A Climate Change Success Story? Look at Hoboken

A Climate Change Success Story? Look at Hoboken - The New York Times

Headway

This flood-prone city on the Hudson River balances climate infrastructure with resident needs.

Note: This newsletter was sent to readers in November 2023. Headway is publishing the newsletter as an article to bring them together with other newsletters on site. Read them all here.

Dear Headway reader,

In late September, a rain bomb socked the city of Hoboken, N.J., just across the Hudson River from New York City. The storm dumped more than 3.5 inches of rain on a single Friday morning, 1.44 inches of it during high tide. Television crews hustled to film flooded intersections. City officials declared a state of emergency. The morning summoned up memories of 2012, when Hurricane Sandy left Hoboken underwater and without electricity for days, causing more than $110 million worth of property damage. Back then, the city had to call in the National Guard.

But this time turned out to be different. Hoboken weathered the September storm with almost no problem, thanks to the city’s long-term commitment to a federal initiative from 2013 called Rebuild by Design.

A region rebuilding

Sandy killed more than 100 people along the Eastern Seaboard, caused billions of dollars in property damage and shuttered Wall Street. In response, the Obama administration came up with Rebuild, a federal competition that invited international teams of architects and engineers to collaborate with community groups and conceive creative, cutting-edge flood-protection proposals for neighborhoods that Sandy ravaged.

Two years ago, when The Times started Headway, I wrote about a $1.45 billion Rebuild project to tear down and resurrect East River Park in Lower Manhattan. Sandy had ravaged the park and many public housing towers nearby. Water swept from the swollen East River straight over the park and into the towers.

My story recounted how the plan to reimagine the park evolved over years of community meetings and consultations with neighbors. At the 11th hour, city officials decided the park would need to rest on more than eight feet of landfill, which would double as a levee against the rising river. Many Lower East Siders felt betrayed and outraged that saving the park now required felling a thousand mature trees.

The story published while several lawsuits were still pending.

Since then, courts rejected the lawsuits and construction began. City Hall agreed to keep half the park open while the other half was rebuilt, delaying completion until late 2026. The first phase of the park’s rebuild is supposed to be done next year. We’ll check in again after that.

Sea walls lead to sea life

Other Rebuild projects continue, too. Further north, along the East River, where Sandy nearly shuttered public hospitals, sea walls have been installed and neighborhood playgrounds refurbished. Off the south shore of Staten Island, where flooding killed 24 people, new breakwaters in the harbor now protect the area.

SCAPE, a New York landscape architecture firm, designed the stone-and-concrete breakwaters to lessen the impact of future storms. I took a boat out to see them under construction last year, and already oysters and other marine life were making themselves at home on the breakwaters and along what had been a barren coast.

How does it work in a storm?

Hoboken provided the first real test of Rebuild’s resilience efforts in September. The Rebuild plan for that city involved new sewers, parks, cisterns, streets and flood walls.

The latest installment of Headway describes how Hoboken fared during this event. In short: A lot better than New York, where subways flooded and Brooklyn residents waded through thigh-deep water. Other coastal cities may want to take a look Hoboken. During the early stages of its Rebuild efforts, there was intense community opposition, as there was around East River Park. Plans had to be altered. Compromises made.

But the recent rain bomb came and went without much notice. With climate change causing increasing chaos, that seems like pretty much the definition of progress.

— Michael Kimmelman

Revisiting

Evictions

In July, I wrote a story for Headway about how Philadelphia was trying to reduce evictions by requiring landlords to attend mediation with tenants before getting courts involved. Recently, researchers there published the first comprehensive look at this effort, the city’s Eviction Diversion Program.

The program started in 2020, but changed several times, which made it a bit tricky to measure. The Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit focused on communities underserved by financial institutions, reviewed 11,509 diversion cases and found that landlords and tenants who went to mediation were more likely to come to some kind of agreement than if they didn’t. And when they came to terms, tenants were less likely to get an eviction filed against them in court. That, the report said, “made a positive difference in the filing experience of tenants.”

The researchers noted that eviction diversion rolls soared in 2022, which meant a much smaller percentage of cases could be heard in mediation. They also left an important question unanswered: What’s the bang-for-your-buck of diversion compared to other housing interventions?

We also heard from a number readers, including some from Philadelphia, who praised the diversion program as a step in the right direction, even if it wasn’t perfect and didn’t address larger issues like the rising cost of housing.

— Aidan Gardiner

The approach is commendable. As a Philadelphia landlord, my goal is to collect rent that covers my expenses and affords a modest profit. I never willingly want to evict a tenant. However many stories that cover landlord-tenant relations tend to heavily endorse the tenant perspective without going into detail what landlords — especially mom-and-pop landlords — go through.

Name Withheld, Philadelphia

[While living in Delaware,] I was evicted for owing $623.00. My monthly rent was $599.00. Eviction is a pathway to homelessness. It’s that simple.

DeBorah Gilbert White, Ph.D., Washington, D.C.

I have been trying to search for jobs I’m qualified for after working for three years right out of college. So many jobs that interest me or that I’m qualified for pay so little, but also looking at rent prices, it seems almost impossible to pay to live somewhere if you’re only making minimum wage or slightly above that.

Karlee Bradlee, Phoenix

Links we liked
In her 2015 book Ghettoside, Jill Leovy argued that when police fail to solve murders, it perpetuates cycles of violence, a phenomenon that has
since drawn more focus nationwide as homicide clearance rates have dipped to record lows. For the past few years, Denver police have applied this thinking to solving nonfatal shootings. A Marshall Project analysis found that the city’s police cleared more nonfatal shootings than any of the other 20 most populous cities in the country.
In 2022, Lucy Tompkins reported for Headway on the prospect of states using some of their Medicaid funding
to cover housing for people with significant health needs experiencing homelessness. Now, Katia Riddle reports for NPR, Oregon and California are among the states putting this idea into practice.
For years, Department of Defense schools have been
held up for their striking outcomes on assessments of student learning. As Sarah Mervosh reports for the Times, these schools have managed to build on this record even through the pandemic.

Your turn

We’d love to hear from you. Where have you seen progress in your own community? Where are you not seeing progress, but wish you were? What links do you recommend to the Headway team? Let us know at dearheadway@nytimes.com.

Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic. More about Michael Kimmelman