Tara Viray, center, performs with the rest of the Alchemist Theatre Company during their production of “In the Heights” April 3 at North Brunswick Township High School. STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ERIC SUCAR The future of some of New Jersey’s most popular Shore destinations and historic oceanfront communities will be decided in the coming weeks as federal officials choose winners in the Rebuild by Design competition.
Initiated under a federal directive last summer, the competition sent 10 teams of international planning and design experts into the region’s most Sandy-impacted communities to seek creative and collaborative solutions to flood risks and other vulnerabilities. The final proposals, which call for everything from a radically redesigned Asbury Park boardwalk to manmade barrier islands miles off the Jersey Shore, were publicly unveiled April 3 at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.
Henk Ovink, lead administrator for the competition, said the plans and the way they were created will drastically impact rebuilding and resiliency efforts across the state, regardless of which teams win.
Above: A conceptual rendering of manmade barrier islands off the coast of New Jersey and New York is designed to protect against storm surge. Below: Renderings of a redesigned Asbury Park boardwalk, which would provide better flood protection and new opportunities for visitors and businesses. The visions are currently under consideration for federal funding as part of the Rebuild by Design contest. PHOTOS COURTESY OF REBUILD BY DESIGN “It’s about changing a culture, changing the way we think about the future,” said Ovink, a former planning director for the Dutch government and senior advisor to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan, who created the competition.
“It’s not about one cool project in a museum. It’s about this whole process of collaboration and making the region the winner — not the teams.”
The 10 plans vary in scope from individual communities to broad regional initiatives. One team has developed a plan to protect coastal commercial centers throughout New York and New Jersey partly by redesigning tenant spaces, raising streets and using architectural tools to help protect against flooding. Using Asbury Park as one example, the team of six architectural and design firms proposes using elevated patios, deployable gates and other design elements to provide flood protection along the boardwalk. This would simultaneously provide new space for seating and pop-up shops during normal operating conditions.
Plans such as these could potentially be replicated in vulnerable communities and business districts across the region, regardless of whether they are selected for federal funding, said Holly Leicht, regional administrator for HUD.
“The concepts are going to take on a life of their own, even beyond this,” she said.
Another plan proposes the idea of manmade “Blue Dunes,” which would be built upwards of 10 miles outside the New York- New Jersey harbor and would help protect the entire region from violent storm surges. Acknowledging the significant costs and impacts of the project, the team proposed a research initiative involving multiple stakeholders who would explore the possibility and potentially steer it toward implementation.
A jury will review all 10 plans before Donovan selects at least one winner later this month.
The selected proposals will be funded primarily by the third round of post-Sandy Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Disaster Recovery funds, along with other public and private funding streams, Ovink said.
New Jersey received $1.8 billion in the first round of CDBG Disaster Recovery grants and is expected to receive $1.4 billion in second-round funding in the coming months. Even if New York and New Jersey were to receive a combined $2 billion in the third round, it wouldn’t be nearly enough to fund all of the proposals, according to Chris Daggett, director of the New Jersey Recovery Fund.
“We have to think about how we develop coalitions of all these groups … to find the money and the will that carries beyond the elected officials that are there today,” Daggett said, stressing that state and local governments need to address longterm risks such as sea level rise. “This is going to go well beyond current administrations.”
While the plans will be judged on traditional metrics such as strength of research, design innovation and potential impact, the teams will also be evaluated on their “participatory design process,” meaning the plans must reflect public input collected at one of the dozens of local workshops held by the teams since June.
The team of Rutgers University, design firm Sasaki Associates and engineering firm ARUP, for example, met with dozens of Keansburg residents and officials in February regarding their Inland Bay plan for the Raritan Bayshore. After receiving numerous comments about the need to dredge local creeks and restore recreational boat access in the small, working-class borough, team members changed the plan.
“We hadn’t really considered that before, and that was something that, coming from the community, we were completely on board with,” said team member Rhiannon Sinclair.
Keansburg Councilman Tom Foley, on hand to review the final plan, said he was especially happy to see that the plan would reposition the disused Natco Lake as a recreational town center with connecting access to communities on all sides of town.
“It’s a pretty bold plan,” he said. “I hope they win.”
Team members said Natco Lake, which would transition to a salt-water body, and a number of new wetland areas created under the plan would all help reduce Keansburg’s regular flooding issues, as well.
The Sasaki team’s plan also addresses two other types of coastal communities and proposes pilot solutions for each. In Asbury Park, the team proposes a redesigned boardwalk that would act as a self-sustaining dune system while providing new opportunities for recreation and concert space.
To address challenges associated with the state’s barrier islands, the team identified an underutilized, inland tract near Berkeley’s town center and proposed a series of new lodging and tourist attractions that would allow “broader interaction with New Jersey’s extensive pineland landscape.” The area would be connected to the Barnegat Bay via new marinas, a water taxi and an aerial tram system, allowing for seasonal shore access and year-round vacation opportunities.
While the plans contain a number of unique ideas, they also call for more traditional flood-control systems. In the stormrocked community of Union Beach, for example, the Sasaki team proposes building a new “super levee.”
The plans also call for a number of policy changes, including the creation of new preparedness plans for business owners and publicizing the costs associated with living in vulnerable areas.
“It would be a policy effort to make sure those homes are more sustainable and more resilient to surge, and that they are not depleting from the ability of the houses behind them to also be resilient from surge,” Sinclair said. “It’s key to make sure that people know they have the choice to move or the choice to stay.”
Marc Ferzan, appointed by Gov. Chris Christie to manage the storm recovery, said the proposed changes would complement the state’s ongoing recovery initiatives and its desire to rebuild not just for now, but for the future.
“What disaster does is it highlights the vulnerabilities, and if you are doing things the right way, you are learning lessons from those vulnerabilities,” he said. “So we are very excited to see what is coming out of the other side.”
All of the plans can be accessed at www.rebuildbydesign.org. They will be on display at the Liberty Science Center through May 4.