Green Infrastructure Successes in New York City Leading the Country.

NYC celebrated the launch of its Rain Garden Stewardship Program, Green Roofs, and a Long Term Control Plans that are the Most Forward Looking Plans to Control Stormwater in the U.S. all in an effort to protect waterways, flora, and fauna.

Photo 1: Horseshoe Crabs in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

As the United States water sector prepares to spend $20 billion over the next decade on capital and operating expenditures, the use of smart water solutions-hardware, software, and analytics-is becoming more popular and necessary. The uptick in sector spending is driven by compounding challenges facing municipalities: maintaining and expanding water infrastructure, water distribution system leaks, rising energy costs, rate affordability for customers, and emerging water contaminants. As local municipalities face mounting pressure to “do more with less,” smart water infrastructure is an important solution that needs to be scaled up [1]. Green infrastructure is a leading affordable way to manage stormwater as opposed to traditional grey infrastructure. While Chicago, Illinois, Baltimore, Maryland, and Portland, Oregon have been leaders in the last decade, New York City’s old infrastructure has caused big expenses and delays implementing parts of their plan for stormwater.

Photo 2: Springfield Gardens in Queens [2 & 5].

DEP celebrated the launch of its Rain Garden Stewardship Program with its first stewards — the Chauncey Street Block Association — during a planting event Saturday in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Participants refreshed and revitalized the rain gardens on their street by sowing new seeds and planting perennial flowers, ornamental grasses, shrubs, and ground cover. About 25 people joined in the fun, with the youngest participant being 10 years old and the oldest in his 70’s. The group planted 115 plants in eight rain gardens, and DEP also recruited seven new stewards. The blossoming Rain Garden Stewardship Program promotes community participation through understanding how intentionally designed green spaces, such as rain gardens, support stormwater management, reduce pollution, and stimulate biodiversity in an ever-developing city like New York. As a steward in the program, community members help care for the rain gardens by performing basic rain garden maintenance so that the gardens can infiltrate large volumes of stormwater designed to help keep New York City streets green and its waterways clean [2]. Photos 1, 2, and 3 show various rain gardens around New York City.

Photo 3: Corona Queens Rain Garden.

Rivers, streams, wetlands, floodplains, and forests provide a suite of critical services like clean water and flood protection, and should be viewed as essential and effective components of our water infrastructure. New York City has great quality tap water because the city invested in water protection by purchasing land around its Catskills reservoirs to ensure that polluted runoff from roads and lawns doesn’t enter the water supply.The city’s $600 million investment in Catskills land protection and restoration did the job of $6 billion in capital costs to construct a water filtration plant as well as $200–300 million in annual operation and maintenance costs.

Photo 4: Rego Park Rain Gardens which also surrounding Lefrak City in Queens.

Brooklyn Grange opened the largest in New York City. Located atop the Liberty View building in Sunset Park, the farm spans a 140,000 square foot rooftop, produces approximately 30,000 pounds of vegetables per year, and can manage more than 175,000 gallons of stormwater in a single rainfall or 10 million gallons of water each year. The project was made possible, in part, by a $1.38 million grant provided through DEP’s Green Infrastructure Grant Program, managed by BEPA. Brooklyn Grange often collaborates with DEP through the grant program to fund installations, which are collectively responsible for capturing millions of gallons of rainfall annually and helping to combat Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs). Through the grant program, DEP has allocated more than $15 million to over 34 private property green projects to date. The grant program has previously funded the installation of Brooklyn Grange’s Brooklyn Navy Yard farm, a sedum green roof and vegetable garden atop affordable housing developed by SoBro, and several other projects. Brooklyn Grange credits much of its growth in this arena to New York City’s proactive approach to integrating green infrastructure on both public and private properties, combined with the willingness of forward-thinking developers and building owners to invest in long-term improvements to the city’s ecosystem.

Brooklyn Grange Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Gwen Schantz said, “Our work with DEP over the past several years represents all the good that can come of public/private partnerships. These roofs are providing jobs and economic opportunity while also yielding significant environmental and ecological benefits to the city. They’re the product of an ongoing collaboration that brings together DEP’s mission and Brooklyn Grange’s expertise, which is a model that can be replicated in cities across the country and around the world.” In addition to 55,000 square feet of cultivated space, Brooklyn Grange’s new Sunset Park farm includes bluestone paved walkways capable of storing 10,000 gallons of rainfall at a time, Skypaver brick pathways made of 95% post-consumer recycled rubber tires and milk jug plastic, and a 4,800 square foot greenhouse fitted with a hydroponic growing system that will increase the business’ capacity for winter production [2].

