As New York’s low-lying thoroughfares and basements became rivers and lakes Friday, the torrent of water was a reminder: Nearly two years in office, Mayor Eric Adams has never laid out his own infrastructure plan, and his failure to impose discipline on the city budget threatens to overwhelm the plan he inherited.
During the morning downpour, the city’s drainage system exceeded its 1.5- to 2-inch-per-hour capacity.
As some areas got nearly 9 inches, water backed up. It seeped into basements, floors and subways.
We can quibble with Adams’ immediate response.
A big part of adapting to catastrophic storms is to just stay home and out of harm’s way.
Adams could have said early Friday people should stay home if they could, instead of waiting until noon.
But the bigger problem is long term. If New York wants to drain water faster, it will have to upgrade sewers.
And the city is doing that: It has a program of upgrading and expanding pipes, spending about $525 million a year, and drops about $90 million a year on softer alternatives, like replacing asphalt on traffic medians with absorbent plantings.
The city is paying a separate $2.2 billion, longer term, for sewers in southeast Queens, in neighborhoods that, just like much of Staten Island, were built in the 20th century on the cheap, so that housing there would be cheaper. (You pay someday.)
Overall, the city will spend $9.3 billion over the next decade on sewers, about 6% of its total $160.6 billion in infrastructure maintenance and upgrades.
But these investments are not going to get us to draining multiple inches of rain per hour, for hours on end.
As a 2021 city report said, “recalibrating our sewers for storms like Ida,” the 2021 deluge that killed 13 New Yorkers, “would require a decades-long, potentially $100-billion investment.”
But New Yorkers pay for most water and sewerage investment on their water bills (including indirectly through their rent) — and they can’t afford a doubling or tripling of bills to begin to pay for these upgrades.
Outstanding water-related debt is already set to increase from $32.1 billion to $37.8 billion five years from now.
Plus, a dollar of investment today doesn’t go as far as it did five years ago. Inflation means it costs more to build.
And as interest rates have risen, the water system must pay close to 5% in interest on new debt, nearly twice as high as in early 2020.
That’s why New York says more investment is “dependent on federal funding” — but Washington prefers to spend money on big projects like floodwalls.
We could be masters of our own fate, spending more local resources on sewer upgrades that can’t be funded through water bills.
But that means taking money from the rest of the city’s $160.6 billion 10-year infrastructure budget.
Much of that budget is bread-and-butter highway and bridge maintenance and upgrades to school buildings, hospitals, sanitation facilities; the city can’t cut back much.
In fact, unless Gov. Kathy Hochul reverses a new class-size cap, school-expansion spending will soar.
One item that couldbe cut is $10.6 billion on building jails in Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan and Queens to replace Rikers Island.
In fact, the four-borough jails threaten to blow up the whole infrastructure budget; Adams warned in August the “price tag” has “ballooned beyond belief.”
The city has spent three years trying and failing to even find a contractor for the Manhattan jail; it just restarted the broken bid process.
But Adams won’t ask City Council to stop the jails plan and instead improve Rikers, so we keep spending money — a lot — pretending it’s going to work.
Then there are the migrants.
It’s not just that $4 billion a year on emergency shelter and support, if transferred from the day-to-day budget to the infrastructure budget, could pay for a lot of sewers.
It’s that after the immediate crisis abates, somehow, someday, the city has no place to house low-wage migrants.
Already, at least 100,000 people, mostly immigrants, live in illegal basement apartments — responsible for 11 of the 13 deaths from Ida flooding two years ago.
It was only luck nobody died this time: The rain didn’t fall as fast.
To make basement apartments safe requires “many years” and “billions of dollars,” the city says.
So why is the city encouraging uncontrolled migration to New York City when it knows it has nowhere for hundreds of thousands of low-income families to safely live?
Questions for the next rainy day, unless Adams acts now.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
NEWS CREDIT
