Sea-Level Rise and Growth Machines in Coastal Cities

Abstract

Climate change, and sea level rise (SLR) in particular, poses new challenges for urban politics. In this paper, we use exploratory case studies of various communities along the Eastern seaboard of the United States, focusing primarily on Boston and secondarily on New York City and Norfolk, to develop hypotheses regarding the behavior of local growth machines (GMs) in response to the threat posed by SLR on local property values. Part of this analysis is a critique of the existing GM literature, which tends to simply assume GM membership and cohesiveness. By contrast, we find a likely but complex relationship between city size (in terms of both population, land, and coastline), city land value, the real and perceived threat of SLR, and GM composition and cohesiveness. We suggest a dynamic tension in GM and city responses to SLR, based on our conjectures that smaller GMs with narrower memberships will be able to act more cohesively with respect to SLR, but also must do so with less resources, and thus may more often choose an adaptation strategy of retreat over investment. By contrast, GMs in larger cities with more valuable land have more resources to respond to the threat of SLR but also represent a more diverse but therefore less cohesive set of proposed strategies, resulting typically in a mix of retreat and investment strategies.

1. Introduction

In June 2018, The Outer Banks Association of Realtors in coastal North Carolina announced Willo Kelly as its new chief executive officer. If ever there was someone who was a key member and chief spokesperson for what might be called an Outer Banks “growth machine”—that is, a coalition devoted to preserving and enhancing local land values for the purposes of profit, or “exchange value” [1]—it is certainly Kelly. As the press release announcing her appointment as CEO described her career,

Kelly served for more than 12 years as the Government Affairs Director for both the Outer Banks Association of REALTORS^® and the Outer Banks Home Builders Association. She was the first hired executive of the Currituck Chamber of Commerce in 1999 and led the organization through tremendous growth in her seven years as President. Kelly is well known, not just in the Outer Banks region, but also on the state and national level as an influential and tireless advocate for fair and accessible property insurance and flood insurance rates, private property rights, and affordable housing.

[2]

Kelly gained some national prominence as the president of NC-20 (described on its website as “an association of members having a common interest in economic development within the twenty coastal… counties of NC” and which has mostly been devoted to fighting state and local regulations [3]), opposing the 2010 assessment of the Science Panel on Coastal Hazards of the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) that sea levels along the state’s coast would likely be 39 inches higher by 2100, making much of the coastline unlivable. As president of NC-20, Kelly led the fight against the effort to use the 2100 CRC estimates for planning purposes (since it would add extensive costs to development) and the fight to suppress the estimates altogether, out of concern that they would depress property sales.

In large part in response to the efforts of NC-20, in 2012 the North Carolina legislature revised the CRC’s authorizing legislation (the chief sponsor was a House representative who was also a realtor), effectively disallowing its use of models showing accelerating future sea-level rise (SLR). The governor elected that same year, Republican Pat McRory, made new appointments to the CRC, which subsequently suppressed its 2100 sea-level estimates and in 2015 produced a new report which found only 6–8 inches of SLR over 30 years, with no estimates beyond that time [4].

Since NC-20’s successful campaign in 2012, the most recent report by the CRC Science Panel, in 2022, estimated SLR on the North Carolina coast to be more than a foot higher in 2050 than 2000 levels [5]. Also in 2022, the Outer Banks experienced a record number of beachfront houses collapsing, a phenomenon that continued into 2024 and which has been connected, at least in the popular press, to climate change and SLR. In a 2022 interview, Kelly once again downplayed the impact of climate change on collapsing houses, noting that the “Outer Banks are undeniably dynamic barrier islands” and that “Nobody is thinking that if you have an oceanfront house that it’s going to be there forever” [6].

Though they did engage with some skeptics and contrarians in response to the 2010 CRC report, neither Kelly nor NC-20 denied the reality of climate change and were quite explicit that their goal was in part to protect property values. Their resistance is thus a relatively pure example of one particular strategy—a regional growth machine adopted in response to the threat SLR posed to property values and development.

