Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

from the impacts of climate change." Most famously, SIRR proposed a new "Seaport City," a high-end neigh- borhood to be built atop a newly created spit of land jutting into the East River (New York City 2013). 1 Both PlaNYC and SIRR were controversial in predictably similar ways. While some hailed PlaNYC as "ground- breaking" and "the forefront of a growing urban sus- tainability movement" (Cohen 2012), others saw it as cover for a real estate scheme geared towards shor- ing up the city's most valuable waterfront properties (Angotti 2008). And while some lauded SIRR and the Seaport City idea for vision and revenue-generating potential, others balked at this costly and potentially dangerous hand-out to real estate (Dawsey 2013). Local residents responded by organizing against these forces. New York City's disasters had strengthened growth machine elites and market-based municipal policies, but they had also created the po- tential for a "radical rupture" (Gotham and Greenberg 2014:6), opening up possibilities to intervene in rede- velopment plans and reclaim "the capacity, albeit brief, to inspire new scales and strategies of grassroots or- ganizing" (Greenberg 2017; Dawson 2017). As a com- munity that had experienced multiple disasters, and several redevelopment recovery initiatives, the LES was well-organized to resist growth-machine forces. Coalitions like Alliance for a Just Rebuilding, Sandy Regional Assembly, and Occupy Sandy emerged aer the hurricane, many with members who had organized in resistance to the recovery projects that had come out of 9/11 and the Wall Street crash of 2008. erefore, what post-Sandy planners found when they began to collaborate with local neighborhood groups was an LES with a strong community voice. Having learned from these past disaster recovery experiences, these groups were comparatively well-prepared to organize early to advocate for a transparent and equitable Sandy rebuilding process, and to lobby to make post-disaster funding more equitable (Graham et al. 2016). It is important to note that LES urban activ- ists had been active in support of the mayoral candi- dacy of Bill de Blasio, who was elected by landslides in both 2013 and 2017. Crisis organizing melded with broader community participation in city politics, since large community-labor coalitions like the Alliance for a Just Rebuilding also played a decisive role in De Blasio's victory and in shaping his position on rebuild- ing (Greenberg 2017). In his first speech declaring his candidacy for mayor, de Blasio had decried city's growing inequality as "e Tale of Two Cities" arguing that the government "must be the protector of neigh- borhood and must guard the people from the enor- mous power of moneyed interests." To do this, de Blasio recognized the role of neighborhood groups including those devastated by Sandy: "average New Yorkers who simply refuse to allow their community's voices to be stifled. It's their spirit that I intend to sweep into City Hall. A spirit that shouts that all boroughs were creat- ed equal and that all our residents matter!" (quoted in Walker 2013). Once in office, de Blasio transformed Bloomberg's sustainability plan into "OneNYC," a plan that emphasized affordable housing along with lower- ing the City's carbon emissions. With a bold emphasis missing from its predecessor, equity, OneNYC would make New York a "city for everyone," in particular by investing in building more affordable housing (Bren- ner 2012). In terms of equitable resiliency planning, de Blasio was aided by a progressive shi at the Feder- al scale under the Obama era Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had launched the international "Rebuild by Design" [RbD] competi- tion. RbD was specifically aimed at combining state-of- the-art design with more participatory and egalitarian planning processes. e de Blasio administration en- thusiastically embraced the winning design for Lower Manhattan, the "Big U," which was to encircle the low- er half of the island with floodwalls and floodwater-ab- sorbing bermed parkland, giving project responsibility to his newly created Office of Recovery and Resiliency. In other words, the presence of social move- ment infrastructure, as well as the capacity to learn from the successes and failures of previous political efforts to democratize post-disaster redevelopment, played a decisive role in the decision to build the ESCR. Community groups had organized around de Blasio as a candidate supportive of more equitable post-disas- ter recovery projects. In his second State of the City Address, echoing comments he made following Sandy on the campaign trail, Mayor De Blasio argued that "if we fail to be a city for everyone, we risk losing what makes New York, New York." 2 is was a far cry from Bloomberg who had described New York as a "luxu- ry product" (Siegel 2011). e election of Bill de Bla- sio was therefore a referendum against Bloomberg's growth machine efforts to turn the New York into a city for the wealthy. De Blasio won with the endorse- ment of e Working Families Party and other groups who felt le behind in the Bloomberg years. Present- ing himself as responsive to lower-income New York- 2 State of the City, February 3, 2015. 48

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