Suburban housing in the suburbs of Staten Island, Southeast Queens and New York City's eastern suburbs could be lost in floods over the next 15 years, according to a new report that serves as a warning on how climate change can further exacerbate the housing crisis.
A report released Monday by the Association of Regional Planning, a nonprofit civic organization, said that strips of land in all boroughs are likely to be undeveloped, helping to boost the local housing shortage to an astounding 1.2 million homes.
“You need to build more homes to replace what's lost in your own municipality,” said Moses Gates, vice president of housing and neighborhood planning and author of the report.
The report is the latest to highlight how the dual threat of climate change and housing shortages are looming in coastal cities around the world.
New York City and its suburbs have not built enough homes to meet demand over the past decades, helping to raise rent and home prices. At the same time, metropolitan areas are struggling to adapt to the increased flooding and other extreme weather caused by global warming.
“The sooner we decide as a city that invests in resilience measures to help our neighborhoods adapt, whether they strengthen or move, the faster we will avoid leaving even greater crises for the next generation.
The report did not monopolize any particular areas due to the risk of flooding. But of the 82,000 homes that could be lost by 2040, more than half are expected to be on Long Island, with Atlantic-facing towns like Babylon and Islip taking the brunt of it.
Cities along Long Island, both in the island and Westchester county, are also vulnerable. New York City will see the most losses, like South Queens and the Waterfront District of Brooklyn, Rockaway and Canalcy.
Several new developments on Queens' Rockaway Peninsula, home to around 125,000 people, focus on providing dense, affordable housing while trying to protect against flooding.
Also, while on Rockaway, a new designed balm system with stone and steel walls in the core helps protect the seaside of the peninsula. However, little progress has been made in Bayside, with regular flooding.
Other mitigation measures are currently underway or already complete, including flood walls and floods at the bottom of Manhattan, as well as nature-based solutions such as the blue belt that connects stormwater sewers to lakes and ponds.
After Superstorm Sandy flooded much of the East Coast of Staten Island in 2012, the state purchased more than 500 damaged homes and cleaned up most of them to bring the land back to natural state in a practice known as managed retreat. However, the costly, ambitious plan to protect the entire city from coastal storms has not yet been approved by the federal government and is at least 20 years away from completion.
The threat of global warming means local officials need to “rethink about what traditional homes look like.”
“It means more dense homes, more energy efficient homes. It probably means giving up the suburban ideals of a standalone home with a white picket fence,” he said.
The Community Planning Association report analyzed the amount of local housing needed today and in the future to ensure that enough homes are available for people to move easily. The area needed 362,000 additional housing units in the area to alleviate overcrowding and permanently house the shelter population, among other factors, among other things.
In 15 years, the number will be more than tripled, given population growth, flood losses and general housing deterioration. Cities and towns need to promote growth in some areas of areas close to public transport and commercial hubs, where flood risk is relatively low, the report says.
Warrenschleiver, president of the Queen's Civic Conference, said he was a group of the borough's citizens' association and agreed that people need to be safe from flood risk. However, he said new developments should focus on affordable housing, and raise the question of how much it costs to develop them.
“Who will pay for this?” he said. “Is that behind middle-income working-class families?”
The report also used a tool called National Zoning Atlas. This maps local limitations on development to see where the zoning code can build more homes. The report found that 580,000 homes less than half of what you need – can be added under today's zoning code (other factors, such as funding and building codes, can also hinder the construction of the home).
That housing gap has shown the need for almost every city, town and village to change zoning codes to allow more homes to be built, Gates, one of the authors of the report.
New York officials have tried to easily build zoning codes in recent years to achieve success.
Gov. Kathy Hochul tried to make more housing paths for every city and town in the state two years ago. But local leaders, particularly in the city's suburbs of Long Island and Westchester County, resisted her efforts.
Mayor Eric Adams' management has successfully driven a plan known as the “City of Yess” that will allow approximately 80,000 additional homes to be built over the next decade. The plan, approved by the city council in December, would reduce housing needs in New York City by just 11%, the report found.
