New condo towers mean construction racket.

Poor Williamsburg. It's now suffering a terrible fate known to but a handful of pert prom queens and high school football hunks—it is not only possible to be popular, but to be too popular.

While many of the newcomers who have recently washed up on Williamsburg's luxury condo-strewn shores are no doubt aware that the neighborhood is "changing" and that that change is part of what makes it attractive to so many new, well-heeled residents—would they have been able to buy artisanal chutney there back in 2005?—they're apparently more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that it continues to, well, change. At least, they hate the construction, according to DNAinfo.

"It's annoying to be outside with a baby, it's loud and dusty," Northside Piers resident Vanessa Vellucci told DNAinfo.

She's not the only one. Other mothers complain about having to take their children to local cafes far from the construction noise to get in a decent nap. Bars might also be a good option—day drinkers tend toward quiet melancholy—if you can get out before the baby curfew kicks in.

Even nannies are complaining about the construction dust blowing into baby's faces and making them cry.

But most admit that irksome though all the racket may be, it's just part of living in a neighborhood that's basically being built from scatch—one SoulCycle gym and condo tower at a time. (Well, sometimes several at one time).

"I do love the neighborhood, and once it's done it'll be amazing," one woman told DNAinfo. "But I guess if you move here first, you have to go through the changes."

For the time being, they'll just have to grit their teeth, focus on rising real estate values and dream of the day when the only thing there will be to complain about is the unimaginative architecture.

Currently, it is illegal to build a new apartment smaller than 450 square feet, but the new program seeks comfortable, attractive housing units between 250 and 375 square feet. The city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development received 33 different entries for the project, which will be built on a city-owned site in Murray Hill.

The winning design came from Monadnock Develpment in partnership with the Actors Fund for Housing Development and Capsys, a modular housing builder based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The design is by New York firm nArchitects. It will be constructed on a plot at 335 East 27th Street, which the city is selling for $500,000.

The project will also be the first modular development in Manhattan, following on the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which suggests that prefabricated construction may indeed take hold as a new model for housing development in the city, at least on the low end. Some 40 percent of the units will be set aside for low- and middle-income tenants, with prices ranging from $940 per month to $1,800 per month.

"We've chosen Manhattan because more than three-quarters of its homes are one or two person households," Mayor Bloomberg said. "We already have the population seeking housing for a small number of people, we just don't have the apartments to house them."

(We'll have more details shortly, as the unveiling has just wrapped up, but The Observer is well aware that all you, dear reader, care about, is what these apartments actually look like, so here they are.

If you build it, they will come. Promise. (Edward Reed/Flickr)

One of the big debates that has been raging around the rezoning of Midtown East is how it might impact development already underway around the city, much of it funded in part by the public sector, and thus taxpayers. Should these projects fail, Joe Public could lose out on his investment.

The World Trade Center and Hudson Yards have been two focal points, but Manhattan West, which broke ground yesterday, ought to be considered, too. While the project's backers bragged at the groundbreaking about building without public subsidy, they are still competing for the same anchor tenants as their rivals further east. Furthermore, the $2 billion the city contributed to the construction of the 7 train nearby is to be paid back through property taxes on the new projects. No new development, no bond proceeds, big trouble for the city.

Still, Mayor Bloomberg is standing by the decision to fast-track the Midtown rezoning and ensure it gets completed this year.

"There's lots of development going on all over the city, not only on the West Side but downtown, at the World Trade Center, in Brooklyn and Long Island City," the mayor said. "People are surprised by how much interest there is."

Still, the mayor thinks there are provisions being taken to protect these projects. "That's why we set the five year sunrise," the mayor said, referring to the delay in the rezoning taking effect until 2017. Some landlords have complained about the delay, as has Post columnist Steve Cuozzo.

"We think that's a decision to give people plenty of breathing room to get their projects off the ground," the mayor said of the sunrise provision.

John Zuccotti, the former Brookfield chairman who was on hand for the groundbreaking yesterday was unconcerned about the Midtown East rezoning, as well. "I think the rezoning will come in its time, but it won't be as tranformative as this because they're building where there are already office building," Mr. Zuccotti said. "Here there was nothing, and it's all gonna change." It is this total transformation, this neighborhood from nothing, its brand-new glowing greatness, that will make the project so appealing (and cheaper) to companies and residents.

