Paul and Shelle Simon have lived in Houston long enough to know that rain can be dangerous. In a typical year, the nation’s fourth-largest city gets about fifty inches of rainfall, and it’s prone to torrential downpours and the occasional hurricane or tornado. Although Houston is not one of the wettest American cities, its hard infrastructure and physical plan were designed to facilitate private automobiles and nearly limitless growth, without much regard for storm water management. The sprawling, six-hundred-square-mile metropolis has massive amounts of impermeable paved surfaces and scores of residential communities in the flood-plain. When the rain is heavy, drainage channels, sewers, and detention ponds fill up quickly. Water courses through the city’s vital arteries, inundating roads and, on occasion, hospitals, homes, and businesses as well. When a major storm hits, floodwaters can breach the oil refineries and chemical plants that saturate Houston, turning what might otherwise be a weather disaster into an uncontrollable toxic event.
In late August 2017, the Simons, a middle-class African American couple in their late thirties, saw a news story warning that a tropical storm named Harvey had formed over the Caribbean and was gradually making its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. It had been an unusually hot summer—though so many summers have been unusually hot that it was probably just usual—and the water in the Gulf and the Bay of Campeche was warm. Harvey picked up energy as it moved toward Texas. On Wednesday, August 23, scientists at the National Hurricane Center predicted that it would become a strong tropical storm, or even a Category 1 hurricane, by the time it made landfall. They were mistaken. Harvey continued to strengthen as it approached the coastline, and on Thursday meteorologists forecast that it would likely hit America’s fourth-largest city as a Category 3 or 4 hurricane, with fierce winds topping 115 miles per hour and biblical precipitation. More ominously, Harvey seemed poised to stall over southern Texas and stay awhile, possibly for days. Houston officials didn’t order a mandatory evacuation, but they advised all residents to prepare for a deluge.
The Simons decided to hunker down in the house they own in Richmond, a working-class, predominantly Hispanic area in the southwest part of Houston. They live in West Oaks Village, a landscaped community with a mix of modest single-family homes, small apartment buildings, and generous collective amenities, including a playground and a large swimming pool. The Simons have two young sons, an eight-month-old and a two-year-old, and their extended families live in the area as well. They remembered 2005, when 2.5 million people tried to flee Houston as Hurricane Rita approached. Shelle was one of them, and her drive to Austin, which is ordinarily a two-hour journey, took more than seventeen hours. Rita wasn’t as bad as everyone feared—not nearly as bad as Katrina, which had hit New Orleans weeks before—but the highways were jammed and overheated, and more people died in the botched evacuation than in the city center. With Harvey, Paul and Shelle figured they’d be better off at home.
This time, though, the storm proved even more severe than anyone anticipated. The rain started on Friday, but on Saturday it became torrential. In church, a few days later, Shelle told her fellow congregants what happened: “My sister, Sheraine, she and her [twenty-one-month-old] son came to stay with us so we could go through the storm together. She didn’t want to go through it alone.” Once they arrived, the tornado warnings started. “Paul came up with a plan. We would clear out all the closets, move the clothes. And Paul kept saying, ‘If this happens we go in this closet, if that happens we go in that closet.’ We were doing that.”
Ordinarily, hard rain lets up after awhile. The clouds empty, the sky opens, the sun or the stars reappear. “Everyone knows that Houston floods,” Paul told me. “But I’ve lived here fifteen years and this neighborhood has never had any problems. We’ve never had water in this house. Nothing even close. I figured that we’d be okay.” The Simons listened as the wind howled and the storm roared. They looked outside and saw that the streets were drowning. They were stressed, exhausted. And soon there was nothing to do except go to bed.
But who could sleep in those conditions?
They woke up before dawn and went straight to the windows. “The rain was up to our driveway,” Shelle said. “And the water was rising, higher and higher.” Her pulse quickened. The walls weren’t going to save them if the rain kept coming. The closets weren’t going to, either. They needed another plan.
“I’m going out there,” Paul said. “I’m gonna drive around and see if we can get out.”
“Don’t do it,” Shelle shot back. “Because I don’t want you to get separated from us, not from the kids.”
But the water kept rising through the day, and by early afternoon Paul and Shelle realized that they couldn’t leave even if they wanted to. The driveway was a river, the streets running rapids. Their house was about to be inundated. Their children, Shelle’s family, and everything they owned was inside.
“I was on the phone with my mother [who’s also in Houston],” Shelle recalled, when she, Paul, and I spoke a few weeks after the storm hit. “And she asked me to send her a picture of what was happening outside. I went to the door, and there was so much water I couldn’t believe it. I was just wide-eyed, in shock. And just then, at that very moment, our neighbors came walking right by our door. The water was so high that they had to stay close to the houses. They were carrying plastic garbage bags with their belongings, and they were with their cousin, TJ, who’d driven there in a truck. I was just standing there. I had clips in my hair, I had a baby on my hip, and I was just looking at them, like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ And they said, ‘We’re getting out of here! Do you want to come with us? Do you need help?’ And I said yes, yes!”
She screamed for Paul and he rushed over. TJ said he’d parked a few blocks away because the streets around the Simons’ house were impassable. He told Paul that he didn’t have room for all of them in his truck, but he took Paul’s number and promised he’d return soon. Paul, Shelle, and Sheraine raced through the house to pack up the essentials: diapers, formula, water, food, clothes for the children. “I’m not really that good with emergency situations,” Shelle admitted. “I kind of break down. But then TJ came back for us. And, you know, we walked through that water.”
The Simons made it, children hoisted in their arms. They wanted to go to Shelle’s father’s place, but the roads leading there were inaccessible. “God had different plans,” Paul said. “We drove around, and all our access points were closing or shutting down.” At one point TJ got to a flooded street where the median looked like a roadway. He tried to drive along it, but the truck went off the edge and, suddenly, they were stuck. “That was definitely the scariest moment,” Paul told me. “It was dark. The rain was just pouring down on us. The radio was broadcasting tornado warnings. And there we were, with three little kids in the truck, no car seats even, totally exposed.”
