Jason M. Barr July 15, 2024
Many cities around the world are facing housing affordability crises. In New York, for example, a majority of renters are rent-burdened, meaning their housing costs eat up more than 30% of their income. Even worse, nearly one in three low-income renters are severely rent-burdened, spending more than 50% of their income on housing.
To his credit, Mayor Eric Adams is pushing his City of Yes Housing Opportunity agenda, which, if approved, would allow for more housing throughout the city. These rezonings will produce up to 100,000 additional units over the next 15 years, if all goes well. While this may sound like a lot, it’s only about 6,700 units per year, on average—hardly what’s needed to make a meaningful impact in affordability.
Where to Build?
One of the biggest hurdles is finding new sites on which to build housing. With only a slight bit of exaggeration, we can say that current housing is where future housing goes to die. In other words, when housing is built, it creates barriers that make future, denser buildings more difficult to construct.
Tenants in rental buildings, for example, would need to be evicted or relocated, which is frequently impossible as retnal laws give tenants the right to remain in their units (and with New York City vacancy rates at 1.4%, where will they go?). In suburban areas, zoning for single-family housing dominates, and densification is nearly impossible (more than 50% of residential land in New York City is zoned for one- or two-family homes and is likely much higher outside the city boundaries).
Last year, Governor Kathy Hochul introduced a bill to upzone parcels near transit lines around the state. However, it was voted down by the state legislature because suburban residents are opposed to having multifamily buildings in their towns or neighborhoods. Mayor Adams’s City of Yes Plan is now working its way through the legislative process. It remains to be seen if key parts will be gutted because of local opposition.
New Mannahatta
However, there is another option that we can add to the list—creating housing on new land.
In the long sweep of urban history, when cities have been land constrained, they have frequently made more of it by draining wetlands or building out the shorelines into the sea. The process of land reclamation is as old as civilization itself.
In January 2022, I proposed expanding Manhattan 1,760 acres (7.1 km2) into New York harbor with the dual aim of providing 180,000 housing units and protecting Lower Manhattan from climate-change-induced storm surges and sea level rise.
The proposal was greeted, of course, with a flood of skepticism. Much of the knee-jerk nay-saying was based on the idea that my plan was too radical. However, I don’t think most people realize that land reclamation has been part of New York’s DNA since New Amsterdam was founded in 1624 and has continued well into the 20th century. Lower Manhattan south of City Hall is about 50% bigger than it was before the Dutch arrived. In fact, there’s nothing wholly original about my proposal as it follows a long line of such proposals (discussed below).
Second, a tour around the world (to be discussed in Part II of this series) will show how common reclamation is in cities seeking to grow and accommodate their populations (I will discuss the environmental concerns in Part III of this series).
The Ghost of Moses
Today, American cities are mired in paralysis—residents are afraid of mega-projects that could substantially benefit us. People in New York constantly chime in about how the city was, so to speak, bitten by the snake of Robert Moses, the master builder of New York from the 1930s to 1960s. Because Moses was heavy-handed and power-hungry in the mid-20th century, the logic goes, we can’t do big projects today.
So, I want to demonstrate in this blog series that land reclamation for urban expansion and new housing is not only an age-old tradition but something we should consider for our future. Let’s turn to New York’s history.
New Amsterdam
When the Dutch created New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1626, one of their first acts was draining the wetlands along the shoreline (today this is a bad idea, but I’ll return to the environmental issues in Part III). They dug a canal from a creek that ran down what is Broad Street today and shored up the coastline. Elminating wetlands was also seen as good for public health to prevent insect-borne diseases. By draining these wetlands, they created new land, and the canal allowed boats to enter the city itself.
Another early act was to build a fort on the lower tip of Manhattan (today, where the Museum of the American Indian resides). As the map above shows, by 1660, the Dutch had transformed Lower Manhattan into a hub for commerce and defense (and the seat of government). If the Dutch had remained in control of the colony and had not lost it to the English in 1664, Lower Manhattan would likely be ringed by a series of canals, like its father city in the Netherlands.
Land Reclamation in Colonial New York
When the English arrived on the scene, local officials sold off so-called water lots—those parts of the shoreline that were exposed during low tide—to private landowners, who would create a retaining wall and fill in the land. Over time, water lots were sold further and further out.
Land creation had multiple purposes. First, it provided new real estate to help the city grow. Additionally, since the new land was now in deeper water, ships laden with merchandise could dock at the wharves and piers rather than anchoring further away and transferring their wares on barges, thus reducing transportation costs and creating a bustling port.
On the eve of the American Revolution, British New York had added nearly five hundred acres of land along the Lower Manhattan shorelines. As the historian Ann Buttenwieser writes, “Ballast was dumped and ships sunk, hills leveled, building sites and roadways excavated, wastes, ashes and sweepings collected, and all were deposited at the water’s edge. When space was needed for services, work places, homes, or recreation, it was always possible to create more land.”
