New York City proceeds with flood protection project in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the New York Amsterdam News. Sign up for Dispatches to get their stories in your inbox every week.

After a decade of planning, New York City broke ground in September on a $218 million plan to prevent flooding in the portside Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, even though experts say it will provide inadequate protection from storms. The project also will provide less protection than other city flood prevention projects, including a new $3.5 billion upscale development on the edge of the neighborhood. 

More than a decade ago, Superstorm Sandy killed 44 people and caused $19 billion in damage across New York City, swamping homes and destroying businesses in Red Hook. The city responded by pumping billions of dollars into neighborhood flood protection projects. Most of the money went to protect lower Manhattan from powerful 100-year storms — defined as storms that have a 1-in-4 chance of occurring at some point during the typical 30-year home mortgage. 

In Red Hook, though, where roughly two-thirds of residents are Black and Hispanic and earn below the city’s median income, the city is instead building to protect against a 10-year storm. The planned construction is expected to raise streets and sidewalks, and erect barriers and floodwalls to an elevation of up to 10 feet above sea level. 

“It’s at best temporary. At worst, it gives a false sense of security,” said John Shapiro, a Pratt Institute professor whose research focuses on the impact of climate change on urban planning.

Shapiro and other experts say that as the climate warms, floods and storms are striking more frequently and with greater intensity. This leaves coastal communities with a complicated choice: Retreat from the coast, or build protection against the next violent storm.

Red Hook sits on a peninsula jutting into New York Harbor, which makes it vulnerable to flooding. The neighborhood was a marsh before the city began filling it in by the 1870s. In 1939, the city added the first section of the Red Hook Houses for dock workers. The 32 buildings of the Red Hook Houses make up one of the city’s largest public housing developments and dominate the neighborhood’s skyline.

The neighborhood also has Brooklyn’s last working port, along with an Amazon warehouse and an Ikea store. Artists’ studios are now tucked into old port buildings and trendy stores line the cobblestone streets. In recent years, the area has gentrified. 

Quincy Phillips was living in a third-floor apartment in the Red Hook Houses when Sandy hit. He watched as the water swamped the first floor of the building.

“It didn’t reach past the second floor, thank God,” he said. “We had to roll our pants up to even walk past to get outside.”

The storm sent a 6-foot wave of water through the neighborhood, destroying homes, ripping metal doors from warehouses, dropping boats onto the streets, and carrying cars out into the harbor. Phillips’s family, like several thousand others in Red Hook, lived for two weeks without power and had to rely on federal aid until his refrigerator came back on. 

The year after Sandy wiped out the homes of Phillips and his neighbors in Red Hook, the administration of then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg determined that Red Hook was at high risk of future flooding. A 2013 city report recommended a flood protection system for the neighborhood, using a combination of infrastructure such as floodwalls and floodgates. 

The city said the project, now known as the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project, would cost $200 million, but at the time, was able to secure only a $50 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The administration of subsequent Mayor Bill de Blasio tapped the city’s capital budget for another $50 million. As a result, the city told consultants to only consider projects that it could afford on the smaller budget, according to a feasibility study. This would be a less ambitious 10-year storm plan. 

No accounting for sea-level rise 

To predict how frequently storms will occur in the future and how high floodwaters are likely to reach, scientists and engineers use historic tidal data. The models project that in Red Hook, a 100-year storm at current sea level would produce surging waves that would reach an elevation of at least 11 feet — a foot higher than the current plan would protect against. 

That doesn’t account for sea-level rise. Climate experts serving on a city climate change panel have projected that by mid-century, sea levels will rise several feet in the worst case scenario. Counting that additional water height, the city’s own study found that Red Hook would need to erect barriers between 15 and 18 feet. Neighborhood storm protection projects in other parts of the city are being built to an elevation of at least 16 feet.

The federal flood insurance program, which provides subsidized flood insurance to homeowners who live in high-risk flood zones, encourages communities to adopt a 100-year flood plan, said Philip Orton, an engineering professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology who researches flood protection. Such a plan, he said, lowers the cost of flood insurance for residents. “It’s rare that communities will not do it,” he said. All other coastal storm protection projects in New York City meet a 100-year standard. 