This time Shelle really did break down. “I was bawling in there. I was scared. My baby was premature and when he was born he’d had trouble breathing. When I looked at him he was totally still. I didn’t know if something was wrong. I couldn’t reach my phone so I took my sister’s, got on her Facebook, and posted that we were stranded. I sent out a message saying ‘Please pray for us.’ I honestly didn’t know if we’d make it.”
Another truck came by, and the driver stopped and used cables to pull them off the median. TJ found a way out of the flooded area, but now he was late and needed to help his own family, so they drove to a gas station where emergency workers had congregated, and the Simons got out. The baby was fine, just exhausted, but now there was a new problem: they had nowhere to go. “We thought the EMS workers would be able to help us,” Paul recalled. “But it turned out they were waiting for emergency calls only. So we were pretty much stranded.” A group of men had gathered inside the station, and one of them was explaining that he’d found a safe driving route to an area that had escaped flooding. “When I heard him,” Paul said, “I realized that the route went right by the subdivision where my parents live. He was going to show the others the way, and I asked if I could go with him. My father was out of town, and I had the keys to his truck with me. I told Shelle and Sheraine that I could get us out of there.” For a moment, the Simons couldn’t believe their luck.
The feeling didn’t last long. The floodwater had breached the front door of Paul and Shelle’s home, probably soon after they left. And it kept coming, in greater and greater volumes, because Harvey really did settle over Houston for another three days. By Tuesday, when the storm clouds finally dispersed, more than fifty-one inches of rain had fallen on parts of the city—breaking the record for the most precipitation from a single storm or hurricane on the continental United States. (The National Weather Service, a cautious scientific organization that typically uses dry, descriptive language, wrote that the rainfall figures were “simply mind-blowing.”1) For the Simons, and for thousands of other Houston residents, the numbers were academic. What mattered was that their homes were underwater, and that they’d lost nearly everything they’d left behind.
The following Sunday, when Shelle and Paul went to the place where they always go on Sunday mornings, the Wilcrest Baptist Church, they told everyone assembled that what happened during the storm only deepened their faith in the community.2 First there was TJ, the neighbor’s cousin who suddenly became their “first responder” and risked his life to rescue them. And then, when the challenge turned to recovery and rebuilding, there was the community that has always been primary but never before so important, the one they’d built through the church.
Wilcrest Baptist is a small church in Alief, a lower-middle-class area in Southwest Houston. It has about five hundred active members with roots in about fifty nations, and they’re a fairly even mix of whites, Latinos, and African Americans, some urban, some suburban, some rural, and mostly but not all conservative. Such diversity is unusual in American churches, which have long been among the nation’s most ethnically and racially segregated institutions, and it didn’t happen at random.3 Until recently, Wilcrest was a mostly white congregation. Michael Emerson, an eminent sociologist of religion who both joined and wrote about Wilcrest, reports that the church used to keep a supply of cards with the names and addresses of churches that served primarily black, Latino, and Asian communities. When someone from one of those groups came to Wilcrest, church leaders would politely hand them a card and suggest they find a place where they’d feel more at home.
That changed in the 1980s, when whites began moving out of the area and blacks and Latinos moved in. Nearly all of Wilcrest’s leaders wanted to move the church to the outlying suburbs where their congregants were going, but the bylaws required a unanimous vote from the board to do that, and one member insisted that they stay and adapt. Wilcrest began to expand its community, first slowly and then with a strong, deliberate push. In the early 1990s, the church hired Rodney Woo to be the new pastor. Woo was part of a rising religious movement in the American evangelical community—fueled by multiculturalism and the influx of new Christian immigrants—to make the congregation a place of cross-racial, multiethnic integration.4 He began doing outreach around Southwest Houston, and led congregants on missionary trips around the world. Paul told me that “the first time I went there Pastor Woo was preaching the Gospel in a way that just touched me. I was with my twin sister. We looked around and we just felt welcome. It was multicultural, which was big for us. There were flags in the sanctuary, each one representing a country where a member is from or where the church has done work. We felt like we belonged.”
The Simons are active churchgoers. Paul, who first joined in 2007, is a deacon and the head usher. Shelle, who joined when they got married, in 2012, hosts home groups and sings in the choir. But they never imagined that their family, and their home, would one day get so much help. Wilcrest canceled services on the Sunday of the storm, but church leaders began organizing a relief effort before the rain stopped. Jonathan Williams, the energetic young pastor who replaced Woo in 2011, posted a video prayer and message of hope on Facebook and offered thanks that the congregation was looking after one another. Several families, including the Simons, had suffered severe flood damage and were displaced from their homes. Church members had volunteered to house them, kids and all.
On Thursday, August 31, Wilcrest used social media to post a list of the supplies that its families needed: “Boys clothes, sizes 9–12 months, 2T, 3T. Baby wipes and diapers sizes 4 and 5 and formula. Car seats. Tee-shirts. Men’s jeans. Socks.” Jonathan requested that congregants bring these items to the church as soon as possible. On Friday, five of Paul’s friends from church met him at his house and scoped out the situation. About four feet of water had covered the first floor, and almost everything it touched—floorboards, cabinets, sheet rock, tiles and laminate—had to be ripped out and replaced. Paul’s friends told Jonathan, who called for everyone in the congregation who could get to church to come back on Saturday morning. They’d transform the religious center into a relief operation for anyone, member or not, with hot food, fresh clothing, cleaning supplies, and prayer. It would also be a staging ground, from which teams of congregants would carpool to flooded neighborhoods and help clean out damaged homes. They’d start at the Simons. If time permitted, they’d extend outward and help other families, even those who didn’t belong to the church.
