Download the full report here
On April 24 and 25, 2017 ULI New York members completed a Technical Assistance Panel (TAP) in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. This ULI New York TAP was made possible through generous grant funding from The New York Community Trust. The Urban Land Institute was awarded a $100,000 grant in July 2016 to raise awareness and encourage the use of resilient building practices in New York City, and to foster a greater understanding among the public and private sector nationwide regarding the many benefits of building for resilience. Through this grant, ULI New York will complete two TAPs in New York City to identify practical approaches to resilience building that help communities be better prepared against rising seas, flooding, and other natural disasters.
ULI New York partnered with the Brooklyn-based non-profit and advocacy organization, Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), for this Technical Assistance Panel. As the sponsor, FAC asked ULI New York to answer a series of questions related to urban head island (UHI) mitigation strategies in the context of the anticipated rezoning of Gowanus as well as the anticipated partial closure of Thomas Greene Park due to the CSO retention tank siting related to the Gowanus Canal Superfund site cleanup.
Chaired by James Lima, President of James Lima Planning + Design, the 10-member panel offered a vision for Gowanus that addresses UHI at the District and building scales, as well as develops funding and delivery structures, particularly for UHI-vulnerable populations. The Gowanus community faces numerous environmental and land use challenges – including heavy traffic and a lack of traffic and pedestrian safety, superfund site toxicity, poor air quality, flooding and severe sewage backups, and a lack of parks and open space, among other issues.
The panel acknowledged that the anticipated Gowanus rezoning will likely create greater density in the neighborhood, particularly for residential uses. Taller buildings (increased FAR) prevent streets from cooling at night – which, coupled with increasing temperatures due to climate change, will further intensify UHI and the health and social impacts related to extreme heat. Currently, extreme heat events cause more death annually in the United States than all other natural disaster/extreme weather events combined – and per the New York City Panel on Climate Change, there will be an estimated 500 additional deaths per year by 2050 in NYC. Gowanus has been identified as a neighborhood with a population particularly vulnerable to UHI.
The panel identified several urban heat deserts throughout the study area that included gas stations, warehouse walls, and parking lots – all of which lack vegetative cover. As a mitigation strategy, the panel recommended that strategies are implemented that increase vegetative coverage wherever possible and leverage the network of hidden creeks in Gowanus and the prevailing summer winds to create ‘paths of respite’ throughout the study area These paths are created by enhancing Thomas Greene Park and connecting the park to the canal, opening up the area to prevailing winds for cooling, creating a vegetated connection from Washington Park to the canal and by adding vegetative covering to walls, and adding benches and trees along the 3rd Avenue Corridor. In regards to the temporary closure of a portion of Thomas Greene Park due to the siting of the Superfund cleanup CSO tanks – the panel recommended that a temporary park to be built on the lot adjacent to the park, which is owned by Con Edison.
The panel also offered a series of transit recommendations aimed to improve the efficiency of urban systems, as well as recommendations to significantly increase building efficiency, among others. The TAP report will be released in Fall 2017, which will discuss the panel’s recommendations in further details, as well as strategies to finance and implement these recommendations through a combination of requirements, penalties, and incentives.
In addition to Lima, panelists included Matthew Brian, Executive Vice President of Development, Omni New York LLC; Nancy Choi, Senior Environmental Manager, ARUP; Bret Collazzi, Principal, HR&A Advisors; John Imbiano, Principal and Partner, IQ Landscape Architects, PC; Aviva Laurenti, Deputy Director of Traffic Engineering + Associate, Sam Schwartz Engineering; Matthew Payne, Vice President of Builty Ecology, WSP; Jeffrey Raven, Principal, RAVEN Architecture + Urban Design LLC and Director, Graduate Program in Urban + Regional Design, New York Institute of Technology; Rupal Sanghvi, Founder, HealthxDesign; and Donna Walcavage, Principal of Landscape Architecture, Stantec.