Not that the transformation comes as a surprise to Mr. Zuccotti.

"It all started with Battery Park City," he said, where Brookfield (then Olympia and York, still led by Mr. Zuccotti) was one of the first builders, creating the World Financial Center. "I was there when the ships left, and it was clear we had to find a whole new use for the West Side. My father took me to the Normandie when it was on fire, so I remember the old West Side, and it's not that anymore, hasn't been for a long time."

"From Nelson Rockefeller to Michael Bloomberg, that's been the transformation, and here we are."

“With today’s groundbreaking, we’re taking a major step forward in the transformation and rebirth of the Far West Side of Manhattan,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said from the podium at the corner of 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue.

Behind him stood the Farley Post Office, some day to become a grand new entrance for Penn Station. In front of him, earth movers had already begun tearing up this former parking lot, making way for one of the project's two 60-story office towers. Directly across the tracks below, on 31st Street, construction workers had not even stopped for the groundbreaking ceremony as they prepped the southwest corner for a residential tower that will rise there. All three towers and a large retail building on the northwest corner are being designed by Ken Lewis and SOM.

Ric Clark, Brookfield's Chief Executive, told The Observer after the ceremony that the project had actually been ready to move forward last year, but the market felt better now, particularly for the inclusion of apartments. "We weren't sure if we would be building one tower at first, or two, but as things progressed, it just made more sense, in terms of economic and market conditions," Mr. Clark said. He had on a long navy overcoat to stave off the cold of the winter morning groundbreaking.

Brookfield has actually controlled most of the parcel since the 1980s, but in the middle of last decade, it acquired the piece Mr. Clark was standing on, at the northeast corner of the site. This unlocked the next important piece of the project, which was determining to build to construct any buildings along the edges of the site. That way, the foundations and cores could be built over terra firma, with only a small section of each building cantilevering out over the train yard below.

In 2009, Brookfield hit upon using a concrete bridging technology that would allow it to deck over the tracks without having to build a huge steel structure reaching down to the yard, holding up what will eventually become the 1.5-acre public plaza at the development's core. Instead, this bridge will be suspended across the 5-acre site.

The final piece was acquiring a 75 percent stake in 450 West 33rd Street, the massive pyramid-with-its-top-shorn-off tower that was the former home of the Daily News and occupied the block front on 10th Avenue. Brookfield is currently redeveloping the property, with architecture firm REX redesigning the structure.

"It's finally the right time," Mr. Clark said.

The developer is still working on finding an anchor tenant before the tower will rise, but until then foundation work will move forward, and numerous tenants are said to be interested.

Correction 1/16: An earlier version of this post stated that 450 West 33rd Street was located on 11th Avenue, not 10th Avenue. The Observer regrets the error.

Now, the shiny strip has a new eastern redoubt. The Observer has learned that a long-planned 57-story tower at 250 East 57th Street, on the corner of Second Avenue, is set to rise this year. Demolition already began on the old high school on the 63,000-square-foot lot in November, the same month World Wide Group, the project's developer, filed new construction documents for the contorted tower designed by Roger Duffy, the art-loving visionary at SOM who designed the equally daring Toren condo tower in Downtown Brooklyn,

First announced in late 2006, the project was an innovative partnership with the city's Department of Education. World Wide would demolish a low-rise section of the High School of Art and Design just off Second Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets, and build three schools on the site (two new ones plus room for the old high school). During construction, the seven-story section of the school on the corner of Second Avenue would remain operation.

In addition to the new classroom, there was also 170,000-square feet of retail in the base of the new school, now home to a Whole Foods. Beyond building the new schools, World Wide would pay $325 million to the Department of Education during a 75-year lease on the site. Once it built the new schools, the main high school building would be torn down, paving way for the tower.

Construction on the new schools was set to start by 2008 and be completed the following year, but the project had yet to get off the ground by then as the economy faltered, and construction on the school did not kick off until 2010. The schools opened in September, in time for this academic year, while the Whole Foods was finished a month earlier.

Meanwhile, the second phase of the project was put on hold indefinitely, like so many other developments back in 2009. When The Observer first reported the tower was being delayed, we wrote that "both the scraper’s height and its composition are now up in the air." But now it is clear the tower will go forward as originally advertized, reaching a height of 57 stories and 715 feet. There are 270 units in the building, down from an earlier reported number of 320—not a surprising trend, given the evolution toward bigger, more luxurious apartments in the city over the past decade. Bigger layouts mean bigger price tags.

