, if you were in New York City at the end of September, you also remember the severe flooding at the end of that month.

The city was swamped, especially parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Rain effectively shutting down parts of the cities, knocking out subway service, people getting stuck on the BQE, basement apartments flooding, but our neighbors across the Hudson in Hoboken had a very different experience at the end of September. Actually, it was a pretty minor event for Hoboken residents. Now, Hoboken is obviously a far smaller city. Its population is just under 59,000. Eyeballing it on the map, it's roughly the length of between Greenwich Village and Hudson Yards.

Hoboken did do something very unique after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It prioritized stormwater runoff when it rebuilt its infrastructure. Joining me now to talk about the work Hoboken has done since the flooding during Sandy to handle storm surges is Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic, founder of The New York Times initiative Headway, which is focusing on big global challenges and paths to progress, and the author of The Intimate City: Walking New York. Good morning, Michael.

Michael Kimmelman: Good morning. Happy to be here.

Tiffany Hanssen: I want to invite our listeners into this conversation. Michael, we're going to be talking about both city's responses to climate change-related flooding. What do you want to share about your city's resiliency efforts? Call us. 212-433-9692. You can also text that number. Do you live in Hoboken? Did you live in Hoboken during Sandy? How did that storm impact your home and community and what changes are you seeing now? 212-433-9692.

We know a lot of listeners who are following New York City's efforts to mitigate the impact of climate change and rising sea levels are out there, so call us. 212-433-9692. All right. Michael, we're talking about how Hoboken really tried to tackle climate change in its community. It's being labeled as a bit of a success story in a Times article that your colleague wrote, James Barron wrote, called How Hoboken Got Smart About Climate Change. It's been labeled a success story. Talk to us about that. Why is that?

Michael Kimmelman: Well, I think after Sandy, Hoboken was really underwater. It was left without electricity for days. It caused more than, I think, $110 million in property damage. Of course, Sandy, which was in 2012, was devastating for the whole region and killed people as well. After that, there was an effort on the federal level to try to think up ways to help different parts of this region cope with what had happened. Hoboken is particularly vulnerable because it's basically a bathtub, [chuckles] so it floods very easily. Scientists have forecast that Hoboken is ultimately going to turn into Atlantis.

I think what was really good about Hoboken was that it had begun to think even before Sandy about building parks and some other water-absorbing things. Then after Sandy, with this federal initiative, it took advantage of that and began a much more complex and ambitious program of steps to deal with not just stormwater from the sea, from rising tides, and so forth, but also rainwater, which, for instance, New York has not been able to deal with as well.

Tiffany Hanssen: What were some of those steps? You said there was some construction. I'm assuming that as we talk about this, there's probably work to sewers. Just outline a few of the steps that the city took.

Michael Kimmelman: Sure. I should hasten to add that callers out there who are listening from Hoboken and whose streets were flooded in late September, please don't yell at me for saying that Hoboken is perfect because what Hoboken did was obviously not stop the rain from falling from the sky, but what it did was to figure out ways to deal with these events which are becoming more common, deal with it more expeditiously to get the water out more quickly. That's really the goal here is how quickly can cities recover. That's what Hoboken did so well in late September.

To do that, it did a bunch of stuff. Some of it was repairing its sewers. I think most of us [unintelligible 00:05:07] was not really aware of how the sewers work. In New York City, for instance, the sewers, which were constructed a century ago can handle about 2 inches of rainwater an hour or something like that. These more severe storms, they're just not built to handle that kind of volume. The same was true in Hoboken. What happens when you have that extra water is that the sewers overflow and then you have this environmental crisis as well.

Hoboken went about rebuilding some of its sewers, but it did some other interesting things. For instance, it tried to make safer streets, which New York City has also tried to do fewer pedestrian accidents, more fluidity between cars and bikes, and so forth. In the process, it greened some of those streets as well. It created basins, areas for water to be collected. Those particular changes were very crucial because basically what happens when the water comes from the sky is it falls on hard surfaces like streets and it has nowhere to go so it floods those streets.