Despite the widespread flood damage, on Saturday morning more than eighty people arrived at Wilcrest for the relief effort. Some got there early to prepare a hot breakfast, and the day began with a shared meal and a prayer. Jonathan told everyone that the hurricane was a reminder that our lives on earth were temporary, as was our hold on our material possessions. He urged congregants to recognize that they were part of a church body, and part of the body of Christ. He promised that the church would be there to help anyone who needed assistance, physical, emotional, or spiritual. Today, and for the hard months to come, their most immediate challenge would be to attend to one another here on earth.
After breakfast, most people, including nearly all of the men, went to the Simons’ house, parking in a nearby elementary school and walking over because the streets were still coated in dirty water and there was no place for cars. Others formed small groups to help with other projects at the church: preparing food in the cafeteria, organizing supplies in the donation center, delivering relief packages to congregants who’d requested specific items, taking care of children whose parents were out taking care of neighbors and friends. Repairing the Simons’ house required grueling manual labor, but with more than forty people pitching in the work went quickly. Once they’d finished, everyone stuck around for group photos and a prayer. And then nearly all of them went to help the Simons’ next-door neighbors, an elderly couple, as well as Laverne and Brittney, who lived across the street. The two women had been thinking of joining a church but hadn’t yet decided on one. Their choice soon became clear.
On Sunday, Laverne and Brittney joined the Simons and the Ayalas, a family with four children that had also been flooded out of their home, for services at Wilcrest. It was an emotional day for everyone in the congregation, but especially for the Ayalas. They’d been anxious because their relatives, with whom they’d been staying since the storm hit, had other displaced family members to house and couldn’t fit everyone much longer. But Leasa and Guy Cantwell, two longtime Wilcrest members whom they barely knew, had invited the Ayalas to move in with them for as long as they needed. The Cantwells were white empty nesters with a large home and a swimming pool, and although the Ayalas’ young children were nervous about staying with strangers, they were also excited, for the first time in days. The chapel was crowded, and Jonathan opened the service by acknowledging what the community had accomplished: “I’ll tell you what a joy it is to look at the group that was there yesterday and know that if it was my house, they would be there. If it was your house, they would be there. I know. I know if my house was flooded, Paul would be there. Shelle would be there. Laverne and Brittney better be there. I will call you. I know where you live. That’s my prayer.”
In the following days, as people and communities throughout Houston prayed for their own miraculous recoveries, scientists announced that, according to current weather models, Harvey was a “500-year flood.” In other words, there is a one in five hundred chance of a storm that strong happening each year. Of course, that didn’t mean that citizens, governments, or relief agencies could rest easy. The United States had already experienced twenty-four five-hundred-year storms since 2010, and with climate change, it could expect many more. What no one anticipated, though, is that the next monstrous hurricane, Irma, would arrive on the US mainland about ten days later, and yet another, Maria, would cause catastrophic destruction in Puerto Rico, including months of disrupted power and water service to millions of people and more than one thousand deaths, about ten days after that.
Irma, which tore through the Caribbean, the Florida Keys, and the western side of Florida, was a Category 5 hurricane with sustained wind speeds of 185 miles per hour at its peak, and a Category 4 storm when it hit the mainland. In Florida, as in Texas, runaway development on low-lying land meant that millions of people were living in places that are likely to flood often and be uninhabitable by the end of the twenty-first century. Irma knocked out power to 6.7 million households across two-thirds of the state, caused between $42.5 and $65 billion of property damage, and took at least seventy-five lives, including twelve residents of a nursing home that overheated when the power went out. That’s actually a lower toll than experts expected, because the hurricane’s path changed and weakened at the last minute. But 2017 wound up setting an American record for costs from extreme weather events, with $306 billion in total damage. And it’s only a matter of time before the next wave of hurricanes and superstorms arrives.
Today, cities and nations throughout the world are beginning to face up to the existential security challenges posed by global warming: rising seas, stronger storms, hotter and longer heat waves, droughts, migration, and conflicts over basic resources like water, food, and land. We have a narrow window to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the climate from changing so dramatically that countless species, including our own, will no longer be able to live in places where they currently flourish. For that reason, there’s no environmental project more urgent than climate mitigation, which means radically reducing our use of fossil fuels, converting to renewable sources of energy, and building new infrastructures to support these systems and sustain new ways of life much sooner than most governments are currently planning.
But much of the carbon dioxide we’ve already emitted will remain in the atmosphere for centuries, heating the oceans and raising the seas. If, through some unfathomable invention, scientists managed to stop all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the process of global warming would continue for centuries, and sea levels would keep rising for thousands of years.5 We must mitigate, but we also have no choice but to adapt.
In coming decades, the world’s most affluent societies will invest trillions of dollars on new infrastructure—seawalls, smart grids, basins for capturing rainwater—that can withstand twenty-first-century challenges, including megastorms like Harvey and Irma. But no investment in hard infrastructure will be sufficient to “climate-proof” the densely populated cities and suburbs that modern societies have built in coastal areas, river deltas, deserts, and plains. Engineered systems can be more or less responsive to the emerging climate, but history shows that they are never infallible. Breakdowns often occur for unanticipated reasons. Social infrastructure is always critical during and after disasters, but it’s in these moments that it can truly mean the difference between life and death.
Social infrastructure can be built into traditional megaprojects, so that expensive climate security systems like seawalls and water basins function as parks or public plazas where people congregate on a regular basis and develop the informal support networks that we need during crises. It can also come from community organizations and religious groups, whose physical facilities and programs are staging grounds for all variety of collective life, regardless of the weather.
