A Tidal wave of urban development in the rockaways
March 24, 2024
Global sea level rise poses great environmental risks to coastal cities, as the increasingly destructive storms and floods of recent years have shown. It’s time for decision-makers in vulnerable cities to intervene—but new projects in New York City have shown that protective solutions for coastal communities and their ecosystems may be at odds.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast, an area of the country unaccustomed to large storms and the damage they bring, and coastal areas like the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront bore the brunt of the damage. New York City received $4.2 billion dollars in federal relief funding, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used a portion of these funds to replace 3.5 million cubic yards of sand lost to Rockaway Beach shores. As of fall 2023, this effort to combat erosion and restore the beach’s “original design profile” is finally wrapping up.
But patch-up projects like these are not the right solution for maintaining and rehabilitating our shoreline areas after devastating weather events, said Marcha Johnson, a landscape architect and ecological restorationist at the New York City Parks Department.
“In fact, ‘erosion’ might not even accurately describe what happened to our beaches after Hurricane Sandy,” said Johnson, who has been researching shorelines and their movement since the 1980s. Her work focuses on the communication gap between the scientific community and developers designing urban waterfronts, encouraging the two parties to work together to serve the public and preserve the health of the oceans.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding about erosion on the shore. In any waterway, sediment moves from one place to another. It doesn’t disappear. After a hurricane, the beach doesn’t actually erode or disappear, it just moves inland.”
When sea levels drop, as when polar ice caps build and freeze, the shoreline moves outward and the coast becomes more visible. During times of sea level rise, like during extreme weather occurrences like Hurricane Sandy, portions of dry land along the coast become inundated and the beach moves inward. This phenomenon is poorly understood by the public, and by the decision makers and politicians tasked to rehabilitate shoreline areas.
“The term ‘erosion’ and the language we use when we talk about storms and waves almost always comes with the baggage of fearfulness,” says Johnson. “Disasters only become disasters when they cause harm to people or property, and often decision-makers don’t zoom out to see the whole picture: that water levels across the entire continent are rising.”
More often than not, our local and state governments choose to favor a-la-carte solutions to property development. Coastal rehabilitation in New York is often part of a small-project economy: a house, a boardwalk, or a portion of beach gets private or public funding to be rebuilt, and developers move on to the next task. A lack of scientific understanding and financial motivation prevent more holistic improvement projects from making it onto the desks of decision-makers.
“It seems like our culture has disconnected itself from ocean processes because we don’t know how to deal with them, and the media keeps us questioning if we even need to deal with them at all,” Johnson explains, pointing to a longstanding trend in the media’s engagement in environmental issues.
New York City has placed emphasis in recent years on developing beachfront areas and protecting them from future storms like Hurricane Sandy. The 302 acres of Arverne, Queens, that lies just west of Rockaway Beach is one of these areas, designated an urban renewal site and acquired by the city for development in 1997. After many years of debate among officials at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, two joint venture groups were given dispensation to build “high quality housing in [this area] of urban blight.” Financial incentives coupled with new, protective zoning laws allowed for a quick buildout that was completed in 2010.
The neighborhood, charmingly rebranded “Arverne-by-the-sea”, spans the waterfront area between Beach 80th Street and Beach 62nd Street. It boasts large plots of identical single family homes, an amenity-rich, market-rate apartment complex, a 6-story hotel, and a cafe that doubles as a surf gear retailer. These stylishly Miami-esque properties were built higher off the ground, and a new roadway just behind the boardwalk provides them additional storm and flood protection. These resilience measures, as reported by The Urban Land Institute, “helped the overall market in the Rockaways” and “enhanced the community’s reputation, leading to higher-than-market rental and sale prices.”
Although this kind of fortified real estate greatly benefits homeowners, geologists know that case-by-case solutions for shoreline protection often don’t work to preserve the long-term health of our beaches. Arverne’s new roads built close to the water protect homes but inhibit necessary dynamic movement of sand dunes, which are meant to shift around—sometimes forward, backward, and sideways. Beaches and their dunes are literally meant to move with the tides, and this kind of protective urban development impedes the ocean’s natural processes.
As sea levels continue to rise, city beaches hemmed-in by real estate will thin. When beaches recede, so do the habitats of state-endangered shoreline species like the piping plover. These birds build their nests in the grassless sand above high tide, and coastal developments built close to the beach threaten their ecosystem. Increased foot traffic around their habitats, lowered availability of prey due to changing shoreline ecologies, and man-made modifications to beach topography jeopardize the livelihood of these and other native species.
Swanky new beachside communities like Arverne-by-the-sea sparkle with the portents of booming real estate and tourism economies, and city goers flock to them in droves. On summer days, you can spot park rangers conducting tours of the renovated boardwalk, extolling the efforts made to protect people at the front lines of sea level impact. The more profound truth, however, is often obfuscated: our oceans are actually at the front lines of human impact.
