When Climate Change Hits The Fan....

For cities now, resilience is a very key strategy.  Maintaining operational systems in the aftermath of major storms is complicated by the density of our housing and population.

See below for potential worst-case scenario and expected hardest hit areas in NYC.

When Climate Change Hits The Fan, Your Glass-Walled Apartment Will Be Your Tomb

(Via designer SHoP)

A new report from the New York City Panel on Climate Change confirmed what 99.9 percent of us already know/live in mortal fear of daily: Climate change is coming for us, and New York City in particular will be a very different place from the one in which we currently live. Sea levels will rise four to eight inches in coming decades, and up to 50 inches by 2100.

It's a fun thought exercise to examine how the city's housing stock would (will) fare in the event of (inevitable) catastrophe, namely, if we lost power. Yes, some New Yorkers are padding around their unheated tundra homes right now, but let's assume the absence of power was sudden and pandemic—in other words, not limited to those already accustomed to wearing 15 pairs of socks just to stave off frostbite.

Ginia Bellafante contemplates this question in today's NY Times, drawing on a study from the Urban Green Council released last year, that bears repeating:

The worst place to live is a single-family detached house—primarily found in places like Mill Basin and northeast Queens and Staten Island—as such a home would reach below freezing by the fourth day of a blackout.

But all those voluptuaries luxuriating in their glass Manhattan high-rises would be shit-out-of-luck, too. (In whatever parallel universe said "residents" are unable to simply hop in their helicopters and head for the family home in Dubai.) But let's pretend for a moment that all the helicopters and private jets are dead; that there was no way out. In the heart of winter, glass towers would reach freezing by day four. In the summer, indoor temperatures would reach the high 80s by the third day.

The best place to live is in rowhouses, which effectively retain heat thanks to being snuggled up next to one another. The bad news is that you probably can't afford one of those, either.