In the United States, religious organizations like Wilcrest play a vital role in helping their communities get through extreme weather. One reason that sites of worship are such important social infrastructures is that they are ubiquitous. Today, there are more than three hundred thousand religious congregations in the United States. “To put that number in context,” writes one group of sociologists, “religious congregations are more common than Subways, McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Wendy’s, Starbucks, Pizza Huts, KFCs, Taco Bells, Domino’s Pizzas, Dunkin’ Donuts, Quiznos, and Dairy Queens combined and multiplied by three.”6
Another reason religious organizations are so important is that they are not merely houses of worship but key sites for community building. Religious institutions are driven by moral and spiritual concerns and are deeply engaged in the lives of their congregants. Although they vary dramatically by size and resources, churches, mosques, and synagogues tend to offer all kinds of social programs in their facilities: education and study groups, athletic leagues, childcare, elder support, and the like. Some engage people outside their congregation and try to build bridges; others are self-segregating and focus on the needs of the group. But in either case, their significance as social infrastructure is beyond dispute.
Not everyone belongs to a religious organization, however, and not every religious organization has the capacity to provide the kind of disaster relief that places like Wilcrest offer. There are, fortunately, many other places and organizations that serve as social infrastructures for secular or religiously unaffiliated people, including libraries, schools, and community groups. But most need resources to thrive.
Increasingly, governments and disaster planners are recognizing the importance of social infrastructure as part of climate security. Nicole Lurie, a scholar at Rand who previously served as President Obama’s assistant secretary for preparedness and response, told me that when she was in the federal government her team understood “how much better people do in disasters, how much longer they live, when they have good social networks and connections. And we’ve had a pretty big evolution in our thinking, so promoting community resilience is now front and center in our approach.”
Barack Obama worked as a community organizer during the late 1980s, learning firsthand why social ties matter. He must have been thinking of the impoverished communities he’d gotten to know so well in Chicago when, as a US senator in 2005, he connected the effects of Hurricane Katrina to the slow-motion disaster that New Orleans’s vulnerable neighborhoods endured every day. “I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane,” he said. “They were abandoned long ago.” Katrina, Obama continued, should “awaken us to the great divide that continues to fester in our midst” and inspire us to “prevent such a failure from ever occurring again.”7
During his first term, President Obama introduced a new National Health Security Strategy that emphasized preparedness and resilience, calling for the participation of the “whole community”—government agencies, civic organizations, corporations, and citizens—in all aspects of the security plan. After March 2011, when Obama issued a directive on national preparedness, FEMA began to embrace a similar approach to community resilience. “Community-engagement” programs funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been launched in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Washington, DC. “There’s always been a big focus on classic infrastructure in mitigation,” Alonzo Plough, a former director of emergency preparedness and response for the County of Los Angeles, says. “But it’s not just engineering that matters. It’s social capital. And what this movement is bringing to the fore is that the social infrastructure matters, too.”8
Today, a growing network of policy makers and designers recognize the advantages of building social infrastructure into larger vital system upgrades. Their goal is to carry out “multipurpose projects” so that public investments in security don’t just mitigate disaster damage but also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times.
Hurricane Sandy marked a turning point in the way government and civic groups think about climate security. The “superstorm” of 2012 covered an area more than one thousand miles in diameter, making it one of the largest hurricanes in American history. Its winds were both punishingly severe and painfully slow, and like Harvey, Sandy seemed to pause so that it could inflict extra damage on nearly everything in its path. Sandy hit the Atlantic coast on October 29—the worst possible moment. Not only was there a full moon with high tides, there was also an early winter storm with arctic air moving into the Northeast from the other direction, and the two systems collided to form what journalists called a hybrid “Frankenstorm.”
As the primary target of the attacks on September 11, New York City had spent billions of dollars, over the course of a decade, shoring up its security systems and preparing for a catastrophe. Terrorism was not its only concern. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city also became a leader in planning for climate change, issuing high-profile reports about adaptation and mitigation and beginning the process of making the city more weather-resistant. In August 2011, New York City braced itself for the arrival of another severe storm system, Hurricane Irene, but was largely spared when the storm spun off to the north and west. The experience was something like a dress rehearsal for city officials and emergency managers, but it also gave residents a false sense of security, and only bolstered the collective confidence that has historically served Gotham so well.
Sandy laid waste to New York City’s spirit of invulnerability, and to much of the city’s vital infrastructure as well. The storm surge, which reached fourteen feet, toppled the city’s flood protection systems. Subway tunnels filled up like bathtubs. The sewage system flooded and eleven billion gallons of soiled water overflowed into rivers and streets. The communications system broke down, leaving more than one million residents and businesses without phone or Internet service. The power grid failed, massively, with outages lasting nearly a week in Lower Manhattan and much longer in parts of Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Several hospitals and nursing homes were evacuated. Tens of thousands of residents were displaced from their homes, some permanently. Officials estimated the economic toll at around $60 billion. Miraculously, only around 150 people died in the United States, and fewer than 100 died across the Caribbean.
Sandy was neither the most deadly nor the most expensive storm in recent US history, and in global terms, its impact was far less severe than other twenty-first-century disasters, from the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 (which killed more than two hundred thousand people) to the pan-European heat wave of 2003 (which killed around seventy thousand people). But Sandy was important for other reasons: Not only did it reveal the surprisingly fragile physical and social infrastructure of one of the world’s wealthiest and best-protected metropolitan areas, but it also directly affected the political, economic, and media elite of the United States. The fossil fuel industry has had great success promoting climate change denial and policy stagnation on all variety of environmental matters, but Sandy forced many of America’s most powerful institutions to begin reckoning with global warming. A wide range of people and institutions that have the capacity to shape public opinion, social policy, and urban planning see the world differently today than they did before Sandy hit. They are looking for new ideas—about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, how to protect vulnerable people and places, how to rebuild cities, communities, and critical infrastructures so that the systems we depend upon don’t fall apart when we need them most.
Sandy revealed serious flaws in all forms of infrastructure in the New York area. When I visited Rockaway Beach and Staten Island in mid-November 2012, residents complained about the slow pace of recovery. The power was out. The gas was off. Phone service was spotty. Trains weren’t running. Sewage water from the flooding covered the streets.
