“The area’s industrial and freight port history has left a muscular legacy of brick and concrete architecture, towering container cranes, parking lots and few trees.” This is an apt description of Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, written by Julie Besonen in the New York Times article “Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the Rebound,” published on October 12, 2016. Due to its high concentration of concrete and cement, the ground in Red Hook is mostly impermeable to water which causes mass flooding during storm surges.

The area is being redeveloped to counteract this problem, however that is causing a problem in and of itself. With 22 townhouses underway, as well as 70 new condos, the area is slowly being gentrified. This is a huge problem for the roughly 10,000 residents that live in subsidized rentals at Red Hook Houses. On top of that, most solution being implemented to handle the excess of water employ grey infrastructure, which, as we know, is really just paint over the cracks as well as non-sustainable. These are exactly the problems we tackle in our project, to be presented at the Macaulay building.