New York City's heavy rainfall is the new normal. Flooding shouldn't be.

Increased heavy rain triggered by climate change, and subsequent flooding, is one of the most pressing issues New York City faces today. Residents around the five boroughs are all too familiar with the scene: Within just a few minutes of the sudden, intense rain bursts that have become more common, streets cascade with water and block movement, subway entrances are submerged, and the city becomes paralyzed. 

“Cloudbursts,” or sudden, heavy downpours bringing mass amounts of rainfall in a short period wreak havoc on our infrastructure, overflowing the sewer networks and pushing storm drains past maximum capacity. For our most vulnerable New Yorkers, the lack of upgraded, rain-resilient design has deadly consequences. Basement flooding has drastically increased in the past decade, which has caused property damage, mold, elevated disease transmission, and resulted in dozens of deaths. Neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens with the highest concentration of below-ground housing, predominantly in BIPOC communities, dangerously overlap with higher-risk stormwater flood-prone zones.

Extreme rainfall events and cloudbursts will increase in frequency. New York City has to transform to live safely with water and the new normal. 

Creative interventions and green infrastructure solutions already exist, from underground tanks to rain gardens and more absorbent sidewalks. However, the city still needs enormous and drastic investment to implement cloudburst management and water safety equitably across the five boroughs.

Raincheck, managed by the Design Trust for Public Space, in collaboration with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, HKS, and the CUNY Macaulay Honors College, will seek to research and propose design strategies for heavy rain that ensure cross-agency coordination and environmental justice for all New Yorkers. Our project goals are:

1. Cloudburst infrastructure is integrated into the capital planning of city agencies, and similarly, that interagency collaboration is more readily accomplished on extreme rain adaptation. 

2. Clear design practices, agency rules, and policies exist to incorporate local feedback, expert insights, and creativity into cloudburst management, moving beyond just infrastructural development.

3. Future cloudburst sites provide neighborhoods with multi-benefit green infrastructure and provide additional resources at all scales, from the block to the region.

This work builds off of the Design Trust’s Water: Designing an Equitable Water Future for New York City initiative, aiming to incubate solutions to the pressures exerted on New York by too much or too little water and connecting New Yorkers with the cultural vibrancy and memory inherent in our waterways. This project is further informed by Design Trust’s participation in the Rainproof NYC working group, a city-wide initiative led by Rebuild by Design to lead NYC to learn to live with increasingly heavy rainfall.

Raincheck is generously supported by Con Edison