If you have some ability for that water to be redirected, then the flooding in the streets is much less. In some ways, the most interesting thing that they did was that they built these parks to have these underground cisterns and wells and pumps so that the parks and playgrounds would serve the city 365 days of the year, but then during these events, they would also be places that would collect millions of gallons of water, hold that water until the tides go down and the rain subside and then the pumps would pump them out. That seems to be what happened in this event.

There was some flooding in the streets, but these parks collected water. One new park, the largest of them called ResilienCity Park which was an $80 million 5-acre project, it collected more than 1.4 million gallons of rainwater, which obviously would have flooded the streets. The result of all of that was that by the afternoon, schools closed on time and the city went about its business. The next day when all the local news cameras came back to see the devastation, there was really no devastation.

Tiffany Hanssen: We're talking about the end of September when we had that rain from Ophelia.

Michael Kimmelman: Exactly. In New York City, those of us who were here remember subway lines being shut down and subways closing. I had a colleague, a Headway colleague actually, whose basement in Brooklyn flooded. It was a different experience.

Tiffany Hanssen: We're talking, listeners, right now about some of the success that Hoboken has seen in its efforts to combat climate change as it relates to stormwater and rising sea levels. We're talking with Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic, about that. We will get to some of what New York City is doing in a minute, but Michael, I want to still ask a couple of questions here about what Hoboken is doing.

In terms of the measures they have implemented, I'm wondering about warning systems. Speaking specifically as we're talking about September's rains from Ophelia, Mayor Eric Adams took some flack for not warning New Yorkers in time. Did Hoboken do anything differently in September and is it part of their larger strategy?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, they did, and they issued lots of warnings in the days before because they saw this coming. That was another difference for sure. I think though that it's worth stepping back because a lot of us, we'll hear a storm is coming and we don't necessarily react to that. You see this as a common response all across the country. Now a hurricane is coming and people just say they're not going anywhere.

I think what Hoboken did, which is really crucial, is to say, "Look, we have to be prepared for this. We have to take steps ahead of time to anticipate these storms happening because they will." There will be events that people will not always prepare for. That's really actually not the way Americans tend to do things. We have had this idea, generally, that we'll deal with a problem after it happens and we'll pay for it at that point, so insurance will pay for it, or FEMA funding will pay for it.

I don't know what that is about us. It's something about maybe just our inherent optimism or our shortsightedness or whatever it is, but this is a very different attitude that essentially we need to think ahead because these things will happen. Hoboken did both. It warned people, but it had also taken these fundamental structural steps. There's one other thing, which I think is really crucial. I found this interesting in reporting this out.

As Caleb Stratton, who's the Hoboken Chief Resilience Officer, that means he's in charge of this sort of thing, said to me, he said, "You pay your cable bill and you expect to get cable. You pay your cell phone bill and you expect to get cell phone service. You pay your taxes, and you expect cities to deal with storms, but in fact, there really is no authority in charge of storms and water." It's divided up. Partly, it's the Department of Transportation, as I said, because water goes into the streets. Partly, it's sanitation.

Hoboken also appointed Stratton to a position that allowed him to talk directly to all of these different departments so essentially centralized a lot of the administration around this. New York does have an excellent climate resilience officer. There are a lot of people in New York, obviously, who deal with this. How well coordinated a system as large as New York's ever could be is a question. Certainly, that also helped Hoboken prepare and helps it bring together the different services, including emergency services, police and fire, so forth, that need to respond quickly.

Tiffany Hanssen: I do want to talk about how we can take the lessons from Hoboken and maybe what parts of those could be scalable to New York City and actually talk about what New York City is doing as well. I want to take a call here from Jane in Hoboken. I want to bring Hoboken in. Good morning, Jane.

Jane: Hello. Good morning. You can hear me?

Tiffany Hanssen: I can hear you. Welcome to the show.

Jane: Great. Thank you. Well, I just wanted to mention that aside from all the investment in resiliency parks and other measures, gates to stop traffic when there's flooding, there was a meeting last night actually. Caleb was actually running the show, and it was a presentation of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection who did a presentation on the Rebuild by Design Hudson River coastal flood risk reduction project. That's a mouthful.

