Hoboken is gearing up for a very rainy day

This story comes from Headway, an initiative of The New York Times that examines the world’s challenges through the lens of progress. Headway looks for promising solutions, notable experiments and lessons learned from what has been tried.

The city of Hoboken, NJ, once a swampy outcrop that the Lenape inhabited only seasonally, is located on the Hudson River. Three quarters of it covers a floodplain. In other words, it is a water magnet. Some scientists have done so prediction that, with rising sea levels, much of Hoboken will be Atlantis by 2100.

But for more than a decade, this city of about 60,000 has been trying to thwart fate – and it’s making progress. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy left Hoboken underwater and without electricity for days, causing more than $110 million in property damage. The city had to call in the National Guard.

In September, another storm hit the city. While not nearly as bad as Sandy, more than 3.5 inches of rain fell on one Friday morning, including 1.2 inches during the hour coinciding with high tide. Early in the day, television crews filmed flooded intersections. City officials declared a state of emergency.

Only this time was different. Across the river, the same storm drowned several New York City subway lines and forced Brooklynites to wade through thigh-deep water. But in Hoboken, the fire department towed only six cars, and by that evening there was only an inch of standing water at three of the 277 intersections. An arts and music festival, the city’s biggest cultural hit and moneymaker, stayed on track this weekend. Television crews, who returned to Hoboken early Saturday to film the usual aftermath, left empty-handed. The flooding of the city was no longer news.

Which of course was the real story.

Let’s take a moment to give Hoboken a shout-out. As climate change brings more extreme weather and rising sea levels, communities across America are struggling to prepare. Severe storms damage businesses, destroy supplies and destroy homes, and the losses and rebuilding cost fortunes. Insurance companies no longer want to cover these costs, causing property values ​​to drop, which has a knock-on effect on the city’s revenues. Some homeowners in high-risk coastal areas have started lobbying the government buy up.

That is not Hoboken’s situation. New York City has spent billions on flood walls and breakwaters and is still considering giant gates to hold back rising water, but it hasn’t done much to deal with the rain. Hoboken has added infrastructure to cope with both rainfall and sea level rise. After all, flood walls can’t stop rain, which has to go somewhere when it hits impermeable streets and sidewalks. Old sewers like New York’s, which handle both waste and stormwater, were built to handle only a few inches of rain per hour. Major storms cause sewage overflows, creating health and environmental crises on top of flooding.

The purpose of Hoboken is to capture and slow down storm water. The city’s strategy has been to rebuild the sewers, expand capacity, and also bundle invasive, time-consuming new infrastructure initiatives with the benefits residents want, such as new parks and playgrounds with water reservoirs and basins. Streets redesigned to minimize traffic accidents in Hoboken also capture and divert water. The redesign was a major reason why the city recovered so quickly Friday in September.

The changes began under the city’s former mayor, Dawn Zimmer, who was in office when Sandy struck. “Before Sandy, our main focus was mitigating flooding caused by heavy rainfall,” she told me recently. “After Sandy, we increased our focus on the problem caused by the storm surge that turned the city into an island surrounded by the Hudson River.”

Damage of the magnitude caused by that hurricane required a federal response, and the Obama administration came up with an initiative called Reconstruction according to design, which invited international engineers, architects and community organizations to collaborate on climate adaptation and other water management strategies. Among the projects seeded by Rebuild, a plan for reinforcement emerged the coast of Staten Islandanother for protecting Lower Manhattan, including expanding East River Park.

Hoboken also received federal assistance. Rebuild “saw our existing green investments,” Ms. Zimmer said, meaning the parks and playgrounds, “as something to build on.” The OMA’s New York officea Dutch architectural firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, worked with Royal HaskoningDHV, a Dutch engineering firm, and with local organizations to devise an integrated approach to storm surges and heavy rainfall.

Rebuild’s plan involves raising vulnerable power lines, building flood protection and, as a result, creating parks with underground tanks and pumps that can hold excess water from rain and tidal waves and then release it once the weather clears.

