On Valentine’s day this year, New York City lost the hand of its richest suitor yet. We all know the deal – a sordid love story between Mayor de Blasio, Governor Cuomo, and Jeff Bezos worth three billion dollars, and the ensuing tumult that one can but count on New Yorkers to deliver. On November 14th, the very day after Amazon initially announced its plans to establish HQ2 in already affordable housing-starved Long Island City, protests broke out with hints that Amazon should try for love elsewhere – hints that sounded like, “STAY THE HELIPAD OUT!” Amazon got the message exactly three months later.
The narrative we’ve been hearing, up here on 116th and Broadway, is loud and triumphant. Abuse of power – thwarted. Gentrification – mitigated. Sustainable development – secured.
But – was it? First and foremost, polls showed that 60% of Queens residents actually supported the Amazon deal. Residents of the Bronx and Staten Island were similarly, if not more, enthusiastic. Ironically, the source of greatest opposition was Manhattan, the wealthiest of the five boroughs. The polls seem to be recognizing the billions in tax revenue that the Amazon jobs represent, and the subsequent opportunities for community improvement.
But that’s all numbers and speculation. More concretely, Amazon’s decision to withdraw represents a shuttered window on sustainable development for Long Island City, and the name of that window is adaptation.
Without Amazon’s support, and without the support of voices in the sustainable development field, Long Island City missed on out a chance to adapt to the dangerous gentrification that is already happening, with or without HQ2.
Between 2010 and 2017, more than 12,000 new apartment buildings were constructed in Long Island City, making it the most rapidly growing neighborhood in the U.S., faster than even downtown L.A. The Queens Library at Hunters Point, a 30-million-dollar structure designed by Steven Holl, decorates the Long Island City waterfront. It’s beautiful – and the most innocent of the lot. The rest of the lot includes luxury gated communities by Rockrose and Tishman Speyer, which have – you guessed it – swallowed up affordable, low-rise communities and priced out tenants that once lived there. Long Island City has been gentrifying for decades. Certainly, HQ2 would have exacerbated the trend; but without HQ2, the trend continues.
Yet there has been no conversation about sustainable development for Long Island City. And without HQ2, there certainly will be no conversation between Amazon, sustainable development experts, and stakeholders in Long Island City, setting progress back even further. Without these conversations, we’ve lost out on options. What we’re left with is either stopping gentrification or forever holding our peace. In other words, we’ve lost out on the same set of options that were shut from the narrative at the UNFCCC for decades: options in adaptation.
The United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was created in the 1990s to work out international policies that could combat climate change. Ideally, to the UNFCCC, sustainable development looked like a zero-loss game, so long as every country mitigated, mitigated, mitigated. The narrative was that as long as greenhouse gas emissions were slashed, and slashed quickly, climate change would be fixed. The idea of adaptation to climate change implied a failure to stop climate change – and that was, strictly speaking, immoral to consider.
The reality, however, is that we have in fact failed. It is certainly morally difficult to plan for the failures of mitigating climate change, for it goes almost without saying that climate change impacts the most vulnerable disproportionately. But already, climate change has induced droughts, famines, sea level changes, ecological disasters, and intensified hurricanes that have affected the lives of millions, sometimes through the medium of human conflict. Today, adaptation to the impacts of climate change is now fully established as necessary and complementary to mitigation.
The issues of climate change and gentrification are parallel. With Long Island City, the narrative was that as long as the arrival of massive companies like Amazon were stopped, and stopped quickly, gentrification could similarly be halted. Yet just as with global greenhouse gas emissions, gentrification is not halting, and in Long Island City this means unethical, unsustainable development.
There’s almost no need to spell out the impacts of gentrification on the urban poor, minority populations, and the elderly. Rebecca Solnit, in her piece of about Alex Nieto, killed by police as the consequence of a series of racist assumptions by white gentrifiers in San Francisco, calls it Death by Gentrification. As with climate change, the harms of gentrification as it plays out like an inevitable wave across communities are complex and lethal.
But if gentrification, like climate change, kills, how can we learn to adapt to it? As morally difficult as it is to plan for failing to stop climate change, so it is for gentrification as well. On the other hand, as necessary as it is to plan for the failures of stopping climate change, so it is for gentrification as well.
Today, climate change adaptation is a rapidly growing field of scientific literature, with funding that has been growing exponentially since the 2000s. It’s a field that New York City – among others – should take a look at, and see how the effects of gentrification can best be adapted to. And perhaps we’ll find that there was a role for Amazon in all this, after all.