Paying private property owners in NYC to “go green”
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund
New York City is approximately 72% impervious. With 218 square miles of paved area—surfaces such as parking lots, building rooftops, streets, and sidewalks—water has nowhere to go when it rains but run down the streets and into gutters, collecting an array of toxic pollutants before it ends up in local waterways.
More than 20 billion gallons of untreated sewage and this polluted urban sludge flows into New York City’s waterways each year. Like other cities with chronic sewage overflows, New York faces mighty—but manageable—challenges to clean up this mess and make our waterways safe and healthy.
To help reduce the city’s stormwater runoff problems, the City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has made commitments to “green” 8,000 acres of impervious area by 2030. This is commonly referred to as “green infrastructure,” which captures rain water where it falls. Green infrastructure includes rain gardens, green roofs, and roadside plantings, just to name a few.
The Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side recently installed a 6.75-acre green roof, the second largest of its kind in the U.S. The green roof has helped to reduce the building’s energy consumption by 26% while creating a wildlife sanctuary. DEP aims to “go green” primarily by managing some of the stormwater from city-controlled land such as streets and sidewalks. New York City has built over 4,000 “bioswales” along sidewalks for this purpose—example pictured below—to help keep some of the stormwater out of storm drains and local waterways. But more than 50 percent of the land DEP has targeted for green infrastructure is privately owned, and DEP has recognized that it cannot reach its mandated green infrastructure goals by focusing only on the public right of way.
DEP needs private property owners to go green, too. That’s why DEP approached our team at NRDC for help in designing the most effective program possible that would get DEP the greened acres it needs at the lowest cost and with maximum social benefit.
Today, and together with our partners from NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, we are presenting DEP with a report containing our recommendations for stimulating widespread use of green infrastructure on private property in New York City. In it, we provide a roadmap for creating a new, large-scale private property grant program, which the city so desperately needs, to retrofit existing development with green infrastructure.
We also recommend two essential, complementary strategies that are commonplace in cities around the country, but are missing in New York:
· strengthening green building standards for stormwater management in new construction projects
· restructuring water rates to shift costs to properties that generate relatively large amounts of runoff, and away from those that generate a relatively little.
Our recommendations are based on more than 250 expert interviews, stakeholder meetings, and the work of an NRDC finance analyst working from DEP’s offices. They include:
· Restructure water and sewer rates to create a separate stormwater fee, and create a strong stormwater management rule that requires the use of green infrastructure in development projects
· Commit decisively to make green infrastructure on private property a core component of the City’s green infrastructure and sustainability efforts:
· Create a new grant program, which works in combination with a new stormwater fee, to motivate private property owners to retrofit existing properties with green infrastructure:
o Make the new program as transparent, simple, and easy to use as possible.
o Engage a third-party to administer the new program.
o Bring community-based organizations (CBOs) into the program as critical partners to help the new grant program succeed and help achieve OneNYC goals.
o Look to affordable housing as an opportunity for green infrastructure to support both clean water goals and broader OneNYC goals.
· DEP cannot do this alone. The City should integrate green stormwater infrastructure throughout all relevant city agencies, programs, and policies.
There is more to meets the eye when it comes to the City’s green infrastructure commitments. We are proud that a wide-ranging group of stakeholders—from community based-organizations to local and national environmental advocacy groups and community development corporations—is urging DEP to take our recommendations seriously. These groups realize that impervious area not only drives pollution in our waterways, but also brings a slate of additional negative impacts. It contributes to the urban heat island effect, raising costs to keep buildings cool, and also makes the city less resilient to climate change impacts such as localized flooding during rainstorms. They also see that large-scale and citywide green infrastructure investments can create jobs, transform neighborhoods, and improve livelihoods—that green infrastructure can serve a critical, yet under-utilized, catalyst to improving historically underserved communities and meeting the goals of the Mayor’s “OneNYC” sustainability plan.
Creating a program that can green thousands of acres of land on private property is necessary, and will also make available lower-cost greening opportunities than if the city tried to get all of its greening done on publicly owned land. However, as we suggest in our recommendations, much needs to be done to position a new grant program for success. New York City has an existing yet very small-scale Green Infrastructure Grant Program, which has only completed 34 projects in the six years since program inception.
New York City has a lot to learn from green infrastructure grant programs and stormwater policies in other cities, and Philadelphia in particular. But, ultimately, New York City will need a program that is tailored to the City’s unique needs and caters to the City’s unique strengths—particularly its dynamic, hardworking, and entrepreneurial residents. We have seen the City surpass expectations when it comes to meeting ambitious carbon emissions reduction goals, which also focused on private property owners as key change agents. The City now needs to bring similarly ambitious goals and focus, and work across agencies -not just DEP- to take advantage of low-cost opportunities to reduce stormwater runoff from private land, and help lift up our communities in the process.
Read the full article at: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/alisa-valderrama/paying-private-property-owners-nyc-go-green