Guidelines from the Biden and Obama administrations encouraged federally funded projects to build to an elevation of at least 2 feet over 100-year storm projections. The Trump administration revoked those during each of his terms.

Last year, the city and FEMA increased funding for the Red Hook project by about $100 million. According to the city’s Department of Design and Construction (the agency responsible for the project), the added funds covered a decade of inflation and paid for upgrades to park and green spaces in the area.

The funds also increased the elevation of the project from the original height of 8 feet to 10, taking into account greater changes to sea levels, but didn’t bring it up to the levels that are being pursued in other parts of the city.

The Department of Design and Construction said a bigger project would disrupt ports, cruises, and other waterfront businesses while taking away park space. When asked why Red Hook was receiving a lower level of protection than other communities, a department spokesperson said its low-lying topography and privately owned waterfront made gaining access to build and maintain a protection system difficult. The current project is sufficient, the spokesperson added, because Sandy is the only storm to strike the city since 1927 that would have overtopped the flood barrier.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor at Princeton University who served on the city’s climate change panel that came up with the sea-level rise projections, said the city is misusing the historical record to justify its failure to protect against future storms.

“That’s a pretty poor excuse,” he said, adding that storms and floods like those experienced in Sandy will occur more frequently as sea levels rise. 

Bernice Rosenzweig, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College who studies urban flooding and serves on the New York City Panel on Climate Change, said the project is inadequate to protect Red Hook from even today’s large storms.

“The walls are not designed for major floods, not even our contemporary major floods — forget about major floods that will happen at the end of the 21st century,” she said. 

Unequal protection 

Alexa Avilés, the City Council member representing Red Hook, said infrastructure planning is particularly frustrating there. Along with community activists and residents, she argues that the system the city and the federal government use to decide how much money to spend on flood protections is biased against poor communities. 

“It never feels like we are prioritized, and we’re constantly fighting with the city again for both a basic level of service and then to get these major projects done and coordinated properly,” she said.

To win federal grants, applicants conduct a cost-benefit analysis that has to show flood projects save more money in the event of a storm than they cost to build, said Kristin Smith, an economics researcher at Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that studies flood risk. 

That can be difficult for poor communities, she said. 

“The benefit-cost analysis can be a barrier to qualifying for federal funding when it’s a lower-income neighborhood and the cost of the project is so high that you just don’t have the benefits to justify it,” she said. 

Red Hook residents, advocates, and leaders say the flood barrier system proposed for the $3.5 billion housing development in the neighborhood shows how wealthy residents in the city receive greater protection. The development, called the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, would build 6,000 mostly market-rate units on the northwest side of Red Hook, according to planning documents. A city task force approved the development in September, along with a plan to refurbish and upgrade the port. It promises a flood barrier system that would protect from 100-year storms. 

The Economic Development Corp., a city-run nonprofit organization, owns the land and plans to pay for the flood protection and other infrastructure with funding from federal grants, the city’s capital budget, and the state, plus some from developers. 

The Brooklyn Marine Terminal plan still needs to pass an environmental review and the state’s approval process, but will bypass the city’s more extensive process. According to the planning documents, it could take until 2038 to finish the project.

The plan would protect the new development site with a 21-foot coastal floodwall, which would start on the northern end of Red Hook and extend about 1 mile north.  

Urban planners who conducted an analysis of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal for the City Club of New York Waterfront Committee, an advocacy group promoting flood protection for waterfronts, say it’s a mistake to protect the new development while the south coast of Red Hook receives a lower level of protection. That will place the new development at risk, because a storm surge could overtop those barriers and flood the area from the landward side of the development. 

The group said the plan serves gentrification and developer interests rather than the larger Red Hook community. “Most Red Hook residents live in public housing and lack the income necessary for housing mobility in NYC,” the analysis said. In contrast, most of the residents in the new development are expected to be very affluent, based on projected rents, it said. 

A spokesperson for the Economic Development Corp. said the city would study how to integrate the two projects, but that there are no plans to further protect the peninsula.

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