Still, there were some surprising reserves of strength. Consider Staten Island, which suffered more fatalities than any other borough in New York City, and endured flooding so destructive that the state helped relocate residents in several coastal neighborhoods to higher ground. In the New Dorp neighborhood, a branch library housed in a modest building escaped major damage, but homes nearby took in as much as sixteen feet of water and residents needed all kinds of assistance. There are schools and senior centers in the area, but when people are in serious trouble they want to go to a place that’s familiar and comfortable, where they are likely to find neighbors and friends. In New Dorp, as in so many New York City neighborhoods, that place was the local library. Old and young, they came in droves.
At first the library offered basic resources: food, hot water, clean bathrooms, phones, power, cleaning supplies, companionship. Within days it was doing much more: helping residents apply for FEMA funds online, connecting them with the Red Cross, and hosting volunteers from civic organizations that were mounting their own relief efforts. In New Dorp, the library staff worked like the religious leaders in Houston. They knew their patrons well enough to do their own emergency outreach, checking in with regulars whom no one had heard from and making sure someone visited those who were alone or vulnerable and in need of extra support.
Something similar happened at the Rockaway Beach Surf Club in Queens, which had opened in a converted auto-repair shop beneath the El on Beach Eighty-Seventh Street a few months before Sandy hit. The club transformed itself into a temporary relief agency when two of its founders returned there after the storm, posted Facebook updates inviting friends to join them, and watched more than five thousand volunteers come to help. Along with some local churches that, as in Houston, quickly transformed their chapels into relief centers, the surf club became one of the Rockaways’ main community organizations, providing food, cleaning supplies, camaraderie, and manual labor for nearby residents. The club’s neighbors, including blue-collar families and poor African Americans who, months before, had worried about how the club would fit into the community, joined in and benefited from the organization.
Unfortunately, thousands of people whose homes were damaged by Sandy live in neighborhoods that lack strong support networks or community organizations capable of mounting a large relief effort. They tend to be poorer and less educated than typical New Yorkers, with weaker ties to their neighbors as well as political power brokers.
After Sandy, Michael McDonald, who heads Global Health Initiatives in Washington, DC, and worked in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, coordinated relief efforts by volunteer groups, government agencies, corporate consultants, health workers, and residents in vulnerable areas, particularly in the Rockaways. McDonald calls the network the New York Resilience System, and he’s convinced that civil society will ultimately determine which people and places withstand the emerging threats from climate change. “What’s actually happening on the ground is not under an incident command system,” he told me. “It’s the fragile, agile networks that make a difference in situations like these. It’s the horizontal relationships like the ones we’re building that create security on the ground, not the hierarchical institutions. We’re here to unify the effort.”
The island nation of Singapore—where 5.6 million people are packed into 277 square miles of land, much of which is perilously close to sea level—has combined physical and social infrastructure in several exemplary projects. Singapore began adapting to dangerous weather thirty-five years ago, after a series of heavy rains during monsoon seasons caused repeated flooding in the low-lying city center. The country has always had a difficult relationship with water: its geography makes it vulnerable to heavy seasonal rains and frequent flooding, but there is never a sufficient supply of potable water, and in recent years Singapore’s dependency on Malaysian resources has led to political conflict. Climate change, with its rising sea levels and increase in heavy rains, threatens the city-state’s stability. But Singapore’s government also sees this moment as an opportunity.
The Marina Barrage and Reservoir, which opened in 2008, is at the heart of Singapore’s $2 billion campaign to improve drainage infrastructure, reduce the size of flood-prone areas, and—through better social infrastructure—enhance the quality of city life. It consists of nine operable crest gates, a series of enormous pumps, and a ten-thousand-hectare catchment area that is roughly one-seventh the size of the country. The system not only protects low-lying urban neighborhoods from flooding during heavy rains but also eliminates the tidal influence of the surrounding seawater, creating a rain-fed supply of freshwater that currently meets 10 percent of Singapore’s demand. Moreover, by stabilizing water levels in the Marina basin, the barriers have produced better conditions for water sports. The Marina’s public areas, which include a sculpture garden, a water-play space, a green roof with dramatic skyline vistas, and the Sustainable Singapore Gallery, bolster the city’s tourist economy. They’ve become vital parts of the social environment, and models for other cities that want their investment in climate security to pay off every day.
Rotterdam, which has a long history of flooding, is another model for climate planning that incorporates social infrastructure. After enduring a devastating storm surge in 1953, Rotterdam began building a series of dams, barriers, and seawalls as part of a national project called Delta Works, and in the early 2000s, when the United States was investing so many resources in homeland security, the Dutch government provided funds for an upgrade, the Rotterdam Climate Proof Program. Arnoud Molenaar, who manages it, said his team realized that they could convert the water that comes into the city from the skies and the sea into “blue gold.” “Before, we saw the water as a problem,” Molenaar told me. “In the Netherlands, we focused on how to prevent it from coming in. New York City focused on evacuation, how to get people out of the way. The most interesting thing is figuring out what’s between these approaches: what to do with the water once it’s there.”
In 2005, Rotterdam hosted the Second International Architecture Biennale. The theme was “The Flood.” Designers from around the world presented plans for how cities could cope with water in the future, and when the exhibition ended Molenaar’s team set out to implement those that would have immediate practical value. Rotterdam is now a global leader in what climate designers consider the architecture of accommodation: Rather than simply attempting to block out heavy precipitation, the city is creating attractive, usable physical places that let the water in. There’s a floating pavilion in the city center made of three silver half spheres with an exhibition space that’s equivalent to four tennis courts; a floodable terrace and sculpture garden along the city’s canal; and buildings whose facades, garages, and ground-level spaces have been engineered to be waterproof.
