Tag Archives: infrastructure

Private Costs of Disaster Prevention

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Champlain Towers collapse. photo from Wikipedia

The recent collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, has cast a spotlight on numerous issues concerning building maintenance, private and public decision-making processes, potential (but highly uncertain) corrosive impacts of sea level rise, and even the continuing exposure of rescue workers to COVID-19, in addition to environmental and occupational hazards. That is all in addition to the governance questions surrounding condominium boards, given the news of past debates about deferred but expensive maintenance once consultants revealed structural deterioration in the 12-story complex.

I wish to be clear about my purpose in writing this post. As an urban planner and researcher, I have doggedly sought to focus on known facts and accurate assessments of hazardous situations of any type. Sometimes, the truth is clear enough. In others, it is wise to withhold judgment while raising questions that deserve thoughtful answers. In this instance, there are so many aspects to the story of the condo building collapse that caution is the appropriate approach because new facts seem to emerge daily. One question—why the North Tower did not collapse while the South Tower did—may compel further inquiry on the role of condo boards in driving decisions about investing in maintenance before catastrophe strikes, but further investigation may reveal many nuances to that story as well. Complete answers are not always simple or obvious.

I have no intention of rushing to judgment on the tragedy in Surfside. But I do wish to focus on one issue that I know is endemic to housing development on a nationwide basis: the roles and responsibilities of homeowners associations (HOA) for managing and maintaining property. Condo boards are one specific subset of HOAs, based on the nature of the buildings. But the issues are not limited to such buildings; they can easily affect the management of townhouse developments and gated subdivisions as well.

Five years ago, when the American Planning Association (APA) and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) collaborated to produce a Planning Advisory Service Report, Subdivision Design and Flood Hazard Areas, we confronted one ticklish issue that concerned us greatly, albeit with regard to flood (and some other natural) hazards rather than structural integrity of tall buildings. The underlying issue, however, dealt with the capacity of privately governed homeowner associations to manage, finance, and maintain hazard mitigation infrastructure over time. Of course, one can easily broaden the definition of such infrastructure to include structural integrity repairs in a situation where buildings can potentially collapse, just as it might include the need to maintain the structural integrity of bridges to prevent such tragedies as the collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities in 2007. There is considerable room for flexibility in defining the issue so long as the focus remains on public safety.

Our concern at the time was the potential for a financially challenged homeowners association or special district to fail to maintain critical infrastructure before a natural disaster leads to catastrophic failure, whether because of flood, landslide, earthquake, or wildfire, among other possibilities. Chad Berginnis, the executive director of ASFPM, alerted us to an article published by two lawyers involved in owner association litigation in California, Tyler Berding and Stephen Weil. They offered several examples of such situations including Bethel Island, which sits in the Sacramento Delta and includes about 2,500 residents whose homes are protected by more than 11 miles of levees that

USGS photo of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California

circle the island, just 12 miles from the Greenville Fault. Throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the potential cascading impact of an earthquake triggering massive flooding with failed levees is a nightmare of major proportions. However, residents had defeated a proposed parcel tax to finance improvements through the Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District (BIMID), leaving the district broke and laying off staff. Berding and Weill offered a series of suggestions for better planning and management of these situations.

Whether the case involves a special district like BIMID or special assessments imposed by an owner association board, the issue is the local or private responsibility for financing and maintaining the protective infrastructure to avert such tragedies. Disasters are almost never solely a function of natural forces affecting human communities. They are also a function of the location, condition, and resilience of those communities, and the greater the exposure, the greater is likely to be the long-term cost of restoring that resilience over time to prevent catastrophic loss. In many cases involving floods, landslides, or earthquakes, insurance may be unavailable or financially problematic. The ultimate result can be a bankrupt association and property owners who cannot recover their losses, let alone rebuild, yielding a combination not only of loss of life and property, but of financial calamity as well.

Pad-mounted Transformer in a floodplain not elevated. Photo by Chad Berginnis from PAS Report, used with his permission.

In the report, we sought in several ways to address the issues posed by these dilemmas. We noted, for instance, that as of 2016, the Community Associations Institute reported that 66.7 million people, about 20 percent of the U.S. population, lived in some 333,600 common-interest communities, 55 percent of which were homeowners associations, the rest either condominium or other community associations. One result is the transfer of responsibility for infrastructure within a subdivision from the municipality permitting it to the HOA itself. The long-term problem is that association leadership not only changes over time but often lacks expertise pertaining to the significant risks and responsibilities involved. We suggested that local planning and other agencies extend technical assistance to overcome this gap. This gap, however, remains a serious problem in many communities. When disaster strikes, the idea of having shifted responsibility will become transparently short-sighted because the city or county will be providing emergency response and assistance, just as is happening in Surfside. It is impossible to ignore a disaster.

