I often make fun of the federal government as operating with what it thinks is an “infinite credit card,” outside and beyond any budget restraints. And thus all problems, real or imaginary, can be solved by dispensing some of the infinite federal loot. In its partial defense, the federal government does have the ability to print money, although that ability too eventually runs into limits.
And then we have New York City. The City has no ability to print money, but nevertheless operates as if there are no constraints on spending. The sky is the limit! Recently I wrote about how the City spends about triple the national average per student on preK-12 education, and more than double the national average per capita on Medicaid. Those are crazy excessive amounts, but at least education and healthcare are bona fide purposes for the spending of resources.
But how about spending huge amounts of money on pure fantasies that accomplish absolutely nothing? Yes, we have that too. For today’s example, how about “climate resiliency”?
Maybe you don’t even know what that is. I’m not sure that I do either. A good summary is that it is a substance-free buzzword that is being used to dispense tens of billions of dollars on consultants and construction projects along the coastline, without any discernible benefits within the lifetimes of anyone around today.
About a year ago, in April 2025, I had a post about a project the City was in the process of building at something called Wagner Park, basically a small lawn area along the water near the Southern tip of Manhattan Island. Wagner Park accounts for about 400 feet of Manhattan waterfront, out of a total of about 32 miles of shoreline for Manhattan (and some 520 miles for New York City as a whole). The City was trucking in vast amounts of dirt in order to raise the level of the park by about 10 feet. The idea, supposedly, is to protect against a rise in the level of the sea that climate doomsayers claim may occur by some time around, say, the year 2100. The cost of the Wagner Park “resiliency” project, as reported in my April 2025 post, was some $300 million.
Well, now it seems that the Wagner Park insanity is metastacizing like a cancer. New and far bigger shoreline-raising projects have now gotten underway both East and West of the relatively small Wagner Park effort. One such project covers about a mile of the waterfront of Battery Park City on the Lower West Side, and another covers 2+ miles of the waterfront at East River Park on the Lower East Side. Steve Cuozzo covers the story in a piece in the New York Post on June 10. Here is his description of the work now getting underway in Battery Park City:
At Le District’s alfresco Battery Park café, customers who previously enjoyed views of the river and the New Jersey skyline now face a chain-link fence and roaring excavation machines. Battery Park City’s beloved Hudson River Esplanade, a treasure of Lower Manhattan, will be closed for years to come as it’s needlessly reconfigured. Its off-limits condition shocks those who loved its airy refuge from the city’s thrum — and appalls nearby residents of this once magnificent neighborhood.
And over in East River Park:
In the now “resilient” segment south of the Williamsburg Bridge, scores of old trees have given way to saplings that might throw shade in a mere 25 years. The mostly level recreation lawns that were favorite gathering grounds for residents of nearby NYCHA housing projects have sprouted hilly, segmented zones mostly too small for easy use.
Cuozzo quotes residents from both the Lower East and West Side areas as being appalled by the endless construction and the desecration of their prior waterfront parks. But then there is Mayor Mamdani, who recently commented on the opening of the Wagner Park project:
The area is “on the front lines of the climate crisis,” [Mamdani] lectured. “With phase one now complete, we are taking a major step toward safeguarding Lower Manhattan . . . from rising seas and stronger storms.”
What “rising seas” and “stronger storms” exactly? Cuozzo correctly points out that the UN itself has recently backed away from its extreme climate doom scenarios. The idea of sudden sea level rise of multiple feet was always ridiculous. Meanwhile, the costs are enormous. This City release from October 2024 puts the cost of the East River Park project at $1.45 billion. In the same release, a guy named Rohit Aggarwala, then Commissioner of the City’s Department of Environmental protection, boasted that the City had “more than a dozen similar projects now underway, from Staten Island to the Rockaways to Red Hook.”
If you are a bureaucrat in New York City, just somehow attach the word “climate” to your budget demand and they’ll give you whatever you ask for. Keep this in mind next time the City comes around looking for another tax increase.