Not short on luxuries, building permits list a rooftop terrace on the seventh floor, an exercise room one floor down, a swimming pool in the basement, and, up on the 25th floor, no doubt with commanding views of the East River nearby, "accessory library lounge, dining, music, screening and wine testing rooms." There will also be retail on the first two floors of the building, according to permits, some 27,000-square-feet.

What was not immediately clear was whether or not the project would be condo or rental or if it would still use the city's inclusionary housing program, whereby 20 percent of units are set aside as affordable in exchange for a tax abatement from the city. In an email in late December, John Marino, a spokesman for World-Wide, said "there is really nothing new to report… they are coming out of the ground next year." He did confirm that SOM was still the architect, but also noted that new designs are in the works. A source who had seen the newer designs said the building is more curvaceous than the angular renderings that had been previously shown off. "It undulates," this person said.

So, forget Fifth Avenue, forget Central Park West, forget Bond Street. Now, improbably, 57th Street has become the city's new gold coast, with all its glistening new castles in the sky. And 250 East 57th Street fits right in. "This building will play a crucial role in solidifying the eastern end of this new hub," Mr. Marino said.

Waterfront wonder. (Bing Maps)

The future design for this corner of the park. (BBP)

How would you like to wake up to views of the Manhattan Bridge and Lower Manhattan beyond, a lavish waterfront park right outside? That is the vision Brooklyn Bridge Park is hoping will entice developers into the newest private development within the libertarian park. Today, the park released a request for proposals for a development at the nexus of John and Pearl streets in Dumbo. The project calls for no more than 130 residential units in a 101,000-square foot development that can rise no higher than 13 stories.

“The addition of the residential development at the John Street site represents a critical element of our park maintenance plan,” Regina Myer, president of Brooklyn Bridge Park, said in a statement. “This development will not only benefit the DUMBO community, it will further activate the northern end of the park.”

Located at the most northern edge of the park, on the far side of the Manhattan Bridge, this section is so far untrafficked because the open space has yet to be built out, though it does have funding for construction to begin, tentatively next year. In addition to the apartments, the project will have space for ground-floor retail.

Among the requirements for the development outlined in the RFP are a strong architectural identity for the project, a design that is complimentary to the park, achieve LEED certification for sustainablity and, above all, "generate a financially feasible and economically viable project, with lease payments that will contribute to ongoing maintenance and operations of the Park."

Some locals have criticized the park for being funded by development on public land, but supporters, including the Bloomberg administration, argue that without these developments there would be no park. (This problem is not limited to Brooklyn Bridge Park, as those on the Hudson can attest.) But by reserving parcels for private development, it inherently means a smaller park (in this case, 85 acres), as well as a whiff of commercialism in what should be the public realm.

But at least the project will not be quite as big as previously proposed, at 17 stories and 140,000 square feet. Last year, State Senator Dan Squadron and Assemblywoman Joan Millman negotiated a reduction in the development's size as part of a deal with the Bloomberg administration over trying to reduce the amount of apartments in the park. This is not, however, one of the developments that could be totally eliminated by a special tax placed on Jehovah's Witnesses property.

It will be curious to see what developers turn up for this project, given the intense interest from some of the city's biggest names in the previous commercial development in the park, a development of a hotel and apartments at Pier 1. McMansion and Northside Piers builders Toll Brothers and hotel financier Starwood Capital won that project.

The John Street development is smaller and more out of the way, but considering that Dumbo has become in only a decade the borough's most expensive neighborhood, it would seem the competition for any development opportunity will be fierce.

Correction:An earlier version of this post said the project would include park amenities within the building, such as toilets and space for park workers. This is not currently in the plans. The Observer regrets the error.

Going up to come down. (Matt Chaban)

The facade of 1780 Broadway will be retained, but that's it. (Matt Chaban)

No sooner did Extell Development file permits for a new 1,550-foot residential tower on the corner of 57th Street and Broadway then scaffolding started to go up around one of the final properties comprising Gary Barnett's little west side assemblage that will be home to the city's tallest tower. On Friday morning, The Observer happened to be out for a stroll on the crosstown boulevard when we noticed construction workers assembling a sidewalk shed, the first sign of construction commencement.

