Amazon's Shiny New Long Island Headquarters Will Be Partially Submerged By 2050

When Amazon announced on Tuesday that it would build one of its new headquarters in Long Island City’s Anable Basin, environmentalists were quick to notice that the site could be partially underwater by 2050. By the next millennium, it will be completely submerged, according to the environmental research group Climate Central’s most recent projections. Situated in an inlet along the East River, the site is currently home to parking lots and warehouse spaces, but when Amazon breaks ground, which could be as soon as 2019, new apartment complexes and office buildings will go up—all of which would be vulnerable to flooding if sea levels rise even just a few feet.

After Hurricane Sandy battered the East Coast in 2012, New York City adopted new building codes to help minimize the damage of such flooding. Today, developers working in flood zones are required to elevate their buildings above the anticipated water level in a storm. An additional set of guidelines for waterfront developers recommends that they build floodgates and levees, create wetlands and barrier islands, and elevate surrounding land to address flooding and erosion. But these recommendations are nonbinding—it’s up to developers to decide whether or not they want to put up the money to build such green infrastructure.

For Amazon, this means that any attempts to shore up its Long Island City site will have to be entirely on its own steam. Before deciding to split its new headquarters between New York City and Northern Virginia, the company considered several HQ2 locations vulnerable to flooding, including Miami, Newark, and Boston, without making any public statements about how it would adapt to rising tides. Then, on Tuesday, the company agreed—in lieu of property taxes—to offer New York City a series of payments, earmarked for infrastructure improvement (streets, sidewalks, utilities, transportation, schools, and the like). Among the priorities listed on its Memorandum of Understanding with the city was “environmental remediation,” the closest Amazon has come to displaying an interest in the environment. As yet, the company has not released any details on what types of projects might be included in this category.

If history is any guide, however, Amazon will protect itself without thinking of the surrounding neighborhood. Too often, said Amy Chester, the managing director of the collaborative research and design group Rebuild by Design, developers only build barriers to climate change around their own sites, ignoring neighboring areas that are at risk. “What you end up having is islands of protection,” she said. Meanwhile, nearby houses and businesses are often left even more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. “If a developer is protecting its own site, where is that water that it’s displacing going to go?” said Linda Shi, an assistant professor at Cornell’s School of Architecture, Art, and Planning who studies urban environmental governance. “It’s going to go to the many places that don’t have elevated buildings and flood walls.”

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https://newrepublic.com/article/152255/climate-change-sink-amazons-new-york-headquarters