> Jacob responded with a declaration that “our urban planning is irrelevant” and decried “shortsightedness of decision-making.” As an example, he cited the Hudson Yards development, just one of many waterfront megaprojects that the city has continued to enthusiastically promote, even after Sandy. He thinks that the government should instead rework its policies to relocate assets away from the water.
I think Jacob commits the opposite error, failing to discount the future. If Manhattan real estate is worth "hundreds of billions of dollars" as an asset, then it's worth tens of billions of dollars a year as a value-stream. If we're talking something like Hurricane Sandy causing $33 billion in property damage in New York, that's maybe one year of the property market's value. That's a quite small "weather tax" in the grand scheme of things, and if we're talking a multi-century trend, well, it might come time to contemplate taking down the skyscraper after a few hundred years, assuming the world hasn't perished in a global thermonuclear war where Manhattan was the first target and assuming that the city still prospers.
And remember that Manhattan is an island literally named "many hills". The Financial District is low-lying but only because it's artificial land. Midtown would be pretty solidly unaffected for a good little while.
Also, because we've lost the ability to build things in the US, we've forgotten that low lying land is a solvable problem. In fact, we already solved that problem in FiDi back before we gave up the social technology of building things.
(Just look at our inability to build subways - something we were capable of 100 years ago and which desperately poor India and China do today.)
When push comes to shove, we can just pay the Dutch or Singaporeans a lot of money to fix things for us.
I think in the US is the environmental regulations and other similar approvals and higher labor costs.
In terms of environmental regulations, much time and money is spend researching and mitigating damage to every little critter and vegetation. That bare field you are building over could be home to some rare field cricket and you have to find a new home for them. In some other countries they just bulldoze over that field and be done with it. I got a little experience on this working for an engineering company fresh out of college. They had to write reams of reports documenting what they found in some former military bases before cleanup. From my understanding nobody ever read those documents... they just read summaries.
I have a college buddy who works for the state transportation department in the engineering design division and he tells me all the red tape he has to go through in expanding a highway. They find a couple of native american artifacts during a dig and suddenly things are halted while that is being investigated. When they widened a highway, some people in adjacent houses started complaining even though the highway existed before those houses were build and space was set aside for future expansion. He ended up adding noise barriers to placate them. Then you have nimbys who will fight and further development.
We use highly skilled union workers for public projects in the US while India and likely China use low cost day laborers. They get paid quite low wages.
> Also, because we've lost the ability to build things in the US
We have the ability. It's just that we've decided having a political process with umpteen layers of environmental review, and having "prevailing wage+" labor unions (who contribute to re-election campaigns) do the construction, is more important than having nice things.
(+ the "prevailing wage", of course, being not the average or median wage, but the highest wage out there.)
Lies! Technology and history don't exist. I bet you haven't even contemplated the world your grandchildren will inherit more than a couple times today.
> If we're talking something like Hurricane Sandy causing $33 billion in property damage in New York, that's maybe one year of the property market's value. That's a quite small "weather tax" in the grand scheme of things,
That's fine in theory. And if the US could get rid of federal flood insurance and not spend any government money fixing up New York when the next storm does damage, then it might be a fine state of affairs. But I don't know anyone who seriously thinks those are politically achievable, much less desirable goals.
I think Jacob commits the opposite error, failing to discount the future. If Manhattan real estate is worth "hundreds of billions of dollars" as an asset, then it's worth tens of billions of dollars a year as a value-stream. If we're talking something like Hurricane Sandy causing $33 billion in property damage in New York, that's maybe one year of the property market's value. That's a quite small "weather tax" in the grand scheme of things, and if we're talking a multi-century trend, well, it might come time to contemplate taking down the skyscraper after a few hundred years, assuming the world hasn't perished in a global thermonuclear war where Manhattan was the first target and assuming that the city still prospers.
And remember that Manhattan is an island literally named "many hills". The Financial District is low-lying but only because it's artificial land. Midtown would be pretty solidly unaffected for a good little while.