Published October 2, 2008
In August of 2008, SustainLane spoke with Rohit Aggarwala and Ariella Maron, Director and Deputy Director, respectively, of New York City ’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability. Maron and Aggarwala spoke to us about the challenges of sustaining a centuries-old city with aging infrastructure and about how the city will accommodate an estimated influx of one million people by 2030.
Read the full Q&A below:
SustainLane: How did New York City (NYC) develop spatially and physically? And what are some of the challenges unique to your city because of its geographical location – what are some built-in limitations when it comes to environmental sustainability?
Aggarwala: New York is the largest city in the United States . We are currently at just over 8.25 million people.. Development started in lower Manhattan in 1624. The biggest land use development in the city’s history was the creation of the subway system, which, over the course of only ten or twenty years, actually cut down Manhattan ’s population. The transit system allowed the city, which at that point had been clustered pretty much below today’s 34th Street, aka the Lower East Side, to really expand all the way up the island and into the outer boroughs.
In about 2000, NYC had finished recovering from the collapse of the quality of life that took place in the 1970s. Between 1969 and 1977 or 78, which we think is the low point, NYC went from over 8 million people to just about 7 million. So we lost a million residents in the space of 10 years. And since that low point, we have been building that back up. We hit our historic population-high again in 2000.
Then in 2005 we had another historic population-high of 8.2 million or thereabout, and it was really that realization – that despite the impact of 9/11 on the city, which of course led to a number of businesses leaving and a number of people leaving – the net growth in the city was still dramatic. So the mayor decided that he needed to start thinking about how a city like New York … would absorb the increase in population. [We project reaching] 9.1 million residents in the year 2030.
One of the ways we think about sustainability in NYC is about ensuring a quality of life that is attractive. It is not just about the environment.
SustainLane: What are some of the other challenges that New York faces because of its location?
Maron: It's not all location. It's also age because we started investing in our large infrastructure early on. By 2030, the majority of our infrastructure will be over a hundred years old. So besides dealing with being able to meet the challenges of the growing population, there is also a challenge of aging infrastructure.
Aggarwala: One of the things to think about is that most cities in the United States fall into one of two categories: either they are a relatively new city like a Phoenix or a Miami, where they have seen tremendous growth in the last 50 years and have…generally been building infrastructure in the last 50 years. Or some of the older cities that are actually smaller than they were 50 years ago. Most of the cities of the northeast and Midwest – if you look at the legally defined city itself and not the metro area—are the same or smaller than they were in 1950, which means that they are probably using old infrastructure and haven’t invested much in their infrastructure. But they don’t have the population pressure.
We have both. Because of the collapse in NYC’s population and the collapse in municipal finances, we really stopped investing in long term infrastructure projects around 1970. We have done very little in the way of expanding the subway system and very little in the way of expanding the water system.
Since that time, we have got a couple of new power plants, but are always straining to find locations for those. Many of our old power plants that serve the city probably should have been retired already. Even if we don’t have a lot of coal or anything that’s used anymore in the city, we still have, for example, natural gas turbines that are 25, 30 some odd years old. Just replacing a 30-year old natural gas turbine with a modern state-of-the-art turbine…gives you major efficiency improvements and major environmental benefits.
One of the things that we are blessed with in our location and in assets is the water system, which of course started in 1840s. It had two major periods of expansion in the 1890s and 1940s and, not only does it have the distinction of being one of the only five big city systems that doesn’t require filtration, but it is also nearly 100 percent gravity-driven. The water starts down in the Catskill mountains. One of our reservoirs is as far away as 130 miles, and that water gets to Manhattan [nearly entirely] by gravity.
We are a highly transit-dependent city. If you look at trips coming into the Manhattan central business districts, two-thirds of them are already on transit. And we have not only the road congestion – some of the worst, if not perhaps the worst traffic in the country—but we also increasingly face crowding on our transit system. And so all of that put together led the mayor to develop what we now call PlaNYC, which started out really just asking a question: “How would NYC absorb the increase of population that we see having us reach 9.1 million residents in the year 2030?”
SustainLane: Is NYC now trying to update old infrastructure?
Aggarwala: The way I would phrase it is that we have to, and I don’t want to over say it or be imprecise. One of the reasons that NYC has grown back and has achieved the quality of life that it now has, is that we had a lot of investments, but it is really re-investment [particularly in bridges and in our subway system].
But what we haven’t done in the last 25 or 30 years is invest in new capacity. It’s all been rebuilding what we already have. That’s the difference and that is lot of what PlaNYC is about. If we’re going to have a million more people, we need to expand the subway system that we have, or at least somehow expand transit capacity, whether it is bus traffic transit or other forms.