A source close to Extell confirms that demolition will soon begin on 1780 Broadway, a 12-story building that was once home to BF Goodrich. At the time, this corner of Gotham was known as Automobile Row during the Gilded Age. Because of an agreement with the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, the facade of 1780 Broadway must be retained as part of any new building, so this will presumably be a careful deconstruction.

It is worth noting that, according to construction documents, the hotel will occupy floors seven through 12, the same height as 1780 Broadway, so it could make a good entrance for the hotel, while the Nordstrom would presumably have its entrance on busy 57th Street, with something quieter for the apartment tenants on 58th Street.

Inside the old, trashed Morton Williams (Matt Chaban)

The building at 225 West 57th Street was also part of the BF Goodrich complex, but the eight-story building was not given protections by the landmarks commission. The only thing holding up its demolition, which is also just beginning, was a Morton Williams grocery store in the ground floor and basement. Construction netting and scaffolding has been up on the building for months, but until a new Morton Williams opened a block down 57th Street, this one stayed open. Currently, the space is half empty, with ripped ceilings and empty cold cases strewn about the space.

Neighboring 117 West 57th Street was torn down last year and has lain dormant.

Is this a sign that this new building might indeed start rising sooner rather than later? "Once a building is torn down, a new one tends to rise," according to our source. "It's quite possible."

That would be an impressive feat, given that One57 is not even finished. Then again, if that building is indeed almost sold out, Mr. Barnett will need something else to start selling to the billionaires of the world, eh? Which begs the question, what could he possibly build next to top these two?

Update:Extell spokesman George Artzt explains that the building is being prepped for future work, but nothing will happen before plans are approved by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission. "We're not doing anything to the building right now," he said. At the moment, demolition is only underway on 225 West 57th Street.

Battered and broken. (Mayor's Office/Flickr)

While the Bloomberg administration has largely come in for praise for its Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts, questions remain over whether City Hall made things worse by encouraging waterfront development. The Independent Budget Office certainly believes so in a critical analysis it has issued looking at the seemingly hypocritical policy initiatives Mayor Bloomberg had championed.

On the one hand, the city had taken pains to reduce its carbon footprint as it acknowledges the dangers posed by rising sea levels and superstorms. At the same time, the administration continues to encourage new residential and commercial projects in the very areas it is wringing its hands over.

Yet even as City Hall grappled with these concerns it continued to put substantial resources into major development projects on the waterfront, rezoning sites as manufacturing declined— including some in prime areas for flooding, the so-called Zone A evacuation areas. Just one month before Sandy struck the city, Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan by private developers to build a $500 million complex on city-owned land on Staten Island’s North Shore that would include the world’s largest Ferris wheel as well as a hotel and outlet mall. Part of the site sits in a floodplain.

An even larger development project is planned on the Coney Island waterfront, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Sandy. The city has rezoned the area to allow the development of hotels, housing, and a new amusement park, and has allocated more than $400 million for sewer upgrades, land acquisition, lighting, boardwalk and park improvements, and other projects to foster the redevelopment plan. On the Queens waterfront, the city is investing $147 million in the Hunters Point South project, which also sits in Zone A. Already under construction, Hunters Point South includes 5,000 apartments, a 1,100-seat school, and retail space.

To be fair, the Bloomberg Administration has taken steps to protect the city from the affects of rising sea levels and storm surges, following existing city building codes and Federal Emergency Management Agency guidelines. But these guidelines may not be adequate in the face of storms with the fury of Sandy.

So is this a sound policy, or a sinking one?

Illo by Ed Johnson

Peer under the tent flap of our splendid new civic order, and you’re guaranteed to see a disturbing sight: all the same failed policies of the past, lovingly preserved in formaldehyde.

That’s what I got from Amy Nicholson’s thoroughly enjoyable, thoroughly enraging new documentary, Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, which won a special jury prize last week at DOC NYC, New York’s Documentary Film Festival and is currently making the festival rounds. Ms. Nicholson was generous enough to open her film with a quote from me about the destruction of the old Coney, though I have no other association with the production.

