As we talked about in class today, it’s pretty much fact that when you build on the coast, you are likely to get flooded. The introduction begins with pointing out the obvious, “They are populating an area that is vulnerable to coastal flooding by major hurricanes.” After Sandy, I’m pretty sure we all realized this. But like we were talking about, no one wants to move. Instead, they got the government and their house insurance to rebuild their homes in the same place they were. This is just illogical. Maybe the government should enforce imminent domain and use the money they would use for rebuilding and put it towards getting the people a new residence away from the coast.
This, of course, comes with its own set of obstacles. Where would these people live. Overcrowding is already a problem in our city and our outer boroughs. There is simply no more land to give. Since we can’t build outwards towards the coasts, we would probably have to continue building upwards. Can you imagine a New York where people mostly live in skyscrapers? That leaves much of the land free to go back to its natural state or be used as parks. Realistically, though, people don’t want to live on top of each other like this.
The article also talks about how some buildings are not up to snuff when it comes to NYC building regulations because those regulations do not take into account climate change and other developments. This means new buildings have an increased risk of flooding and old ones too. We need to work harder for better integration between our policy makers and our builders and scientists who actually know what’s going on first hand. Bloomberg’s Vision 2020 sure sounds great because it hopes to make our 500+ mile shoreline sustainable. But this came out in 2011 and we’ll graduate by 2018. Will things really be so different in less than 4 years? I don’t really think so.
Here’s a fun article to show how much space people take up and how if we didn’t have houses/ personal space/ any reason to function, we could actually fit the whole population in one place.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html