The most exciting social infrastructure that Rotterdam has built for climate security is Waterplein Benthemplein (the Benthemplein Water Square), designed by the Dutch architectural group De Urbanisten. The square, near the city’s Central Station, in a formerly drab open space surrounded by large buildings, consists of three basins—two shallow, one deep—whose primary ecological purpose is to collect rainwater during the city’s heavy storms. Ordinarily, flood management projects like these are buried underground as invisible infrastructure, so that the water disappears from view without anyone knowing how much there is, where it’s going, or how the urban system works. Waterplein Benthemplein takes the opposite approach: the basins are not merely exposed; they are the most prominent architectural features of the plaza, places that attract different groups of people and offer a wide range of social and recreational activities.
On dry days, the deep basin doubles as a sport court, and people of all ages sit around the tiered seating area that surrounds it, taking in the action. The two shallow basins have different everyday functions. One contains an island with materials resembling a dance floor; the other is designed for skaters and the people who watch them.9 The square has other amenities. The site had long been a healthy habitat for trees, but the designers filled in open areas with wild flowers, tall grass, and small benches, which together create a series of pocket sanctuaries for rest and conversation. There’s a large fountain, a dramatic water wall, and a rain well that feeds into an oversize, stainless steel gutter. There’s always a pleasant flow of water in the square, but when there’s precipitation, the full system rushes into operation. It sounds like a powerful waterfall, and looks exactly like what its designers intended: a dramatic work of urban art that doubles as critical infrastructure for a city where rain can be deadly. Projects like Waterplein Benthemplein and the Singapore Marina Barrage and Reservoir are not inexpensive; but as storms mount and their costs, both human and financial, add up, governments will have no choice but to dedicate the kinds of resources to climate change that we’ve devoted to the war on terror. Unfortunately, governments in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable nations do not have the kinds of resources that are necessary to build high-tech infrastructure systems that protect people from extreme weather while also improving the quality of everyday life. They’ve lobbied for adaptation funds during negotiations for every major international climate treaty, and although they’ve gained some concessions from the affluent societies whose carbon emissions are responsible for most global warming, the pool of money available to help developing nations fend off ecological ruin is a fraction of what they need.
Consider Bangladesh, a geographically small nation of 165 million people densely packed onto a delta formed by the confluence of several large rivers, and one of the most ecologically vulnerable places on earth. Bangladesh has a long history of catastrophic flooding that predates global warming: tsunamis, cyclones, and rainstorms arrive with frightening regularity, and each storm surge sends salinated water into the agricultural regions, ruining the crops that residents rely on for income and nourishment. In 1991, a tropical cyclone killed roughly 138,000 Bangladeshis, including a disproportionate number of women, old people, and children, who were trapped in the water and didn’t know how to swim. In 1998, monsoon rains flooded two-thirds of the country, destroying some three hundred thousand houses, killing livestock, contaminating drinking water, and devastating local farms. In some nations, dealing with global warming remains a low priority, but in Bangladesh it’s already a matter of grave national significance, part of every major policy debate.
In Bangladesh, as in most of the world’s poor nations, international development agencies tend to dictate the terms of new infrastructure investments. Malcolm Araos, an NYU graduate student and one of my research assistants, did fieldwork in Dhaka to examine how adaptation projects unfold on the ground. He found, predictably, that hard infrastructure like embankments, sluice gates, and drainage systems were often placed around command centers where the nation’s elites clustered rather than in the crowded, low-income neighborhoods where residents are most at risk. Not only did most climate security projects neglect social infrastructure; in some cases, they required demolishing the informal settlements and busy marketplaces where poor people gathered.
But Araos also discovered exciting projects where communities unable to secure conventional flood protection developed new ideas for staying above water. Throughout the country, grassroots organizations have been collaborating with nonprofits and local governments on social infrastructure projects that enhance resilience during weather disasters and dramatically improve residents’ everyday lives too.
One particularly effective initiative is the “floating schools and libraries” program, led by Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a nonprofit that’s addressing climate change, access to education, human rights, health care, and the digital divide with buoyant social infrastructure—in this case, boats. Shidhulai operates a fleet of fifty-four vessels in flood-prone areas in northwest Bangladesh, where recurrent flooding, even from routine rain events, regularly renders schools, hospitals, and libraries inaccessible. The boats, which are tethered to particular places and function as local institutions, are large and steady enough to host classrooms and health clinics during all but the stormiest weather. Children are not their only beneficiaries. The boats are staging grounds for all kinds of adult education, including courses for literacy, sustainable agriculture, and, more urgently, disaster survival. They’re places where women build closer ties to one another, learn when and where to evacuate with their children, and even how to swim. Traditional security experts don’t always appreciate the value of these programs, but scholars and international relief agencies believe they’re among the most effective ways to help women and children survive the region’s dangerous monsoons and floods.10
Poor, developing nations are not the only places experimenting with “floating infrastructure.” In 2017, several leading international design firms proposed building floating work and residential space in the bay water that runs along Silicon Valley. That same year, the New York Times reported on the rise of “seasteading” in areas threatened by rising sea levels—“Floating Cities, No Longer Science Fiction, Begin to Take Shape,” teased one headline—and high-profile investors including PayPal founder Peter Thiel are betting on the concept.11
Leaders in the international development field may not yet appreciate the importance of these climate-driven programs, but Bangladeshi leaders credit grassroots education projects like floating schools with dramatically reducing mortality during extreme weather crises. Social infrastructure is not a substitute for well-designed hard infrastructure, but it’s just as important. In Bangladesh, as in so many low-lying, developing nations facing dire threats from climate change, it’s the best way for communities to protect themselves.
