On the Waterfront

Roughly 123 million people in the US live near the coast, and along with critical infrastructure—ports, oil refineries, wastewater treatment plants—there is a tremendous amount of pricey real estate very close to the water. With increasing concern about rising sea levels and greater frequency of severe, Hurricane Sandy-like storms, coastal cities are striving to find better ways to protect the shoreline. In many cases they opt for zoning restrictions, allowing limited new development in areas at high risk for flooding. Yet as this New Yorker article reports, in New York City a wave of new buildings—condos and hotels—are going up right on the water.

At one luxury development, whose condominiums went on sale just a year after Hurricane Sandy, demand was so great that prices increased six times in the first 10 weeks. A real-estate agent quoted in the article says “Everybody’s going to build wherever they can, every inch. Unless we are permanently underwater, I don’t think there will be much change.”

The article suggests that the buyers who are able and willing to pay for property right on the water are also better able and more willing to accept the risks, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad trend: “Though it strikes many as crass and unaccountably reckless, the city’s waterfront-revitalization plan is, from a risk perspective, surprisingly prudent,” the article notes. “Land that would have been developed come hell or high water (as the saying goes) is developed to its maximum of area and value. Public waterfront parks are impeccably maintained. Shorelines are privately (and literally) shored up. When a disaster does strike, as it inevitably will, the owner of a luxury condo is less likely than a middle-class mortgage holder to lose everything, assuming the owner is in residence at all (some high-rise buildings in the city have only a sixty-per-cent owner occupancy at any given time), and more likely to have purchased the full complement of available insurance. Federal money can be used to rebuild flooded roadways and municipal buildings—and to help out city residents who are not as wealthy as condo owners.”

If you live in a coastal area, what zoning restrictions, if any, are in place for coastal development?

You can read more on coastal erosion and resilience planning in this Erosion Control article by David Richardson, and about coastal protection in “The Evolution of Coastal Erosion Control Technology” by Peter Hanrahan.