We have to think about the fact that in the 1980s it was very easy to fund power plants. Of course, it was before the issue of climate change. It was very easy to find locations for power plants because there were large parts in the city that were undesirable and unattractive. Now there aren’t any neighborhoods in NYC that are undesirable, and so it’s very, very hard to build a power plant – you just don’t have the land.
SustainLane: I believe Tokyo has a larger population than New York by at least 50 percent. What do you think is the maximum carrying capacity of New York is at this time?
Aggarwala: I don’t think we can get to 9.1 million people with the transit system we have unless we start making the kinds of investments that are mentioned in PlaNYC. People won’t be able to get to work. That will lead to businesses moving out. Everything is a cycle. That’s a lesson of sustainability. If you were willing to transform low-density neighborhoods and put transit in, and put all of the infrastructure, sure. There are [places where] you could increase the density and you could have pretty much what Tokyo has, which is something equivalent to the five boroughs of New York, all of which looks like Manhattan. It is a question of whether you want that as well.
Maron: And then of course once you do that, you have to figure out how to find the space to enlarge your energy and water infrastructure and everything else.
Aggarwala: But don’t get us wrong. I think one of the fundamental messages of PlaNYC is that growth can be good. It just requires planning for it. And, of course, one of the reasons we think growth is good is that New York is a very environmentally-efficient place to live.
We often point out that the average New Yorker has a carbon footprint of only 29 percent that of the average American. That’s because we already take transit. We live in small apartments. The apartments actually insulate each other. We don’t have coal in our energy mix to any great extent, and we produce so much of our power locally that we don’t have quite the transmission losses either, things like that.
SustainLane: NYC’s transit system and infrastructure were so well planned when they were originally built. New Yorkers, at the time, must have thought the developers were insane, creating such a vast system. Is NYC now planning ahead one hundred years?
Aggarwala: The purpose of PlaNYC is to plan for 2030 and do so in a way that actually has impact. The mayor has been fairly successful as a business person and fairly successful as a manager for the city, and I think one of the things that guides his thinking is that goals have to be ambitious, but achievable. That was the standard he set for us.
We already have a million trees that we plan to plant. In just one year, we planted a hundred thousand trees around NYC. Ten percent of the yellow cab fleet runs on hybrid vehicles. You know, stuff like that where we are actually achieving or getting points on the board in terms of reducing our carbon foot print and improving quality of life. That’s really the way we focus.
In PlaNYC, we do not rely on technology that is not commercially proven, and we also prioritize solving the problems that we know we have. We have huge potential just to replace some of these old natural gas turbines with state-of-the-art turbines and expand capacity, reduce pollution, and reduce the carbon footprint all at once. Because if you can get a 50 percent increase in efficiency, and a 90 percent reduction in criteria pollutants, you don’t have to go renewable. You can just do these in-kind replacements and that’s off-the-shelf technologies that are financially viable right now.
I am not actually sure whether I’d say the answer to your question is “no” or “yes” because I think the legacy that we want to leave are the things that we actually do.
SustainLane: Can you highlight some of the changes you are planning to make as part of planYC?
Aggarwala: In terms of land, the fundamental thing you have to think about is housing. Where are these million people going to live and how do we allow this great, environmentally-efficient society to expand? The obvious answer is transit-oriented development. It’s increasing density in those parts of the city where the transit and other infrastructure can handle it.
For example, we did the largest re-zoning in NYC’s modern history in Jamaica [a neighborhood in Queens ] with the hope of turning that major transit hub into a medium- to high-density, mixed use-neighborhood. We are doing re-zoning for parts of the Bronx and parts of west side of Manhattan.
We are getting very close to a couple of the other major re-zonings that’ll have the same kind of impact. Of note is Willets Point, which is between Shea Stadium and Flushing, and so that’s both Long Island Rail Road and subway access. And that will turn an area that’s nothing but auto park yards into what we hope to be a mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhood.
Parks
While we have added five hundred acres to the park system over the last couple of years, you can’t just expand the park land as the city grows because it’s a zero sum game. What we tried to do is use our existing open-space more efficiently. We are reinvesting in some of the parks that we never really very well landscaped to make them truly useful. Open-space is used in some cases for passive recreation, some places for active recreation, like playing fields. We worked with the department of education to open up 72 school yards so that they can be used as neighborhood playgrounds when the school is not in session. We’ve effectively expanded our playground system by leaps and bounds.
