Planning a Resilient Future with The Jewel Streets

This project is a continuation of several years of ongoing work with our local partners, The East New York Community Land Trust and Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, to support the community of the Jewel Streets. Its residents are forging a vision of a resilient environmental future for their neighborhood, which stands within one of New York City’s most climate-vulnerable zones. The Jewel Streets face chronic inland flooding and heat exposure placing additional burdens on a low-income population. To date faculty and students in the departments of architecture, planning and environmental systems have helped to document and daylight the historic legacies of the community and the behavior of both local and larger watershed ecologies. They have helped the community articulate design strategies of soft infrastructures, robust utilities, and housing. They have also helped local partners successfully engage with the City in planning for new homeowner sewer infrastructure and a blueway that will offer multiple community benefits.

The project team will work collectively and in a cross-disciplinary manner to envision community-based strategies for specific properties, including those for specific homeowners and for a rare 17-acre expanse of developable land situated on higher ground within the flood-prone blocks. With Spring Creek running beneath it to Jamaica Bay, the site poses both an environmental challenge and a strategic opportunity. Working with residents, some of whom will most likely be displaced by flood risks to this site, the team will create a plan for a resilient mixed-use community featuring affordable housing, a place of refuge during extreme weather, and a public water management landscape. In this way, the grant also serves as a first pilot project in the climigration that will increasingly confront the city, a test of how relocation can preserve heritage while embracing a resilient future.