Bill de Blasio's Biggest Challenge: Climate Change

| Wed Nov. 6, 2013 4:43 PM EST


Bill de Blasio, New York City's new mayor-elect, didn't spend much time during the campaign talking about climate change, but he'll likely spend a lot of his time at City Hall dealing with it.


Today, New York City's central challenge is one that virtually any other city would love to have: Too many rich people want to live there. But Wall Street bankers, trust funders, and wealthy foreigners looking for a pied-à-terre have driven up the price of housing to levels that threaten to eject the creative classes that have powered New York's renaissance. The high cost of housing is also the main reason New York's homeless population is at an all-time high.

The massive gap between rich and poor, the loss of diversity in the most centrally located neighborhoods, and the lack of affordable housing were the problems identified by de Blasio in his "tale of two cities" campaign spiel. De Blasio won in a landslide Tuesday on a promise to increase the supply of affordable housing, raise taxes on the very wealthy, and expand educational opportunities for those left behind by New York's current boom. Meanwhile, crime has been so successfully tamed—the murder rate is one-fifth of its 1991 peak—that de Blasio has proposed to reduce the use of aggressive policing tactics such as stop-and-frisk.

But other serious challenges loom in New York's future, even though they were hardly mentioned in this year's mayoral campaign. Indeed, they are arguably already here: extreme weather events caused by climate change, and felt especially hard in coastal areas developed during the city's boom years.

New York is built on a collection of islands, with 520 miles of coastline and entire neighborhoods constructed on landfill. One year ago, Hurricane Sandy flooded New York's low-lying neighborhoods, from Lower Manhattan to the Rockaways in southeastern Queens, leaving elderly, impoverished New Yorkers stranded in high-rise housing projects without power for weeks. Some families are still displaced, living seven to a hotel room.

Global warming leads to melting polar ice caps, which lead to higher sea levels. Global warming is also raising surface water temperatures, leading to larger, more frequent storms. The former could permanently submerge miles of New York's currently inhabited land, while the latter threatens to periodically topple buildings, destroy power stations, and knock trees onto cars.





Though he vaguely promised to adhere to Bloomberg's climate change agenda, de Blasio didn't make climate preparedness an issue in his campaign. But it will likely be the central challenge of his mayoralty, and his successor's as well.

De Blasio said in his victory address that "the city has chosen a progressive path" in electing him. If he really wants to help all New Yorkers thrive, he'll get as serious about climate change as he is about economic inequality. Reducing the city's greenhouse gas emissions and preparing its neighborhoods for storms and rising seas is a moral obligation for a self-described progressive, no less so than housing the city's homeless, enhancing its social mobility, or welcoming its undocumented immigrants. And climate adaptation is a pragmatic imperative too. It will be expensive, but as Sandy demonstrated, failure to invest on the front end will cost even more later on.