Million trees initiative
We recently began planting a million trees. We did a tree census, and NYC had just over 5 million trees. We are going to try and increase that by 20 percent by 2017, so that’s a hundred thousand trees a year. We have got just about the first hundred thousand in the ground in the first year of that program, many of which are sidewalk trees. We have made a commitment to fully stock the city. Everywhere in NYC where you could put a tree in the sidewalk, you will. And that turns our streets into vibrant green areas.
Public Transportation
I think everyone knows that one of the key initiatives in PlaNYC is congestion pricing, which we see is a major thing that still ought to be done in some form because it’s like so many other good ideas related to sustainability that had achieved multiple goals within one policy. It will reduce traffic, carbon, and pollution, and it would raise money to plow into our transit system. However we do it, we also know we need to put billions and billions of dollars into upgrading and expanding our transit capacity, so that more people can choose to ride rather than drive and more people can actually work in the dense areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Air Quality
We’ve got a number of things that center around improving all of the key areas of our pollution profile. In terms of some of the easiest things we can do, the average NYC yellow cab drives 60 some odd thousand miles a year. So it is an obvious candidate to reduce a lot of start-and-stop kind of traffic. We are requiring all the yellow cabs to go hybrid. We have done the same thing for corporate cars, the black car fleet which is not as well known, but is just large almost as the yellow cab fleet.
Energy
One of our biggest things is the re-powering and expansion of clean power supply. The city participated in a bidding process, which will result in the construction of a new, natural gas, state-of-the-art power plant. Because it is so efficient, we’ll actually have a net carbon reduction city-wide because some of the less-efficient plants will operate less frequently.
We are working with the state to develop a series of incentives, and then we will be proposing a series of regulations to require buildings to be more efficient.
And what we need to focus on there is existing buildings because it’s very easy to make new buildings green. At least in New York , most of the real estate developers say that there will never be another non-green skyscraper built because the market won’t seek that building if it is not green. But 85 percent of the buildings that we expect to have in 2030, we already have today.
So the heart of the matter is how do you retrofit existing buildings to make them more energy efficient? And we are going to be putting forward some ideas on how to do that.
Climate Change Adaptation Planning program
We have got two things going on – both of which are initiatives in PlaNYC. One was the establishment effectively of a local version of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. We have established a panel of scientists and insurance experts to come up with the official best projections of what climate change means for NYC very locally, in terms of sea level changes, flooding, storms, heat waves, drought and all of the other potential changes. That’s actually co-chaired by a co-chair of an IPCC committee Cynthia Rosenzweig, up at Columbia .
And then, one of the first consumers of that information will be our new Climate Change Infrastructure Task Force, where we brought together pretty much every organization that owns or operates major infrastructure in NYC, and we are going to be doing a joint process by which each of those agencies uses the projections from this New York Panel on Climate Change to do their own risk assessments and develop their own climate change adaptation plan. We should have the first set of preliminary projections out by the end of 2008 and then the full set of risk assessment and the plans from the agencies is probably a year away.
SustainLane: Some of the cities we are talking to are combining their adaptation, climate change programs with their homeland security programs. Is there any overlap like that in New York ?
Aggarwala: Our office of Emergency Management has done a Hazard Mitigation Plan. I believe the Department of Homeland Security requires all large cities to do in order to qualify for certain federal funds and, yes, that has taken into account both a certain amount of climate and as well as other kinds of hazard. And as you well know, the risks posed by climate change are really the intensification of risks we already face.
We are expecting to have more hurricanes, but it’s not like we have no hurricane risks today. We are going to have more heat waves; it’s not like we don’t have heat waves today. So, this has been taken into account, but we see this as being a much more thorough, much more of a long-term perspective. For example, if you take a look at the report, all of their waste water treatment plants, of course, are on the water, and they have their out-flows into the water. If the sea level rises, you can’t have your out flow under water for very long. It will back up the system, so they have to take that into account because when you build a water treatment plant, you expect it to last fifty or hundred years.
SustainLane: Although there are countless groups and projects in NYC, Sustainable South Bronx is one that’s gotten great coverage in the media. Do you think about your programs, in terms of media and how they get covered and the impacts that you want to have in terms of bringing the citizens along with your ideas?
Aggarwala: Definitely. I think right now our biggest media strategy is the good news that Mayor Bloomberg is a bit of a celebrity in is his own right, so he can talk about these things, whether it is calling for carbon tax, which he did last November, that got national and, to a certain extent, international press, or the yellow cab rule, which in fact I know was covered on several continents.