We noted that many such associations assume responsibility for stormwater infrastructure, such as detention ponds, seawalls, and levees, or even private dams. If they fall into disrepair, the flooding consequences can be severe, so provisions for inspection and maintenance are critical. It is vital for such association boards to understand, for instance, that levees are never totally flood-proof and failure can have various causes. Privately built and owned levees exist across the nation, many in poor condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

In short, these owner associations have assumed responsibility for some key areas of local flood risk management, including ponds, spillways, erosion and sediment control, flood control structural repairs, drainage improvements, managing vegetation that reduces flood risk, bridge maintenance, and open space management, among other possibilities. Given the potential financial and expertise limitations of these private associations, it may be incumbent upon local governments, in approving development, to assert some degree of control over the standards for approval, for which we offered several major recommendations for requirements related to maintenance costs and final plat approval.

There is, in the end, no perfect way to ensure adequate protection against disaster, but we were hoping to raise the level of concern and discussion, and attention to detail, in the relationships between local governments and owner associations as a way to avert tragedy and financial meltdown following disaster. It is not my intent here to explore the issue in depth but to introduce readers to the depth of the questions that these situations entail. Those wishing to learn more can follow the links to additional resources.

Jim Schwab

In Harm’s Way or Dodging Disaster?

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President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill aims to fix much that is ailing in America, and its sheer size is drawing predictable—and short-sighted—fire from Republicans in Congress. The nation has a great deal of aging infrastructure, which will eventually pose a massive challenge to economic development. But the American Jobs Plan also takes aim at a growing, urgent, and critical need for infrastructure to cope with the impacts of climate change. These affect many kinds of infrastructure, including transportation, water, wastewater, and energy and communications systems. There is nothing patriotic, it seems to me, in being so oppositional as to allow our nation to deteriorate, Texas-style, in the face of changing climate conditions. There is also nothing about what happened in Texas with frozen energy systems that contradicts “global warming.” The research clearly shows that climate instability, including seemingly less predictable winter storms, is part of the overall impact of a generally warming climate. Nobody but a charlatan ever promised that climate change would be a simple topic.

Earlier this year, I reviewed a book by a former Toronto mayor about what cities are doing about climate change. Later, I reviewed Doug Farr’s elaborate tome on how the design professions are providing solutions to climate challenges in new forms of housing and urban development. In addition, a year ago, I reviewed a new Planning Advisory Service Report by the American Planning Association on planning for infrastructure resilience. I remain committed to highlighting resources for planners, public officials, and interested citizens on issues of climate resilience.

In this post, I feature a new book on community solutions to climate resilience. In Harm’s Way, by John Cleveland and Peter Plastrik, provides a set of detailed ideas for building climate resilience in our communities. In my view, its dominant values in contributing to the discussion of climate change and community adaptation center on two crucial issues: first, how to finance investments in climate resilience, and second, how to build the policy foundations for managing retreat from the most vulnerable coastal areas as a means of avoiding major “natural” disasters. The two co-authors bring interesting backgrounds for such discussion. Cleveland is executive director of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and a member of the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, a group of business and civic leaders supporting the Boston Climate Action Plan. Plastrik is vice-president of INC and co-author of an Island Press book on networking for social change.

The Biden plan faces a challenging uphill climb toward passage in Congress. The money it promises for what it offers to do is heavily dependent on changes in corporate taxation that may face daunting opposition in Congress. In any case, even passage of the plan does not necessarily mean that every valuable potential investment at the local level in more resilient infrastructure will be assured of adequate funding, nor does it mean that local leaders will always agree with federal priorities for their own communities. The struggle to implement the plan will face years of challenges. In short, this is an important time for the vital discussion by Cleveland and Plastrik on how we can best find the money for essential investments in climate resilience.

Financing climate resilience is essentially an exercise in risk management. The first ingredient in successful risk management is recognition of the problem, which at a national scale has been a political football because of right-wing denial that a problem exists. For four years, this denial was centered in the White House, but the nation clearly chose a sea change on climate policy in the 2020 election. But that does not mean that nothing was happening outside the Trump administration—far from it. Local financial innovations were afoot in numerous American communities, including large cities like Boston, Miami, and San Francisco. Indeed, networks of such cities have been exploring avenues for fostering climate-related investments. The issue in many cases, because local governments seldom have large stores of cash awaiting brilliant ideas, is hunting for money in the financial markets. In many ways, the hunt for climate-resilient investments is a race against time for cities that may face climate-related disasters that may cost far more in damages than the investments they are contemplating to prevent such outcomes. Misalignments between resources and needs are commonplace, the environmental burdens of climate change, particularly on low-income and minority neighborhoods, are often enormous, and public revenue is often insufficient to address the problem. The authors thus focus on the need for innovations in climate resilience finance to meet this challenge. Given the likelihood that at least some of the Biden plan will require some level of local and state matching funds, this issue will remain potent. The authors outline a range of tools for creating these new financial structures. This task is far from impossible, however. Bond-rating firms and others are already recognizing the inherent risks involved in ignoring climate change. Why not invest on the positive side through mitigation and adaptation?

