From the NYC Independent Budget Office's Web Blog:
The Mayor’s March 2011 report Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan forecast the coming of storms like Sandy and the potential affects: “The rise in sea level and increased frequency and magnitude of coastal storms will likely cause more frequent coastal flooding and inundation of coastal wetlands as well as erosion of beaches, dunes, and bluffs.” A few weeks later, in an update to PlaNYC, the warnings were reinforced: “As a city with 520 miles of coastline—the most of any city in America—the potential for more frequent and intense coastal storms with increased impacts due to a rise in sea level is a serious threat to New York City.”
Yet even as City Hall grappled with these concerns it continued to put substantial resources into major development projects on the waterfront, rezoning sites as manufacturing declined— including some in prime areas for flooding, the so-called Zone A evacuation areas. Just one month before Sandy struck the city, Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan by private developers to build a $500 million complex on city-owned land on Staten Island’s North Shore that would include the world’s largest Ferris wheel as well as a hotel and outlet mall. Part of the site sits in a floodplain.
An even larger development project is planned on the Coney Island waterfront, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Sandy. The city has rezoned the area to allow the development of hotels, housing, and a new amusement park, and has allocated more than $400 million for sewer upgrades, land acquisition, lighting, boardwalk and park improvements, and other projects to foster the redevelopment plan. On the Queens waterfront, the city is investing $147 million in the Hunters Point South project, which also sits in Zone A. Already under construction, Hunters Point South includes 5,000 apartments, a 1,100-seat school, and retail space.
Photo from LiQCity
5 comments:
Waterfront development or waterfront dumping?
Build projects in a class "A" flood zone
That's one way to accomplish ethnic cleansing in a democracy, without tipping off the rest of the civilized world that Americans do it too!
Wash those undesirables, living in affordable housing, into the drink!
Time for Jimmy Van Bramer to stop sending us his cute wedding pictures and those carefully posed PR stunts with carefully selected community groups ...
and start to answer some tough questions about:
(1) waterfront development next to Newtown Creek
(2) waterfront development above toxic brown fields.
People in LIC are starting to talk - time to nip things in the bud Jimmy.....
The community board and all the elected officials will act like nothing is changed.
The Queens weeklies will talk about the future waterfront development with glowing terms.
The people in Queens will say nothing negative, indeed, they will say things positive about the need for affordable housing, supermarkets, senior residence, jobs, waterfront access, in short, spit and regurgitate whatever words are placed in front them.
Nothing will change. Its Queens.
only the school is up. The other building haven't broken ground.
Seems to me business as usual!
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