Tiffany Hanssen: That's a mouthful. Yes.

Jane: This is a major project that's going to not only build barriers but also implement changes in our sewer systems. It's a major project, and it was a result of a design competition. I didn't get all the details. I was just a community member listening. If your presenter wants to look into that, I think it seems to me a major success for our future in developing more resiliency.

Tiffany Hanssen: Michael?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, I do know about this meeting too. Just to explain a little bit of that, this federal program was called Rebuild by Design. It started after Sandy and [unintelligible 00:13:56] thing. As I said, it was trying to think through ways to protect these various vulnerable communities that have been impacted. As part of the Rebuild project in Hoboken, they are building walls against flooding from future tidal stuff.

I think there were resolutions last night to try to get some of the remaining impediments to that resolved because the-- not to get too far into the weeds of either New Jersey politics or the geography, but the plan also involves building this very elaborate structure that extends outside Hoboken and into neighboring Jersey City and also into Weehawken. You need other cities to participate in this long 9,000-foot project with floodwalls and gates and another park and so forth.

That's still in the works. Hoboken, I think, is on board in all of this. These efforts, this brings up the point that nature does not care where we've drawn a city boundary or a state or a national border. These ecosystems have their own logic and purpose. Essentially, Hoboken, in order to ultimately protect itself, needs to have the cooperation of the state and the region. We need to think of this as a collective effort, not just something that one city can do on its own. That, I think, is one of the other lessons of Hoboken.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, right. That's an approach that's scalable for New York?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes. Well, the scale, of course, you were 100% right. Hoboken is basically a square mile and New York is so vast. I'm sure Caleb Stratton, the Resilience Officer of Hoboken can walk down the hall to talk to somebody in the Department of Transportation there, and in New York City, I don't know, some 10,000 people work for the Department of Transportation. New York is just a different matter.

You were talking earlier about budget cuts. New York has to think long-term and has to think about this seriously. There were cuts to the New York City Parks Department as well. Not just the libraries, which were so crucial, by the way, during Hurricane Sandy. Libraries were sanctuaries. They were safe spaces for people to go, who had been flooded out, who didn't have electricity, and so forth.

Parks are also crucial to the conversation around resilience and the ability of cities to adapt and deal with floods because it's the same principle. They absorb water. It's going to take New York, obviously, a long time. I should also give a shout-out. I think New York has-- it's been doing various things after Sandy, some of them quite ambitious, but it's also been doing a few things around rain. It hasn't quite focused on them as much as Hoboken has, this efforts around rain. They've been building some bioswales and installing some porous concrete [crosstalk].

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, I want to talk with you about that because that's an interesting approach for me. Let's get to that. I just want to remind listeners that we're having a conversation with The New York Times architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, about what lessons could be learned from the approach Hoboken has taken to dealing with stormwater and flooding as it relates to climate change.

We're going to talk here, as I said, about some of what New York City is doing. Also, I want to remind listeners that they can call us at any time with their comments. Do you live in Hoboken? Do you have some insights into what maybe New York City is doing in your neighborhood to address these issues? 212-433-9692. We'd love to hear from you. Michael, we had a text here.

"I was surrounded by water for two days after Sandy in Hoboken without power for a week. I'm glad the city has largely taken flooding seriously, but I wish it would recognize how much its continued preservation or expansion of parking space contributes to flooding. It still experiences directly through runoff and indirectly through emissions. This, to your point about porous surfaces and maybe what New York is doing." There's some interesting work happening around porous services and how we can get this stormwater out of the way faster, right?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, absolutely. Your email or text raises an interesting and important point too about the sense of integration because all these things do relate. Suddenly raising this issue of parking spaces may sound out of left field, but in fact, that's true. Our streets do need to be reimagined in ways that is much more flexible and adaptable for water. One of these things are porous streets. You can't just turn all the streets into porous surfaces, obviously. New York, I think there are projects around the city.

