Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

An even larger concern to activists was the fact that, in the 5 years the ESCR project was on hold, a pri- vate, high-end "building boom" was transforming con- tiguous and nearby working-class communities—in- cluding the Essex Crossing/Seward Park development, as well as market-rate high-rises at 250 South Street, 30 Pike Street, and those proposed by the New York City Housing Authority's (NYCHA) on vacant land at LaGuardia Houses. In addition, on the waterfront, only a few blocks south of the proposed ESCR proj- ect, developers had begun to build the kind of luxury housing discussed by Patrick Foy, except without the public resilience infrastructure finance deals he had described. Extell Real Estate's One Manhattan Square is a tower of waterfront view, high-rent apartments, creating a self-described "tony neighborhood" walled off from both storm surges and from the low-income neighborhood around it. is fortress shields itself physically, financially, socially, and environmentally from the proposed public green and resilience infra- structure. Instead, it boasts its own 40,000 square foot private park several floors above the street. e city had granted the project a 20-year tax abatement (Guerriero 2017) and had demanded no contribution to finance resilience infrastructure for the rest of the community. As this new tower began to advertise its multi-million dollar apartments, LES activists were met with yet an- other such project even closer to home: e Two Bridg- es project consists of two towers that would be built between the neighborhood and the water and which would—literally—tower over much lower-scale public housing (Echevarria and Segal 2018). One commen- tator called the arrival of these tall towers the "Dubai- fication" of Lower Manhattan (Kazi 2018). While the Big U is not explicitly linked to these developments, its existence—on paper at least, and its promise of future green amenities, likely lowered hurdles to billions in investment for upscale development in a flood plain. Yet, with the project stalled, it looked like the lower in- come neighborhoods were going to get gentrification without the green. Conclusion: gentrification by design, or default? By June of 2018, media reports on the ESCR project were nervously citing the HUD award deadlines: the project had to be finished by 2022 in order for New York City to receive the funds it had been awarded (e Lo-Down 2018). e next levels of approval were state and federal environmental impact statements, which had to go through yet another round of formal pub- lic hearing processes. en, right before the 6th year anniversary of Sandy, the Mayor's Office announced a new, third, design, one which moved even further from the original BIG design that had gone through years of collaborative approval processes. While the details on this design have not yet been made fully public, the new proposal disposes with the berms or the idea of a park designed to absorb floodwaters. In- stead, it is mostly built around fill, raising the current park a few more feet above sea level, and putting play- ing fields on top of this fill. is is a familiar and rather standard process that communities up and down the Hudson River have utilized to redevelop low-lying wa- terfront property. at redevelopment has tended to include—and be funded by—luxury housing. Rather than the storm-surge-absorbing so berms the project would involve traditional hard seawalls near the river supporting the several feet of fill. It would, the May- or's Office announced, also add another $700 million dollars to the project's final price tag (New York City Office of the Major 2018). LES groups found the third design closed them off from the water even more. LES Ready!'s Damaris Reyes, involved in the collaborative planning process since the beginning, noted that the idea of the orig- inal plan "was not to build a wall to keep us from the water. It was to create multi-purpose space that connected us more to the water. It feels like, in the end, we are going to wind up with a space that will do the actual opposite" (e Lo-Down 2018). Rebuild by Design, which had sponsored the original competi- tion, was also taken aback, publishing an op-ed in the Daily News criticizing the new proposal. Interesting- ly, even aer the third design was announced, Ingels was still doing public talks presenting the Big U as the original project design, as if it were about to be built, adding an element of expert marketing, if not "fake news" to the project. Why the de Blasio Administration was rushing out a new, entirely different, and top-down design re- mained unclear. e Administration did state that the new project would minimize closing parts of the FDR highway during the project's construction. Announc- ing the new plan, the Daily News speculated that the other problem could be the costs of maintenance, in particular restoring playing fields aer storm surge in- undations—the difficulties of having the space be both an active recreation area and a kind of stormwater buf- fer (Chester and Wright 2018). e Administration is touting this new design as a solution to all the issues brought up by participants in the design process, call- 54

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