Case studies are always helpful in making clear that some community, somewhere, is at least testing solutions, many of them proving successful. The authors outline a playbook for paying for climate resilience, using eight examples in which communities have generated local revenue, imposed land-use costs on unwise development, leveraged development opportunities to achieve climate resilience, and pursued equity, among other options. Local governments in fact have a range of regulatory tools and incentives they use to leverage many other decisions by businesses and residents, many of the options, such as floodplain management rules, are already common. What is needed is the imagination for new ideas on how to use those tools, as well as accessible guidance on how well those ideas are working and under what circumstances. One city highlighted in this chapter is Norfolk, Virginia, a low-lying city on the Atlantic coast that faces a future laden with nuisance flooding due to sea level rise. Its system of four color-coded zones indicates relative levels of safety or vulnerability as a means of directing redevelopment to safer areas while demarcating those in need of protection. Zoning may not seem like a financial issue, but it is a quintessential financial tool in dictating what sort of development is permissible in what location, thus channeling investment to those areas the city deems acceptable for certain purposes. The problem is that the power of zoning has not always been used with a vivid awareness of the environmental hazards that are tied to urban geography.

In the U.S. system, municipalities are creations of the states, which establish the rules under which cities operate. Notwithstanding the magnitude of federal largesse, it is thus also fitting that the book contains a chapter on how states can help communities invest in climate resilience. States can serve as both barriers to and intentional supporters of local innovations in financing climate resilience.

Collapsed houses after Hurricane Sandy on the Jersey shore. The results of climate-driven disasters are seldom pretty.

In the end, however, all of this depends to some degree on political will, a subject addressed in a final chapter on managed retreat under the caption, “Can it happen here?” Communities have long shied away from open discussion of retreat from the shoreline or highly volatile riverfronts. Seashore land has historically been some of the most valuable real estate in the nation, and not only because it can become a haven for rich owners of second homes, but because beaches attract tourism and harbors attract economic development and transportation infrastructure. What public official wants to say no to new shoreline development, let alone talk of managing retreat from existing settlements? Yet the sheer long-term cost of such reluctance to lead with courage is something I discussed in another book review early last year. The Geography of Risk was a book that detailed wave after wave of catastrophic destruction on the New Jersey barrier islands as a result of investments by entrenched real estate interests that resisted risk-based land-use reforms.

But Cleveland and Plastrik insist that retreat will happen, and the question is not if, but when, and under what circumstances. Basically, they say, in coastal areas threatened by climate change and sea level rise, retreat will be driven either by disasters, or by the market, or by plans. In the first instance, nature itself will make decisions that force painful choices that we cannot control. In the second, recognizing the inherent dangers of such stubborn persistence, market forces will withdraw investment from areas that are no longer viable as a result of climate change, with major losses for those who either lack the means to move or who fail to read the tea leaves. The final choice, plan-driven retreat, is the only one that allows the community some degree of sovereignty in the matter, deliberating about the direction of retreat, the means of financing it, and ways of mitigating financial consequences for those involved. The problem is finding articulate, visionary leadership that can lead the community to its moment of truth.

Jim Schwab

The Need for Resilient Infrastructure

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This summer, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is at last rolling out its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, and its first Notice of Funding Opportunity will likely be issued in September. In July, FEMA is airing a series of five weekly webinars to introduce BRIC to communities and state officials around the nation. BRIC is the practical result of provisions in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2018, to create a secure funding stream for what was formerly the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program. I plan to discuss all that in coming weeks on this blog.

But the personal impact on me was to remind me to attend to an egregious oversight on my part that began earlier this year with the release by the American Planning Association (APA) of a new Planning Advisory Service Report, Planning for Resilient Infrastructure. I read it, attended to some other business in Texas and Nebraska in late February and early March, and along came the coronavirus, upending most of my existing personal and professional plans and refocusing my attention. But it is time for me to give this report the attention it deserves.

