Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

years passing and the threat of new storms mounting, the once grand plans for the Big U have been delayed and diminished, community proposals sidelined. Instead, at every anniversary of the hurricane, local organizers have taken note of the limited, stalled, and contradictory results of their ambitious organizing and public participation in the BIG design process. At the 5-year anniversary, LES Ready! and other neigh- borhood coalitions, under the combined banner of "Sandy5," marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to the public housing on the Lower East Side, to publicize numerous problems with the public response to the disaster. As the organizers noted, the problems were threefold: first, many repairs from Sandy had yet to be made. Kim Fraczek, head of neighborhood group e Sane Energy Project, noted in media coverage of the event: "ere are still people struggling to move back into their homes and people are still dealing with mold issues" (Lynch 2017). One purpose of the protest was to publicize delays in the Build It Back program, which was supposed to have finished repairs by 2016. Yet, one in five people still did not have repairs by that time. And the repairs to heat and lighting systems in public housing were even further behind. According the e Guardian, only one of 33 public housing build- ings had undergone repairs as of the 5-year Sandy an- niversary (Millman 2017). Second, the Sandy5 event was meant to publicize the lack of preparation for the next disaster. 4 Finally, Sandy5 protesters noted the on- going pressure to redevelop in floodplain areas. While some rezoning has taken place to control development in flood-prone areas, new building projects, supported with government funds, were still taking the lead, like the redevelopment project in the Far Rockaway neigh- borhood of Queens, where a new development—iron- ically, affordable housing—was planned to be built in an area predicted to be under water by the end of the century (Lynch 2017). By 2017, city officials were proposing signif- icant revisions in BIG's design. New York City is di- vided into community districts and the ESCR is most- ly located in Community District 3 and borders on the southern edge of Community Board 6. Aer the awards were announced, city officials put this revised design through the formal public hearing process. Many of the same neighborhood groups became part of this next phase of time-intensive comment process- es and hearings aimed at obtaining buy-in from com- munity organizations, community boards as well as, at this point, formal regulatory agencies. In other words, the neighborhood groups that were involved in the original Resilience by Design collaborative planning process were, by 2017, in their fih year of collabora- tive planning meetings for the project. e redesign project proposed by city officials was somewhat less ambitious than the original Big U design, depending on more and higher walls that cut off access and vis- ibility between the neighborhood and the park. Pro- posals to increase community access had been whit- tled down to improving a few of the existing bridges. A Rolling Stone feature story on the changes summed up the new design as "a big dumb wall" (Goodell 2016), making neighborhood activist ask what had happened to the state-of-the-art design they had embraced. e higher walls also meant less safety because they cut off visibility. "We won all this money," Reyes noted in an interview for e Lo-Down, a blog covering Lower East Side issues, "to do something that has not been done before. e world is looking at us…I would hate that people come to the first resilient park in New York City and say, 'is really ain't no big deal.' I really encourage the teams to do everything possible to make this park is as beautiful as possible" (e Lo-down 2018). In that same article, another local organizer worried that the walls in the new design would make the park look like a "penitentiary." Meanwhile, the de Blasio Administration was in the contradictory position of both increasing budgets to build more affordable housing in the city (Goldenberg 2017) and coming under fire for lack of post-Sandy repairs in the LES public housing complex- es (Smith 2018). e US Attorney's office forced the City to sign a consent decree that committed it to fund long-needed deferred maintenance in public housing (Ferrée-Sadurní and Goodman 2018). Faced with the choice of fulfilling his promises through the politically unexciting processes of maintenance and repair of cur- rent housing versus the more politically and financially profitable choice of breaking ground on new affordable housing construction, de Blasio had chosen the latter, reflecting the growth machine politics of infrastruc- ture funding that focused on new income-producing projects over repairs to old housing projects, which are maintenance costs without new income. 4 ere has been some controversy as to whether e Big U itself would protect against the predicted sea level rise. Climate scientist-activist Klaus Jacob argued that all of the resilience infrastructure projects so far were just "fiddling around at the margins" and, even if built, would not protect against the long-term effects of sea level rise (Millman 2017). In this pa- per, we focus the conversation on the goal of resilience projects to protect against "storm surges" rather than against long-term (2050 and 2100) predictions about sea level rise. 53

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