In recent years, as ferocious hurricanes, searing heat waves, and raging wildfires have threatened life and destroyed valuable property in the world’s most affluent societies, governments that long denied or delayed action on global warming have begun to act more like Bangladesh. It was easy to ignore remote and abstract ecological transformations like sea-level rise and warmer temperatures. But today, climate change is coming to mean something specific, and scary. “Even on a clear day a hundred years from now, the water will be where it is today under storm-surge conditions,” says Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist at Columbia University whose 2009 report on climate risks to New York City contains eerily accurate predictions about what would happen to the city’s infrastructure during a major storm surge. Sandy, for instance, seemed to be following Jacob’s script. “We can’t just rebuild after every disaster,” Jacob told me. “We need to pro-build, with a future of climate change in mind.”
After Sandy, President Barack Obama created a special initiative to support such pro-building in new infrastructure projects, an international design competition called Rebuild by Design. The competition was managed by then–HUD secretary Shaun Donovan and funded with more than $1 billion from a federal disaster relief bill. It attracted applications from 148 multidisciplinary teams from around the world, 10 of which were selected to participate in an intensive nine-month process of research, outreach, and design. I served as the research director for the competition, and by doing this job I came to appreciate both the inadequacy of our current infrastructure systems and the social benefits that rebuilding them could create.
I also got to work closely with leaders in an emerging field of practice that links climate science, social science, urban planning, engineering, and design, all in service of mitigating climate hazards and protecting vulnerable people in an ever-warming world. These individuals are not just changing the conversation about climate change; they’re changing the systems we need to become more resilient to all variety of threats.
Of all Sandy’s targets, none was more densely packed with human, economic, and cultural activity than Lower Manhattan, and none had such vulnerable infrastructure either. The compact but crowded area below Forty-Second Street includes some of New York City’s most impoverished and most affluent neighborhoods, headquarters for several of the world’s largest corporations, thousands of public housing units, and scores of community organizations that serve those in need. It hosts global financial institutions near the Battery, large hospitals near the East River, prestigious art galleries in Chelsea and the West Village, and thousands of small businesses throughout. It also has dozens of subway stops and an electrical substation in the East Village that supplies power to most of downtown.
All of this flooded during Sandy, when fourteen-foot storm surges topped the river’s edges in southern Manhattan, inundating the Lower East and Lower West Sides. There was damage everywhere, but the East Side, where there are thick concentrations of poor people in aging public housing projects, and a cluster of large medical institutions, proved especially vulnerable. Water from the East River poured into the lobbies and basements of major hospitals, destroying years of research materials, forcing emergency evacuations, and, after the storm, disrupting the region’s chronic care network for more than a year. The surge destroyed systems that provide power and communications to housing projects up and down the Lower East Side, and it left thousands of vulnerable people stranded, without water, electricity, or elevator service, on high floors of apartment buildings. And, for good measure, the surge dumped wastewater and debris onto the beaten-down asphalt that dominates the area’s public spaces, including the South Street Seaport and the East River Greenway.
Safeguarding Lower Manhattan from future hurricanes and sea-level rise is a major priority for New York City, but so too is improving the quality of everyday life on the Lower East Side. The Rebuild by Design competition yielded an extraordinary, multibillion-dollar proposal for doing this, from Bjarke Ingels and the BIG Group.12 The plan, initially called the BIG U because it wraps around Lower Manhattan in a U-shape, but now known as the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, relies on a series of protective walls that double as sloped parklands and recreational facilities, such as athletic fields, bike paths, and walkways. The project is divided into three sections, each called a compartment, and the design ideas for each site grew out of extensive consultations with local residents, businesses, and community organizations.
The compartment on the Lower East Side, which is, for now, the only funded part of the project, features lushly planted berms that protect neighborhoods, infrastructure, and institutions near the river, while also bridging them over the FDR Drive (an elevated highway that carries lots of traffic up and down the East Side of Manhattan and currently cuts off pedestrian access to the waterfront) to new gathering places and commercial outlets on the water’s edge. The berms would block and absorb storm surges when necessary, but their everyday function, as parklands and recreational areas for inhabitants of an especially gray and unpleasant part of an especially gray city, is at least equally as important.
Deployable walls, camouflaged as a series of murals that hang from strong hinges on the ugly underside of the FDR Drive, are another key part of the proposal. Most of the time, the structures, which will be designed by local artists, operate as decorative ceiling panels that enhance the experience of walking beneath the highway, which, lacking good alternatives, thousands of residents do each day. Occasionally the walls will flip down for other functions, such as blocking out wind and framing space for a protected seasonal food market. And when hurricanes hit, the walls become hard barriers, reducing the odds that floodwaters will devastate the area again.
Staten Island, a sprawling barrier island at the mouth of the Hudson River and directly exposed to the Atlantic, also needs better protection. Residents there have endured repeated, occasionally devastating flooding since the late 1950s, when the government began building the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, expanding infrastructure, and encouraging people to settle there. Although Staten Island has a smaller population than any other New York City borough, it had the greatest number of fatalities during Sandy. Tremendous waves crashed into its low-lying neighborhoods, eviscerating homes, carrying cars off the roads, and penetrating communities blocks from the ocean, where no one expected a deluge.
You can’t wall off an ocean, but you can reduce the energy of its waves and protect against catastrophic flooding. Doing this, while also promoting social life and encouraging collective climate action in vulnerable waterfront communities, is the core goal of Living Breakwaters, a creative plan to build natural infrastructure—rocky sloped walls full of finfish, shellfish, and lobsters—that cuts the risk of flood damage and erosion on the south shore of Staten Island.13 The landscape architecture firm Scape, which is directed by the pioneering designer Kate Orff, leads the project. But it also includes a team of climate scientists, marine ecologists, educators, and advocates for social infrastructure.
Instead of building a massive barrier, Scape’s plan acknowledges the inescapable fact that water is coming and uses nature’s tools to protect vulnerable people and places from dangerous floods. It also does something bigger: since a robust climate policy agenda will require citizens, and not just scientists, to understand the risks of global warming, Living Breakwaters includes an ambitious educational program to teach how ecological citizenship can mitigate future climate threats.