First, there is the question of why it deserves attention. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which funded the project led by the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), which partnered with APA, chose their joint proposal in funding the first round of projects under its Coastal Resilience Grants Program in 2016. As Jeffrey Payne, director of NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management, states in his preface, “Tomorrow isn’t what it used to be. Increasingly, coastal conditions include all the risks of the past, but risks that are amplified by a changing climate, rising seas, and more rapidly fluctuating Great Lakes.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I was involved with ASFPM executive director Chad Berginnis in co-authoring the proposal for this project in the summer of 2015. (After I left APA, ASFPM hired me back as a consultant in later stages of the effort to help refine and focus the PAS Report.) Our intent was both simple and bold. Local governments spend tens of billions of dollars annually on the construction and maintenance of various kinds of infrastructure. Much of that infrastructure, related to essential services including water, wastewater, and transportation, is subject to the impacts of climate change. While, as Payne goes on to state, this is true away from the coast as well, some of those impacts are particularly significant and noticeable in coastal states and communities. In short, a great deal of taxpayer money is at stake regarding the ability of that infrastructure to withstand future climate conditions and natural disasters. Planning for greatly increased resilience is a recipe for improved fiscal stability. This holds true even if, as planned by statute, a greater share of that funding for hazard mitigation projects comes from FEMA through BRIC. Taxpayers are taxpayers, whether the money used is federal, state, or local.

All that said, the serious work of completing the work fell to Joseph DeAngelis at APA, now the manager of the APA Hazards Planning Center, and Haley Briel, a research specialist for the Flood Science Center at ASFPM, along with Michael Lauer, a planning consultant with deep experience in growth management programs in southeastern coastal states.

Global average sea level rise from 1880 to the present, based on tide gauges and satellite measurements (US EPA). Reuse courtesy of APA.

Their collaborative report addresses the most significant issues of infrastructure resilience. Particularly in areas subject to coastal storms, these involve not just the impacts of major disasters but the everyday nuisance impacts of flooding because of high tides atop sea level rise that already are yielding closed streets and parks and flooded basements. Urban flooding has become a “thing” where the term never used to be heard. They include a small table with projections by the U.S. Global Change Research Program showing ranges of sea level rise between 0.5 and 1.2 feet by 2050, and 1 to 4 feet by 2100. Of course, these are rough ranges in part because various geological conditions, such as erosion or glacial rebound, cause different results from one region to another, although most of the East Coast faces serious problems over the coming century. A major part of the problem is that sea level rise amplifies the impact of high tides in storms, leading to increased flooding and erosion that is already evident in low-lying cities like Norfolk, Virginia, or Miami. The authors note that, “Over the last half-century alone, with just one to three inches of average sea level rise, daily high-tide flooding has become up to 10 times more frequent” in American coastal communities. Even in Midwestern communities, including those along the Great Lakes, problems result from climate-driven increases in high-precipitation storms that frequently overwhelm stormwater drainage systems built in an earlier era based on other, less challenging, assumptions.

Storm surge heights are cumulatively based on the mean sea level, the height of the tide, and the high volume of water pushed toward the shore by coastal storms (National Hurricane Center). Reuse courtesy of APA.

It is natural that a planning document is going to assert a role for planners in addressing these problems. The role the report asserts is entirely logical, starting with “assessing long-term infrastructure needs and understanding future risks to infrastructure assets.” Equally logical, however, is that the report builds upon prior APA literature to outline the need for coordinated action through the plan-making process to integrate climate risk into local plans as a means of “capturing the future conditions to which existing infrastructure and any planned infrastructure projects will be subjected.” Put simply, if the local planning process does not identify those risks and provide clear recommendations for creating resilient infrastructure, it is not likely to materialize in any coherent and consistent fashion. The third chapter outlines a step-by-step approach (see illustrations below) for developing an inventory of local infrastructure, identifying risks, and moving toward an effective plan for adaptation.

The process for conducting an infrastructure vulnerability assessment (Joseph DeAngelis). Reuse courtesy of APA for both diagrams.

 

 

 

 

 

A project or asset’s vulnerability to flood impacts is a product of its exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (Joseph DeAngelis).

Later, the report provides some examples of what such consistent planning for resilient infrastructure may look like. Its case study of San Francisco’s approach to assessing sea-level-rise impacts outlines how the Sea Level Rise Committee of the city’s Capital Planning Committee (CPC), a body responsible for overseeing capital investments for infrastructure, recommended using the upper end of estimates from a National Research Council report for the West Coast. These were fed into a CPC guidance document for assessing vulnerability and supporting adaptation to sea level rise, a primary outcome of climate change. Without engaging the full details here, the bottom line is that the City and County of San Francisco was working from a single play book for climate adaptation of project life cycles for future infrastructure. Capital planning could thus proceed in a more standardized manner based on common assumptions. The report also uses an extensive example from Toledo, Ohio, the site of one of two pilot projects supported by the ASFPM/APA project. Toledo, sitting on the shores of Lake Erie, has suffered from stormwater flooding and is approaching the problem with a mixture of green infrastructure and analysis of social vulnerability in affected neighborhoods. The report elsewhere delves into questions and methods of documenting and addressing environmental justice and social and racial inequities in environmental protection through appropriate local capital planning projects.

