While television screens showed the dramatic images of water pouring into metro stations, my mind was fixed on a quieter, more terrifying reality: my frail, elderly neighbors navigating the flood in their basement apartment.
As the heat wave gripped the city this past summer, I couldn’t help but think of the older residents who lack air conditioning, baking in brick ovens in the heart of the city. Heat stroke, heart failure, dehydration. That’s what the death certificates say. But the real culprit? Climate change and a city that hasn’t responded to protect itself.
Heat is the number one weather-related killer, causing an average of 350 excess deaths each summer, with the vast majority occurring in homes without air conditioning. The heat disproportionately affects seniors in low-income neighborhoods of Brooklyn, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
I have called Brooklyn home since I was a teenager. I have watched Brooklyn become a melting pot of languages and traditions, forming something new and beautiful. However, beneath this beauty lies plagues we aren’t confronting: sea-level rise, ocean acidification and shifting weather patterns such as heatwaves, storms and floods.
Climate change is always perceived as an abstract issue — melting ice caps and rising sea levels half a world away. But it’s here in our borough.
In Brooklyn, thousands of seniors and immigrant families live in basement apartments. During devastating storms, these homes — the last frontier of affordable housing — become deathtraps. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, more than 70 % of the 13 New Yorkers who drowned in basement apartments were living in unregistered units, according to The City. After the waters recede, toxic mold corrodes the lungs of kids and the elderly. Extreme weather, frequent waves, and hurricanes are on the rise, leading many Brooklynites to endure mold and despair.
Climate change in Brooklyn brings another silent killer: food insecurity. A flood comes and the bodega goes out of business. The grocery store two blocks down loses power for days and tosses thousands of dollars of inventory. Fresh food goes away for weeks.
For seniors and the infirm who rely on bodegas for bread and milk, their option becomes limited to chips and sodas. Blizzards come and the first thing to go are fresh vegetables. The last things to come back are the affordable prices. Another disaster occurs when vegetables are replaced with canned goods for families that live paycheck to paycheck.
Despite the challenges, I still love Brooklyn. I love Jamaican patties, Dominican coffee and Bangladeshi spices I can smell as I walk down the street. I love that Brooklyn is where the world comes to start anew.
To the city’s credit, some things have begun to change. It now opens cooling centers in heat waves and has weatherized NYCHA apartments. It has run pilot projects to deal with stormwater in flood-prone areas of Red Hook and Canarsie. But these efforts feel like bandages on a bullet wound. A cooling center won’t keep an elderly immigrant cool if she is too afraid to leave her basement apartment, for fear that she will be caught and evicted or robbed by looters. A drain won’t fill the fridge of a family whose market was destroyed by a hurricane.
Planning needs to be targeted. We need a census and outreach program for the basement residents. They don't show up on city maps, but are always the first to experience flooding. We need a network of community health workers aware of families living in the basement, with disabilities or health problems, with emergency plans to account for those living alone. We need integration of public health and food policy.
We have to support urban farms and food co-ops in low-income neighborhoods so that when grocery store shelves are empty, the most vulnerable are still able to get fresh produce.
The New York City Housing Authority needs a Green New Deal. That means not just weatherization, but passive house standards, backup power for life-saving medical equipment during outages and green infrastructure that soaks up flooding, rather than directing it into buildings.
We need cooling centers that are able to serve all those who cannot leave their homes.
References
- New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. (2022). Heat-Related Mortality in New York City. Retrieved from nyc.gov/health
- The City & Gothamist. (2021, September 15). Most of Ida’s Basement Drowning Victims Lived in Unregistered Apartments. Retrieved from www.thecity.nyc