What she and I do share is a deep resentment over what has been done to this iconic New York neighborhood under the guise of “improving” it. Ms. Nicholson’s movie centers around the travails of Eddie Miranda, operator of a single Coney ride, the “Zipper,” a carnival perennial that was one of some 42 profitable small businesses shuttered recently by the city’s developer partners after 38 years of operation. Much of Zipper involves the very human story of Mr. Miranda, his workers, and other small-time carnies as they face the end of an era, but the larger forces at play kept dragging Ms. Nicholson—a self-described political naïf—into the looking-glass world of New York development.

Just what will happen now to Coney is anybody’s guess, following its submersion in the storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy. But the plan for the area that the city aided and abetted is a depressingly familiar “razzle,” as the local parlance goes. Much of the area was bought up by a developer with the Dickensian moniker Joe Sitt, an impish character who specializes in acquiring properties, clearing them of tenants, then holding them in limbo until the authorities change the zoning of his parcels, greatly enhancing their value.

The razzle here is that, almost from the start, the city was playing along. Mr. Sitt was paid off at $14 million an acre, more than 10 times what his lots were originally worth—a price that approached that of top Manhattan street frontage. The city let itself be “forced” into reducing the designated amusement zone on Coney from 60 acres to just over nine, and into provisions that will likely allow future developers to erect 30 separate 30-story condominium towers on the island.

The waste of public money is appalling in a city that regularly claims it must lay off teachers and close firehouses. But the greater crime here is the vision of New York that our public and private leaders have come to internalize: that the city should be just like everyplace else.

The directors of this scam were, as usual, unelected and unaccountable: City Planning Director Amanda Burden; Lynn B. Kelly, president of the Coney Island Development Corporation, now called the Alliance for Coney Island; Bob Lieber, the longtime Lehman Brothers real estate investment banker turned former deputy mayor. In what has become standard operating procedure, they sold the idea to the media, at least, with fantastical, computer-generated images of a new Coney that had absolutely nothing to do with any real plans.

Like all those who would lead us to hell, Ms. Burden, Ms. Kelly, Mr. Lieber and company were armed with earnest good intentions. They seem to have honestly believed they were helping the area by making it a future destination for any number of chain stores and restaurants.

Ms. Nicholson, in her ingenuousness, managed to solicit from Mr. Sitt, and from Coney-area City Councilman Domenic Recchia, a cascade of brand names that Coney “needs” in order to be made whole: Dave & Busters, Williams-Sonoma, Build-a-Bear, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Howie’s Game Shack, Cold Stone Creamery, The NBA Store, Barnes & Noble, Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, The Gap, Duane Reade.

“Does everything have to be a brand?” Ms. Nicholson lamented in a phone interview. The director is no revolutionary, but in her day job she works as an advertising art director and very much understands the value of brands. “Coney Island is the antithesis of all those things,” she added.

And as such, it had come to work very well as an amusement area again in its own ragged, enduring way—a place that offered all the anarchic spirit of the 1970s with almost noneof the crime. Coney served up a unique array of cheap, family-friendly entertainments, from minor-league baseball to the aquarium, the beach to the Cyclone, Nathan’s Famous to Dick Zigun’s geek shows to ... the Zipper. The Parks Department’s own figures showed beach attendance rising from 1.9 million in the summer of 2000 to a peak of 15.6 million by 2006.

Coney Island was working. But it didn’t have a Dave and Busters, you see, or a Howie’s Game Shack, so working people who poured their whole lives into the place had to go. Mr. Miranda works in private security in Florida, and the ride was shipped to Honduras.

We’ve been here before. Coney once had a vibrant, year-round community and a business district along Mermaid Avenue to go with it. Both were largely annihilated by another of Robert Moses’s daft schemes. But hey: 50, 60 years later, here’s the government to help us again.

The Alliance for Coney Island is something of a spinoff of the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), another of the largely unaccountable “public” authorities that Moses pioneered. Backing it is the perennially tunnel-visioned coterie of developers and their construction-union allies, who would tear down the old Penn Station all over again if they had the chance.

Riding herd on them, supposedly, is our elected city council, which to judge from their campaign literature is composed almost exclusively of lifelong community activists. Yet these ceaseless doers of good deeds, supposedly born of the 1960s grassroots tradition, voted 42-2 to okay the gentrification of Coney Island. Why? Because it’s the council’s habit never to interfere with any member’s pet project, and Councilman Recchia wanted this done.

