A new era of flooding in New York City began on September 1, 2021, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida hit as a historic storm. Nearly 7.5 inches of rain fell in Manhattan, with over 3 inches falling in the course of just one hour in Central Park.
Unlike during superstorm Sandy in 2012, when flooding was limited to low-lying coastal areas inundated by the storm surge, Ida was like asymmetric warfare: areas of the city both high and low flooded, killing 13 people. And in the many major rain storms since — when as much as 9 inches of rain falls on the city — the flooding has seemed similarly scattershot. The Bronx has flooded, but so has wealthy Park Slope.
As it turns out, however, there is some rhyme and reason to where floods happen in New York — and who, exactly, is affected.
Last Friday, the New York City Office of Climate and Environmental Justice put out the city’s “first comprehensive study on systemic environmental inequity across all five boroughs.” According to the report, New York’s so-called environmental justice areas, which tend to be Black and Latinx, are “disproportionately exposed to flooding due to coastal storm surge, chronic tidal flooding, and extreme rainfall in the current decade.”
The findings put Black New York squarely in line with Black America on the whole: not only are non-white communities already at a disproportionately high risk of flooding, but Black communities could see the greatest increase of flood risk in the coming decades.
The parts of the city most prone to storm water flooding are sections of Queens, the Bronx, and north Staten Island — where the predominantly white borough’s Black population is concentrated. It’s not that surprising that stormwater flooding tends to affect more Black and Latinx neighborhoods, as low-lying and otherwise flood-prone neighborhoods were often redlined. But with high-end waterfront development booming in New York City, it’s more surprising that coastal flooding is such an outsized risk for non-white residents.
Some 57% of the environmental justice area population live in the 100-year floodplain, much of which is coastal in New York City, which has 520 miles of coastline. There are, of course, predominantly white and wealthy coastal areas, including lower Manhattan (which became the center of the financial world in part because 400 years ago, Dutch settlers inhabited the most canal-friendly part of the island). But such neighborhoods appear to have an outsized influence on how we think about waterfront New York.
Of course, with climate change, these flooding issues will only get worse if nothing significant is done. So while the 2020s may feel like an era of heavy rains and flooding, what counts as a bad storm today will look like nothing come the end of the century, when annual rainfall could have increased by as much as 30%.
New York is in the process of constructing a massive flood wall that will protect low-lying coastal areas (though such “hard” flood-control infrastructure is increasingly understood to not be the best approach). But the Office of Climate and Environmental Justice report, like the everywhere-all-at-once flooding of the past few years, shows once again that flood risks need to be addressed across the city, not solely on the shoreline — and that starting by addressing EJ areas would likely provide the most bang for the government’s buck.