Historian Hendrik Hartog recounts,
Over the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the harborside facilities of New York were transformed. Two full blocks were reclaimed out of the East River. The city once had ended at Pearl Street; by the end of the century, Front Street was the southeastern border of lower Manhattan.…It is a certainty, however, that waterlot grants were used, as they were designed, to provide New York City with the streets, wharves, and port facilities of a growing seaport.
The Battery
The Dutch fort (though rebuilt) remained a defensive location for the English as well. Colonial Governor Thomas Dongan began building batteries along the shore in 1683, giving the area its name. In 1788, the fort was demolished, and the rubble was used as landfill to create a public promenade. Between 1808 and 1811, a new, circular fort was built 200 feet offshore on an artificial island to prepare for the War of 1812. Originally called the West Battery, it was re-named Castle Clinton in 1815. In 1824, it was repurposed as Castle Garden, and became a popular entertainment venue and beer hall.
During the 1840s, as people began clamoring for more park space on Manhattan, the idea of infilling the area between the Battery and Castle Clinton took hold. Battery Park was thus created with landfill, uniting Castle Garden island with Manhattan. From 1855 to 1896, Castle Clinton operated as the city’s official immigrant processing depot before Ellis Island opened.
Over the course of the 19th century, New York continued to expand it shorelines. In 1865, the engineer Egbert Viele published a topographical map, which shows how much of the city had been expanded through fill up to that point. Many housing projects built in the 20th century, like Stuyvesant Tower and the Lillian Ward Public Houses on Avenue D in Alphabet City are on land reclaimed in the 19th century.
The World Trade Center
After World War II, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) moved the city’s port to the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, which could accommodate the large container ships. Between the declining fortunes of Manhattan’s port and the aging Art Deco offices, Lower Manhattan was falling on hard times.
In 1957, David Rockefeller, Chairman of Chase Bank and grandson of oil baron John D. Rockefeller, spearheaded the creation of the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA) to help revitalize Lower Manhattan. The DLMA commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merril (SOM) to create a master plan, which included a World Trade Center and office and exhibition space near the East River south of the Brooklyn Bridge. The DLMA turned to the Port Authority as a natural agency that could spearhead construction.
After protracted negotiations and “slum clearance,” the PA took control of a 15-acre (6-hectare) site on Manhattan’s lower west side and built the World Trade Center, including the Twin Towers, on landfill created in the 19th century.
Battery Park City
Excavation for the World Trade Center produced a lot of material that had to go somewhere. Thus, the idea of creating a new neighborhood, Battery Park City, emerged by reusing the fill for new land next to the World Trade Center site. However, the plan was expanded to 92 acres (0.37 km2) and only a quarter of the fill came from World Trade Center site.
The Battery Park City Authority developed the complex, which was formed in 1968 by the New York State Legislature. While the neighborhood took a while to be fully built out, today, it is hailed as a success story of how to create a mixed-use neighborhood from scratch. The site contains 9,300 residents in 30 residential towers, 10 million square feet of office space, parks, museums, a marina, and a riverside promenade.
Waterside Plaza
Another example of a successful housing development is Waterside Plaza. In 1973, twelve years after it was first proposed, the “ambitious and dramatic Waterside housing development over the East River was formally opened…by Mayor Lindsay and former Mayor Robert F. Wagner.” The project contains 1470 residential units within three towers and rows of townhouses on a six-acre platform built over the East River. Two thousand steel piles were sunk 80 feet in the riverbed to support the platform. Many units are reserved for middle- and low-income households, made possible by various housing subsidy programs.
The Unbuilt Future
Producing visions of expanding Manhattan is something of a cottage industry. In fact, despite the shock created by my Manhattan expansion proposal, there’s not all that much original about it. What is unique is that it has been updated to reflect our current needs: protection from climate change and the need for more housing.
Arguably, the most brash—much more so than mine—was proffered by the engineer T. Kennard Thomson in 1911. He proposed to dam and fill in the East River while also expanding Manhattan and Brooklyn four miles into the harbor. His plan added new peninsulas on Staten Island. And, he proposed digging a canal from the Long Island Sound to Jamaica Bay and moving the city’s port to southern Queens.
Thomson argued that “The method of reclamation to be followed is extremely simple. I would merely erect concrete seawalls from the Battery toward Staten Island for the desired length, and then fill them in.”
In 1921, the New York Times reported on a scaled down version of the plan, which was simply the Manhattan extension part—four miles into the harbor (my plan is a mere 2.5 miles). The consensus among the panel of lawyers, planners, and engineers was that there were no legal or engineering barriers to building it, and that new land would help the city grow and reduce congestion.
In 1924, engineer John A. Harris proposed damming up the East River and creating new land in place of the river (and a canal to the east running through Brooklyn and Queens). The centerpiece of his proposal was a vast new civic center and arts complex on top.
New Land for New Cities
While land reclamation has been part of New York’s long history, many cities around the world are using it to expand their cities. In the next post, I will discuss what’s happening globally.
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