As part of a $60 billion federal aid package for states hit by 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, New York and New Jersey are getting nearly $1 billion to protect their coastlines, particularly in and around Manhattan. Katie Valentine looks at where that money is going:
The $920 million is being distributed to resilience projects that were decided upon through a federal competition called Rebuild by Design. The competition awarded money to six projects, with the largest chunk going to a project called “the Big U,” which aims to build a 10-mile protective barrier around lower Manhattan. The point of the barrier, which will be composed of levees and berms, will be to protect the region from storm surge and flooding, but the project’s creators — architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group — are also focusing on the utility and aesthetics of the wall, factoring in greenspace and protective walls that would be “decorated by neighborhood artists” into their proposal. …
Another of the winning Rebuild by Design projects will install breakwaters, or partially submerged barriers, off the south shore of Staten Island.
The “Living Breakwaters” will dull the severity of storm surge and create new habitat for fish, oysters and lobsters. The proposal also plans on building a network of “water hubs” on the shore near the breakwaters. These would act as recreational parks, providing opportunities for kayaking and other activities in the calm water created by the breakwaters, along with providing space for birdwatching and outdoor classrooms and labs.
Justin Davidson breaks down how much of that cash is going to each project:
The keeper of the purse strings was Shaun Donovan, the Obama administration’s housing secretary and Sandy reconstruction czar, who recently became budget chief — and it was Donovan who popped up yesterday to announce the awards: $355 million for those lower Manhattan berms, designed by the Danish architecture firm BIG and its partners; $230 million for a full package of strategies to protect Hoboken, from a team led by the Dutch firm OMA; $60 million for those Staten Island reefs; $20 million for a plan to safeguard the Hunts Point Market — and so on.
Even with all that promised money, pushing some of these projects closer to reality won’t be easy. In Hoboken, public funds will need to leverage a much larger pile of private investment, which makes the plan vulnerable to economic fluctuations. The Manhattan project, a multi-stage piece of green riverside infrastructure, will mean whipping together a fractious choir of bureaucrats, community boards, the Army Corps of Engineers, activists, obstructionists, NIMBYites, and environmentalists. Still, Henk Ovink, the tireless Dutch water management expert who runs the program, claims to relish the obstacles.
(Video of the “Big U” via Rebuild by Design)
The Dish 