Scape’s way of shoring up Staten Island’s social infrastructure involves using environmental educational hubs as everyday cultural centers, promoting social cohesion around a shared set of projects and concerns. The plan, which also introduces a curriculum codesigned with the New York Harbor School and the Billion Oyster Project, is designed to bring thousands of students into marine restoration projects and, through them, help families and communities see how our fate is linked to the fate of our oceans. It also links people in the area to one another through cultural programs and beachfront activities—such as planting oyster reefs and observing local wildlife—so that they’ll know who needs support, and how to help them, when the next big storm hits.
Both Living Breakwaters and the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project await final environmental reviews and regulatory approvals, and there’s much that could go wrong. Living Breakwaters requires working in or around areas where the city, the state, and the US Army Corps of Engineers have other water projects, and it could get tangled in a web of conflicting priorities and jurisdictional disputes. From the beginning, critics have warned that cutting costs to meet a budget in the final stages of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project implementation process could reduce the verdant bridging berms into an ugly and imposing seawall, exactly the kind of project that Rebuild by Design was supposed to reject.
But at this stage the federal, state, and city governments continue to support the innovative projects, and other cities, in the United States and around the world, have already taken inspiration from the plans. If the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project and Living Breakwaters are built close to their designs, they will change the way we conceive of climate adaptation, putting social infrastructure at the core.
Unless we dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, climate adaptation will be nothing more than a temporary survival strategy, one fated to make environmental injustice a more serious problem within and across nationstates. Consider, again, Houston: Many of its neighborhoods already benefit from social infrastructure that fosters cohesion and support in disasters. Since it’s one of the world’s wealthiest cities, embedded in one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations, it has resources to build better hard infrastructure for flood protection too. But as long as Houston continues its current trajectory, with an economy rooted in oil and gas and a city plan that promotes continuous sprawl, single-family homes, and dependence on private automobiles, the great metropolis will wind up fueling global warming and increasing its own risk. Houston, like all the world’s cities, needs to become more compact, dense, and amenable to walking and biking, which means building taller, multiunit residential towers in central places. It needs more trees to absorb carbon and cool the air, more urban parks and greenways where people can enjoy themselves without using their cars. It needs to replace its seemingly endless span of paved, impermeable roadways that channel floodwater to low-lying areas. All of this means building better social infrastructure, which is no easy project in a city that famously lacks zoning ordinances, and rebuilding after Harvey is the ideal moment to begin.
For inspiration, Houston can look to a nearby city that’s also recovering from a catastrophic hurricane: New Orleans. In 2010, city leaders developed New Orleans 2030, a master plan that went far beyond what people urgently wanted in the wake of Katrina: flood protection, adaptation, and climate security.14 The city faced major challenges. Its population, 455,000 before Katrina hit in 2005, had fallen to 208,000 in 2006 and was only 348,000 in 2010. (It was 391,000 as of 2016.) With far fewer children, New Orleans had no choice but to close some of its public schools. The new plan called for repurposing and redeveloping the large institutional buildings as community centers, art studios, small business incubators, and apartments. That wasn’t the only major change. Before the flood, in 1999, the city plan promised support for regional commercial development on major roadways and intersections, places where big-box stores could fit comfortably and parking would be abundant. After Katrina, as citizens and civic groups grew more concerned about climate change, that idea was discarded in favor of pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use commercial and residential developments that encouraged local social activity on sidewalks and streets. New Orleans was already famous for its ebullient, neighborhood-based public culture. Now it would double down.
In highly segregated cities, social polarization is a potential downside of intense neighborhood culture, and although New Orleans has a long, unique history of ethnic and racial mixing, its residential areas are sharply divided by race and class. To combat that problem, New Orleans 2030 features a social infrastructure that facilitates pedestrian circulation across the city, and helps with climate mitigation and flood protection too. The Lafitte Greenway, which opened in 2015 around the historic Carondelet Canal, is a three-mile, multiuse trail and park linking six diverse neighborhoods, including affluent areas like Mid-City and Lakeview, the African American Tremé, a cluster of Section 8 housing buildings, the bustling French Quarter, and the bayou. The path is lined with bioswales (plants that absorb storm water, silt, and pollution) and native trees, and walkways run into a string of neighborhood parks. In just a few years, the greenway has become one of the city’s most popular sites for leisure and recreation. It has also helped revive a formerly moribund cycling culture. New Orleans had 11 miles of bikeways when Katrina hit; today it has 115. Since the greenway opened, New Orleans has shot into the top American cities for bike commuters. It currently ranks fifth in the per capita population that cycles to work, and it promises to move further up the list once it launches its bike-share program.15 If political officials need evidence that social infrastructure can entice people out of their cars and into transit options that reduce our carbon footprint and curb global warming, New Orleans is a fine place to look.
The Lafitte Greenway is a modest project, with an initial budget of $9 million, but it has already expanded to incorporate new playgrounds, dog runs, community gardens, and athletic fields that branch off the pathway. Today, community groups in neighborhoods just beyond its reach are pushing to build new paths into the corridor. Commercial establishments, including bars and restaurants, are opening on the trail and all around the periphery. Real estate development is following, and in the process helping New Orleans become more walkable and compact. If there’s a downside to this infrastructure project, it’s that too much upscale development could generate additional waves of gentrification and displacement. But the early signs are that residents all along the greenway are embracing the project. It makes their daily lives healthier and more enjoyable, and it makes the city more sustainable too.
More important, the Lafitte Greenway, with its storm protection systems and clean transit networks, exemplifies the kind of new infrastructure project that we will need to survive climate change. It blends climate adaptation with mitigation while also improving the quality of urban life, regardless of the weather, and giving the people fortunate enough to be near it a way to connect. The water is coming. With the right kind of social infrastructure, we may well get through it without building an ark.