Because of his personal interest and his brand name, we have been able to really get a lot of attention. But what we have done perhaps more tactically and more along the lines of what you are talking about is we have launched a public education component to the plan called, “GreeNYC.”
We actually got some of our green developers in the city, a couple of whom have bill boards on Times Square, to give some of that space, and we have rotating messages around environmentalism—mainly seasonal tips on what you can do to either reduce energy consumption or recycle your gift wrap in the winter and things like that. That’s also led to some partnerships where we teamed up with Whole Foods, and they marketed a GreeNYC bag. And then also we have some other private public partnerships.
SustainLane: I understand that you have grassroots neighborhood groups who sometimes compete against each other to see who’s greener?
Aggarwala: Well, it’s not an organized competition or anything at this point; although the Brooklyn Borough President and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens actually do a “Greenest Block” competition within Brooklyn . We have a lot neighborhoods, which are well organized, and increasingly they are turning their attention to greening. In Fort Green Brooklyn there is a community group called Green Fort Green. On the Upper West Side there is a synagogue that is leading an effort to convince neighbors to change their life style. Those are just two examples. There is Sustainable South Bronx. There is Uproads and Sunset Park Brooklyn, where they actually train high school students to plant trees and take care of trees. So they’re really working on sidewalk trees and park land and community garden. We have got, “We Act” in West Harlem , whose director is also on our environmental justice group. One of the things they do is local air quality monitoring. Ariella and I met with their executive director a week or two ago, and they have a real-time particulate matter and ozone monitor in their conference room. They have done some of these studies where they equip kids with backpack monitors and check street level air quality. That’s actually an initiative of PlanYC. Our Department of Health, over the course of the next year will be doing street level air quality monitoring in 140 locations around city.
SustainLane: With kids’ backpacks?
Aggarwala: No, this is being done at a bit more of a corporate and a governmental level. But it is inspired by the fact that these studies that folks like “We Act” have done, showing that what the EPA measures for clean air act compliance is actually very different from what you breathe at street level. And we don’t know how air quality varies around the city because we don’t measure at street level. And this is, for the first time, something that we are doing. I have no idea whether any other cities have ever done something like this or not.
SustainLane: If NYC were a global leader in an area of sustainability, what would it be?
Maron: I think we would definitely lead in terms of reducing carbon footprint, just because, as we mentioned, our footprint is a third of the national average because we are so transit-oriented, and we live in smaller building spaces, which takes less heating and cooling, and we share walls that are more insulated.
SustainLane: Does the city have sea level rise projections?
Maron: Yes. Even before PlaNYC we had projections for sea level rise from the Metro East Coast study that came out in 2001. Since then, modeling has improved and warming accelerated compared to what was expected, and therefore, those original projections are out of date. The Union of Concerned Scientists and a few other groups have come up with other projections region-wide, and in PlaNYC we talk about the projections from those studies. As part of PlaNYC, the local version of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] discussed above is working on updated projections of what climate change means for NYC very locally, in terms of sea level changes, flooding, storms, heat waves, drought and all of the other potential changes.
We are really seeing the impact of climate change. There is no doubt about it for us. It’s just making sure we are protected at this point. We know sea level rise is happening As we actually have seen a one foot-rise in sea level in the last century. Half of that is due to warming waters. Half of that is due to the fact that we sit on a fault line. We are already seeing an increase in flooding, as well as more frequent storms. In fact, we had tornadoes here for the first time last year in Brooklyn when it wasn’t even storming in the rest of the city.
SustainLane: Where do you see NYC 50 years from now?
Maron: Our plan looks to 2030, and that’s as far as our visioning process has gone.. Therefore, I don’t have a specific administration vision for 50 years out. But I can tell you generally that it includes cleaner sources of energy and energy supplies that are more distributed, buildings that are significantly more energy efficient. Those buildings also help as manage storm water, waste, and protect us from the impacts of climate change. Our City will also be greener with a network of green infrastructure cleaning our air, helping to manage our stormwater, and increasing our quality of life.
Learn More:
- SustainLane: New York City's Sustainability Rankings
- Meet Rohit Aggarawalla via CUNY's Sustainable Cities Blog
- Check out PlaNYC, New York City's plan for bolstering its sustainability, qualify of life and climate change mitigation all the way out to 2030
- Here's PlaNYC planning news at NYU
- Wikipedia PlaNYC Entry
Photos: Rohit: Courtesy of CUNY Sustainable Cities Blog, Ariella: Courtesy of Kathryn Kirk