Both cases highlight the value for local planners of establishing credible data sources, which often rest within federal agencies such as NOAA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But, as one chapter illustrates, these can include experienced national nonprofits as well, such as Climate Central. Unquestionably, however, the best single assemblage of data and tools is NOAA’s own Digital Coast website. Planners can access additional high-quality resources on climate through other NOAA programs such as the Regional Climate Centers, located at a series of universities across the nation, and the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments, where RISA staff work directly with climate scientists to communicate the science to the public and local officials.

Just as important as understanding where to find the proper data and tools, however, is a knowledge of best practices in local capital improvements planning, the development of effective standards, guidelines, and regulations for creating resilient infrastructure, and, finally, the best means for financing such long-term investments in infrastructure, especially with an eye to climate resilience. Each of these three topics is covered in separate chapters in the second half of the report.

View of part of the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy, February 2013.

Ultimately, the real challenge for local planners is overcoming a natural discomfort with the inherent uncertainties in planning for infrastructure that must withstand the impacts of climate change within a range of assumptions that, in part, depend on federal and even international action to mitigate rising global temperatures as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. Planners, and the communities they serve, must adjust to those uncertainties and the inherent complexities they embody. Planning, however, has always been a speculative enterprise riddled by uncertainties, yet cities have embraced assumptions about population growth, demographic change, and economic scenarios that have often been equally uncertain, for none of us has a crystal ball. What we do know, however, is the direction of existing and accelerating trends, and climate change is no myth. We are ultimately better off, and will better invest public resources, by anticipating climate change with the best projections available, so that our communities are not overwhelmed by future storms, sea level rise, and storm surge. We cannot say we did not see it coming. We can only hope to say we used a wise approach based on the best data available to avoid catastrophe for ourselves and future generations in the communities we serve.

Jim Schwab

 

Building Coastal Resilience: A Podcast Discussion

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Recently, the American Planning Association’s Hazards Planning Center, which I manage, and the Association of State Floodplain Managers, began work on a new project funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management (OCM), under a program called Regional Coastal Resilience. The project, “Building Coastal Resilience through Capital Improvements Planning: Guidance for Practitioners,” was one of six chosen under FY2015 in a competition involving well more than 100 proposals. The project will focus on building resilience and incorporating climate change data into the process of planning local capital improvements in order to make those public investments more resilient for the long term.

In a recent half-hour podcast, I interviewed Jeffrey Payne, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management (OCM), and Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), about this undertaking. Listen and learn!

 

Jim Schwab

Financing Environmental Infrastructure

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DSC00626For a number of years, the American Society of Civil Engineers has been issuing an annual report card on the condition of the nation’s infrastructure. Generally speaking, those grades have not been good: In 2013, the nation’s grade point average was a D+. It is not my intent in this short post to review all the deficiencies that ASCE describes, although I will note that part of the problem is a penny-wise, pound-foolish national politics that is so concerned about lowering taxes that it has lost sight of the value of investing wisely in the nation’s future. National, state, and local economic development all depend crucially on well-functioning infrastructure. The fear of raising taxes to pay for important infrastructure repair is short-sighted and ultimately unpatriotic.

Essential pieces of the national infrastructure are and should be environmentally related: water and wastewater treatment plants, sewer and water delivery pipes, green infrastructure that helps to mitigate stormwater runoff, and so on. Much of that environmental infrastructure also serves to mitigate natural hazards and thus reduce damages from major storms and other disasters. Regions affected by prolonged drought have learned the hard way, in many cases, that water-conserving infrastructure is critical to drought resilience.

How do we find new ways to pay for all this? The real point of this short blog post is simply to link the reader to a video interview by me with Dr. Jack Kartez, a long-time professor of urban planning at the University of Southern Maine. Dr. Kartez also serves as director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 1 Environmental Finance Center, which is hosted at the university but serves all of New England. This is the second of two interviews we conducted during the July 20-22 Natural Hazards Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado, this summer under the auspices of the American Planning Association’s Hazards Planning Center. I think he offers some valuable insights into solving some of our problems in this arena.

 

Jim Schwab