More than 500 million people lack clean drinking water. Drought affects more than 35 million every year. And by 2050, ~1.5 billion people will live in flood-prone areas. Most people think that building dams, water treatment plants and other infrastructure is the only solution for these problems — but that’s only because they haven’t considered the many benefits of green infrastructure. Green infrastructure like healthy forests, wetlands, reclaiming urban spaces native species of plants and flowers, and coral reefs can cheaply and effectively enhance the performance of traditional built, or gray infrastructure.

Photo 3: Brooklyn Navy Yard Rain Garden Under Construction.

While green infrastructure refers to projects that draw from nature to achieve desired results, for example, an urban space with plants reintroduced so wastewater or stormwater can run through space rather than going to a wastewater plant or be discharged into local waters via grey infrastructure. Grey Infrastructure includes the pipes, pumps, catch basins, ditches, and detention ponds eventually piped to a wastewater treatment or discharged untreated into local waterways and engineered by people to manage stormwater. Such systems require technical engineering, continual maintenance, and often need to be upgraded. When green infrastructure is designed correctly, minimal maintenance is needed. A very simple example is observed how green and gray infrastructure can be implemented together in figure 1. This along with their bluebelt systems make New York City a leader in the U.S. as seen in photo’s 4. The Bluebelt includes structural and nonstructural stormwater management control measures taken to mitigate changes to both quantity and quality of runoff caused through changes to land use. New York is unique in building their Staten island Bluebelt system and they are now expanding it to all boroughs in an effort to manage stormwater and protect local waterways.

Photo 5 — NYC DEP bluebelt under construction in Staten Island designed to alleviate chronic flooding. Photo courtesy of JRCRUZ Corp [2 & 5].

Figure 1: How Green and Grey Infrastructure Can Work Together [3].

New York City is a concrete jungle with more than 70 percent of New York City’s land mass is covered by an impervious surface, which creates tremendous volumes of stormwater entering the sewer during rainstorms and often directly combined with wastewater overflow goes directly in the waterways surrounding NYC. The city has already begun work on more than 5,000 specially designed curbside rain gardens in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, building upon the more than 4,000 rain gardens that have already been built. This construction will bring a total of more than 9,000 curbside rain gardens to New York City, helping to prevent flooding and reduce Combined Sewer Overflows into local waterways by more than 500 million gallons each year, thereby further improving the health of New York Harbor and its tributaries. Weather events will become more erratic and more intense, cities will have to adapt. The current 50-year intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curve is used as a proxy for the future 5-year storm (projected for the 2080's). New York City is a City of Water. NEW York City has designed on-site detention/retention systems to retain the volume associated with the current 50-year IDF curve which will greatly reduced large volumes of untreated water to enter New York’s waterways.

Figure 2 — Current Intensity-Duration-Frequency Precipitation Curve for NYC, adapted from Weather Bureau Technical Paper 25 and presented in the PLANYC and One Plan NYC.

New York City is a national leader in protecting the environment and at the forefront of this work is the largest and most aggressive green infrastructure program in the country. New York Harbor is cleaner today than it has been since the Civil War and expanding our use of green infrastructure will help NYC continue to improve all of the city’s waterways. Future articles on stormwater degradation of local waterways in new York and in the United States to control these pollution sources will be undertaken.

References:

1. National League of Cities: Water & Green Infrastructure; https://www.nlc.org/topics/environment-sustainability/water-green-infrastructure
2. NYC Environmental Protection Weekly Pipeline (08–13–19); https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/about/weekly-pipeline/10501-pipeline.pdf
3. How Green and Grey Infrastructure Can Work Together; https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/03/debunking-myths-5-things-know-about-green-infrastructure
4. Figure 2— Current Intensity-Duration-Frequency Precipitation Curve for NYC, adapted from Weather Bureau Technical Paper 25; https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/orr/pdf/NYC_Climate_Resiliency_Design_Guidelines_v3-0.pdf
5. Photo 2 & 5 — NYC DEP bluebelt under construction in Staten Island designed to alleviate chronic flooding. Photo courtesy of JRCRUZ Corp and Springfield Garden Bluebelt completed.