We can only be glad, I guess, that it wasn’t his pleasure to tear down the Verrazano Bridge. All three of these “progressive” traditions—the independent public authority, the “run the government like a business” movement exemplified by our billionaire mayor and the grassroots activism—got their starts many years ago challenging the choking corruption of the old political machines. But when it came to sustaining one of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods—and the working people who kept it alive—they behaved as rancidly as the worst old Tammany Hall hacks. And all in the service of a vision that Brooklyn might one day be as bland and sterile as any suburban mall!

Now Sandy has changed everything. Good luck getting flood insurance now for all those planned condo towers. But no matter what becomes of Coney Island, our leaders go on mindlessly turning New York into a city that none of the rest of us, rich or poor, condo-owner or carny operator, really wants.

editorial@observer.com

Kevin Baker's 1999 novel Dreamlandwas set in turn-of-the-century Coney Island.  

Deja vu: NOLA and NYC. (Getty)

How many more lives will be lost and how much damage will it take for us to realize that Sandy was part of a continuing menacing pattern of extreme weather events that are here to stay? In 2005 it was Katrina, last year Irene and now Sandy. But around the world, extreme weather has crippled nations and destroyed property since 2000. You may think this has been going on forever, since the time of Noah, but this destruction has been escalating, with more damage every year than any similar span in recorded history.

Insurance losses in the U.S. averaged $9 billion in the 1980s. Katrina alone cost nearly $100 billion, with an average of nearly $40 billion a year in the 2000s. If we include Japan, the destruction to the globe in the last couple of years is unparalleled. Is this global warming or something else? No matter what the cause, there is a clear pattern of severe weather causing catastrophic human losses. This pattern, according to the National Research Council, is going to continue. We have to do more than hope it won’t happen here (wherever here is). The data indicates that a disaster is coming to you, or near you, in the near future, if you live in an urbanized coastal area. More than 60 percent of all Americans do.

So, what to do?

First, like anyone in trouble, we have to acknowledge that we have a problem. Our problem is that since World War II, we have built too much of our housing and commercial structures the wrong way and in the wrong places. We have built single-family homes on slabs, so that when severe rains come, the water washes through our structures in raging torrents, destroying everything in its path. We have covered over too many wetlands on the presumption that floods occur only once every 100 years. We have grown too dependent on a cheap-fuel, high-energy living pattern that is crippled by any loss of power from a fragile electric grid.

Secondly, we have created a land-use pattern that we cannot support. We build in areas too close to the sea or to large bodies of water. We even create bodies of water near homes. This is a recipe for the trouble we see. Third, we are forced to evacuate our homes in times of danger by going out on highways that were not built for this, when the most intelligent evacuation should be into shelters near where we live, work and go to school. Finally, we have not built any backup systems for our fragile, over-taxed utilities. So in times of danger, these systems fail when we need them the most.

Here is what New York, what America, must consider going forward.

After Sandy, we need to reposition and not merely rebuild. Sandy presents the ideal opportunity to think about reorganizing Lower Manhattan with stronger, smarter—and higher—transportation modes. Building tidal barriers around the tip of the city is important, as well as creating better links between New York and New Jersey so evacuation and train travel can create more options for human movement in good and bad times.

We need to develop local power generation systems interdependent with the grid so we can generate local power for days and perhaps weeks using solar, wind and even tidal power generation. Every neighborhood needs to have local clean water cisterns. In San Francisco and Japanese cities, this is standard, and now in New York and throughout the nation it should be too. How else to provide local fresh water for an extended period of time, not only for drinking but also fighting fires quickly using local trained volunteers?

We have to commence a strategic retreat from many coastal areas, particularly in the Carolinas, Virginia and parts of New York and several other states. This may take 50 or more years, but it has to begin with offering people new resettlement options post-disaster rather than reinforcing current dangerous patterns. Even for those who elect to stay, the rebuilding should be more resilient, with deeper setbacks and barriers. Moreover, we must use state and federal rules to curb coastal building.

These ideas may not be popular, but a century ago, creating our great National Parks system was not popular in many quarters, either. Our parks are the envy of the world. We save nature. Now, saving nature and saving lives have to work together to make stronger communities in a stronger nation.

Edward J. Blakely is Honorary Professor of Urban Policy at the University of Sydney. He headed the Office of Recovery Administration and Development after Hurricane Katrina. His book, My Storm (Univ. of Penn. Press, 2011) recounts his experiences in New Orleans.