During the rain bomb in September, the parks proved to be real life savers. On that one morning, the largest park, a new $80 million, five-acre site called ResilienCity Park, collected more than 1.4 million gallons of rainwater.

I spoke with Caleb Stratton, Hoboken’s Chief Resilience Officer, on the Monday morning after the storm. After working as a city planner in Hoboken for the past decade and then helping to oversee the city’s climate initiatives, Mr. Stratton sounded like a high school student who had just completed the SAT program.

“I’m not saying we haven’t been flooded, that some residents and businesses haven’t had a hard time, but the question is how quickly a community recovers,” he told me. Hoboken took weeks to get back on its feet after Sandy, he said. In September the city only needed one day.

Every storm is different, of course, and Mr. Stratton didn’t say the city can handle them all. He shared a study from the North Hudson Sewerage Authority, which has been collecting weather data since 2015, showing that Hoboken is prepared to handle nine out of 10 rain events without significant flooding. “It’s just not realistic to talk about 100 percent unless you’re going to take dramatic measures – buyouts, restoration of natural floodplains, abandoning infrastructure, down-zoning: all tools that return the ecosystem to a natural state,” said he. -zoning is shorthand for population reduction. “That’s hard to imagine in a context like Hoboken, let alone across the river in a place like Manhattan.

“So it is necessary to move to other strategies and talk about risk tolerance,” he continued, “and by that I mean what is possible within the limits of what is financially practical.”

But also potentially profitable. a study released by researchers for Rebuild by Design and Ramboll, an architecture firm, suggests that every dollar invested in green infrastructure ultimately results in $2 in “avoided losses” (office closures, flooded inventories, flooded basements) and other benefits (improved home values ​​and public amenities) produces. health). That argument partly led Mayor Ravi Bhalla, Dawn Zimmer’s successor, to move Stratton’s position to the Department of Administration, which oversees the entire Hoboken government, to coordinate climate strategies.

As Mr. Stratton notes, in most American cities, “all the infrastructure we create to handle water — roads, sidewalks, sewers — is controlled by different departments with different priorities, and none of them are specifically responsible for storms. There is no special authority or budget for stormwater in most cities.”

That kind of silo formation has fostered a political culture of short-sighted decision-making. Just days before the September storm, New York Mayor Eric Adams cut $75 million earmarked for the city’s Parks Department to deal with a budget crisis. Disinvestment in parks will cost the city money in the long run, because parks are a first line of defense against climate change. Like Amy Chester, who directs Rebuild, featured in Vital City magazineNew York’s natural acreage absorbs as much rainwater as $580 million in green infrastructure.

I don’t want to suggest that everything has been smooth sailing in Hoboken. Ms Zimmer faced lengthy protests from community members outraged by a proposed flood wall along a residential street. She fought with the state’s then governor, Chris Christie, and also had to seize property through eminent domain. City officials eventually reconfigured the flood walls and stormwater projects to blend less intrusively into neighborhoods. The negotiations took years.

Even now, Ms. Zimmer fears that efforts to protect Hoboken could be compromised if Rebuild’s $350 million, 10,000-foot project, which includes flood walls, gates and another park, is not completed as planned.

The project, which has just begun construction, runs through neighboring Jersey City. The mayor, Steven Fulop, still has to sign some required easements. According to a representative from Mr. Fulop’s office, the easements appear to affect pre-existing plans for a light rail station, potentially making the station more expensive to build, and Mr. Fulop wants the state to pay for these additional costs.

When I contacted New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, an official representing his administration told me that the governor’s office has “written assurances to Jersey City that Rebuild would not make light rail impossible, and to the extent there costs are As part of the easement process, the state would pay these costs.”

The September storm provided early proof of concept for Rebuild’s work in Hoboken and the effectiveness of green infrastructure, although changing minds remains a hurdle in today’s media landscape. “The news likes to find water on roads,” Mr. Stratton said, “images that do not reflect how quickly a community recovers from storms.”

In other words: cities will flood. It is the speed at which they can bounce back, to use Mr Stratton’s words, that will be “the real measure of preparedness”.

The Headway initiative is funded by grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editorial process and do not review stories prior to publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.