At last, Boston appears to have a plan to protect one of its most important assets from sea level rise with more than sandbags and hope. 

As Steve Adams describes in his story this week, the city’s Green Ribbon Commission has laid out a plan to protect its ocean-facing neighborhoods from flooding using special taxing districts that equitably spread the burden of paying for this infrastructure among all property owners, with an assist from city coffers.  

The Seaport and South Boston will likely be the test case for these “District for Resiliency Improvements,” or DRIs. In part, that’s necessary to fix city officials’ massive error in not requiring Seaport developers to build defenses into the district from the start. There are no excuses for this failure. Climate change and the threat sea level rise poses to Boston have been established scientific fact for so long members of this paper’s editorial board learned about them in elementary school.  

The consequences of this dereliction of duty have been fully evident in recent years, as building owners in this most valuable of commercial districts have had to defend their properties from floods and storms with portable defenses. 

Previous planning efforts, with some refinements by the Green Ribbon Commission, have set out a list of what must be done, and thankfully the Boston Planning & Development Agency is taking its job more seriously this time as it reviews plans for new office/lab towers along the Fort Point Channel. As those properties are developed, a $20 million stopgap, 6-foot-high berm built into those designs will begin the process of defending large swaths of the city further inland from severe storms. 

The new Green Ribbon Commission report offers a roadmap for completing this to-do list, and more importantly money to pay for it – possibly as little as 50 cents per square foot of building area per year. And by grouping the wealthy Seaport together in the same funding districts as big-ticket projects like flood defenses that could protect average residents in neighborhoods like Roxbury and Dorchester, the city can put the immense value developers’ ingenuity has created in the Seaport to use in an equitable fashion.  

The city’s banking and commercial real estate worlds should embrace these plans. Yes, it would impose additional costs during tough economic times as office tower owners look at the rising amount of space on the sublease market with trepidation. But are those costs worth peace of mind that comes with district-wide solutions far stronger than any flood wall? We believe they are. 

Letters to the editor of 300 words or less may be submitted via email at editorial@thewarrengroup.com with the subject line “Letter to the Editor,” or mailed to the offices of The Warren Group. Submission is not a guarantee of publication.  

Boston Takes Step Forward on Climate Defenses

by Banker & Tradesman time to read: 2 min
0