As a highly developed, dense waterfront city with 520 miles of shoreline, New York City is centered directly in the crosshairs of the climate crisis. In addition to the other climate impacts of heat and increased precipitation, the slow, steady, and accelerating rise of sea levels threatens to permanently inundate neighborhoods and infrastructure, while deepening the reach and destruction of more frequent and intense coastal storms. The pandemic also demonstrated the importance and benefits of having access to quality open space. But only 66 percent of New Yorkers are within a five-minute walk to a park and Community District 1 in Brooklyn has one of the lowest amounts of parkland per capita within the city.
Faced with the worsening impacts of climate change, the City must make critical decisions around existing and future development in flood hazard areas, if it is to continue to thrive while safeguarding its residents. At the same time, there is an urgent need to address the lack of urban parks, particularly in underserved neighborhoods.
In RPA’s own Fourth Regional Plan, we called for a combination of resiliency strategies – including zoning changes, and investments in engineered and nature-based solutions – to adequately adapt to our changing coastline and providing access to new open space.
Project Background
With its novel shoreline design, that includes a soft edge with nature-based features, River Ring could serve as a new regional model for rethinking the urban edge for greater resilience and waterfront accessibility.
The proposal would link the existing waterfront parks and esplanades along the East River shoreline in Brooklyn. The creation of a park at River Ring will enhance access for active and passive recreation activities for communities in North Brooklyn. The project would achieve this by connecting a string of public parks and open space that stretches from the Navy Yard to Newtown Creek. The proposal will also enhance the resiliency of these neighborhoods by reducing the impacts from storm surge. By increasing the linear distance of the shoreline, the waterfront park and protective cove will offer multiple touchpoints for dissipating energy and attenuating wave action.
Most of the waterfront properties within the project study area are within the preliminary flood insurance rate maps, and affected by the V zone, where hazard is increased because of wave velocity. Storm surge flooding is projected to increase with sea level rise within the study area and in particular upland along North 4th Street. Throughout the following decades, dozens of properties, most of which are mixed residential buildings, will be affected by the floodplain.
Expand the Scope of Work to Inform Future Projects
The scope of the EIS analysis, should aim to quantify the impacts of different coastal flood risk scenarios, including with and without the proposed land use actions. Under the proposal, the design of the waterfront park and protective cove are likely to reduce the extent of flooding induced by storm surge and sea level rise. The proposed design will not only reduce flood risk within the property itself, but will likely reduce it for properties in the vicinity as well.
To help demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal in mitigating flood risk and to inform future developments, the scope of work for the EIS should include the findings of a hydrologic flood model. By incorporating a hydrologic model into the analysis, the EIS could disclose the number of properties and types of buildings that would be affected by flooding and the associated risk levels under each future scenario. This will help quantify the net beneficial impacts from this project, but also inform future developments in the city that could incorporate comparable shoreline interventions.
Similarly, the open space assessment (Chapter 7 of the Technical Manual), should include additional quantitative and qualitative criteria that go beyond the measurement of open space acres per capita (calculating open space ratios for residents and workers). The proposal would connect a string of high quality waterfront parks serving multiple neighborhoods in Brooklyn. This will enhance each individual park through improved connectivity, in a system where the value will be greater than the sum of its individual parts. Current CEQR guidelines do not require the evaluation of these potential benefits, but in this case the enhanced value through connectivity should be evaluated as a key factor.
Conclusion
We need to see more of this kind of innovation and forward-thinking along our urban coastlines. River Ring could serve as a regional model for rethinking resilience and waterfront access. Including additional analysis will provide useful criteria, and help set new standards for resiliency in development projects, that address both flood risk impacts and increased waterfront access.