I heard from someone in the city government who told me that through the Department of Environmental Protection and the climate office in the city, we've managed to create some 7,000, 8,000 feet of porous concrete and some--

Tiffany Hanssen: Feet?

Michael Kimmelman: 5,600 bioswales. Yes, feet.

Tiffany Hanssen: Okay.

Michael Kimmelman: Feet, yes, and some 5,600 bioswales. Those numbers are very hard to interpret for me too. What it tells you is we're beginning to make an effort. Obviously, what we need to do here is have a thoughtful, integrated approach that rethinks the use of our streets and what we're going to do about our sewer system that's so enormous. You obviously doing it, redoing sewers in Hoboken is one thing. Doing it here is something else. We're beginning to make some efforts to do that barely.

Tiffany Hanssen: To your point about coming up with a thoughtful, integrated approach, we keep saying New York City is so big. New York City's government is so big. Do you have

any thoughts on how we can rally the troops on this one?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes. It isn't that we don't get things done. After Rebuild, New York got several projects in the works, and they're underway. There's a remarkable project to build some breakwaters off the coast of Staten Island, which is nearing completion. That will really make a big difference in easing the strength of some of those waves, which were so damaging and destroyed houses in Staten Island. At the same time, those breakwaters are encouraging the return of wildlife, of fish, oysters, to those beaches and to that area, which had become barren.

Along the East River in New York, we're rebuilding East River Park, raising that park in order to protect the many public housing projects that had been flooded all along the East River by Sandy. Further up on the East River, another project also from that same effort has basically been completed. There's a new park there called Stuyvesant Cove, which has been rebuilt. You can't say it's deeply beautiful, but it does include some sea walls that will protect the areas around the East Side, where there were also public hospitals that were threatened during Sandy.

There are a couple of other efforts too in Battery Park City. It's not that nothing is happening at all. Things do get done. They just don't necessarily move at the pace of climate change. They meet with a lot of inevitable resistance. Nothing's ever easy in New York, and sometimes that's frustrating. Sandy was in 2012. It's now 2023, and many of these projects are underway, but they won't be done and there's more to be done. We're talking about 20-year time horizons, which is a long time for people to live with the consequences of things that we could see 10 years ago.

Tiffany Hanssen: Last question because as you mentioned we did have that discussion about budget cuts earlier in the last hour. We should say some of the funding for these programs does come from the federal government, right?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes.

Tiffany Hanssen: Just a quick breakdown of like-- because I can hear people saying, "How are we going to pay for all of this?" We did get a what, a $56 million Army Corps of Engineers project approved by the federal government for New York and New Jersey to build floodwalls, right?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes. Look, this 9,000-foot-long floodwall project I just mentioned, Hoboken [unintelligible 00:23:57], that's a $350 million project. I don't know whether all of the money comes from state, but some of it's federal, I believe, too. I was not somebody who has the answer to this, but I will say there's always going to be immediately pressing needs. Look, we are facing a serious budget cut. Everyone has to somehow deal with this. A couple of crucial things are worth thinking about here. One is the cost to us in the long run for not dealing with these things upfront is enormous.

What we do know is for every dollar we invest, and this is something we've seen already and Hoboken is an example, we invest upfront. We save a lot of taxpayer money in the long run. This does have to do with the way we are able to think about things ahead. It's difficult when you have a budget crunch, but it is also worth thinking about, that this is an economic investment that is going to pay off sooner than later.

I'm not suggesting that we put all of our money in fixing the sewers as opposed to police and fire and schools and libraries and so forth, but I do think we do need to have an honest conversation and one that takes a time horizon into account that isn't just the next year or so because these problems are going to recur. We could have another Hurricane Sandy in a year and then what?

Tiffany Hanssen: Michael, I think that's a good place to leave the conversation. Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic and founder of The New York Times initiative Headway, which is focused on big global challenges and paths to progress. He's also the author of The Intimate City: Walking New York. Michael, thanks so much for your time today. We appreciate it.

Michael Kimmelman: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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