Other regional growth machines have responded to climate change information differently. For instance, the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce established a Resilience Committee that readily admitted the challenges SLR posed to its region, stating on its website that “Within 30 years we will very likely experience sea level rise of a foot or more and by the end of the century a rise of five feet or more is predicted.” Miami mayor Thomas Regalado championed a $400 million bond issue, approved by voters in 2017, to invest in new infrastructure such as “anti-flooding pumps, seawall improvements, drainage upgrades and other adaptation projects in the face of sea level rise” [7].

In this article, we explore the factors that determine local or regional growth machine (GM) responses and strategies to the threats SLR poses to property values. SLR is one effect of climate change, and refers to the gradual “increase in the ocean’s surface height relative to the land in a particular location” driven by warmer waters and melting ice sheets and glaciers [8]. This increase can lead to erosion and damage to coastal infrastructure, and make coastal flooding during storms more destructive and extensive. In the coastal cities we discuss here, we view SLR as a sort of “stress test” that may alter GM composition and cohesion, reveal otherwise hidden dynamics of GMs, and which may thus in the process improve upon the GM framework. In doing so, we hope that the GM framework may also provide a useful tool for explaining and perhaps even predicting local policy responses to SLR.

Our discussion proceeds in seven parts. In the first, we briefly explain our choice of three cities that comprise the primary though not exclusive focus of our discussion: Boston, Massachusetts; New York, New York; and Norfolk, Virginia. Second, we provide a critique of the current literature, which we argue often simply assumes the existence of GMs without exploring how and why GMs might vary across cities, both in terms of membership composition, relative cohesion, and strategies. Third, we focus in detail on the case of Boston, and specifically the city’s Wharf District, which provides a vivid example of how the clear threat of SLR altered the composition of the city’s GM and created new frictions among GM members. Fourth, we extend our discussion of GM membership with a brief examination of real estate investment trusts (REITs), which are typically only regarded in the GM literature, if at all, as exacerbating the focus on exchange value that is ostensibly characteristic of GMs. We argue instead that REITs may have variable impacts on GMs that cannot be assumed by the fact that they are financial investment companies. Fifth, we focus on two primary categories of GM adaptation strategies in response to SLR, investment or retreat. Sixth is a brief note on the concept of “climate gentrification” as a possible outcome of a retreat strategy.

In the seventh and final part of the paper, we discuss our major conclusions and suggest areas for further research. Our major conclusions are that there is a likely but complex relationship between city size (in terms of both population, land, and coastline), city land value, the real and perceived threat of SLR, and GM composition and cohesiveness. We suggest a dynamic tension in GM and city responses to SLR, based on our conjectures that smaller GMs with a narrower membership base will be able to act more cohesively with respect to SLR, but also must do so with less resources. By contrast, GMs in larger cities with more valuable land have more resources to respond to the threat of SLR but also have more diverse land portfolios and sets of interests, and therefore less cohesive proposed strategies.

2. Our Exploratory Case Studies: Boston, New York City, and Norfolk

The GM literature is primarily a literature of case studies—indeed, it has most recently spawned a cottage industry of case studies that have sustained the relevance of the GM framework (see [9]) (Figure 1) precisely by suggesting the limits of that framework (see, for instance, [10,11,12,13]). This present article is in some respects no different in that it relies on short, exploratory [14] (ch. 1) case studies to suggest refinements of the GM framework specifically with regard to SLR.

Though we will incorporate various cities discussed in the relevant literature—and we have already introduced one GM that is notably not in a city, but in the Outer Banks, that we will bring up again—our primary focus will be on Boston, and secondarily on New York City and Norfolk, as previously mentioned. As our goal is largely exploratory, we compare and contrast our cities selectively as the evidence warrants. We selected these three cities in a loose approximation of attempting to “hold constant” some variables so that we could look at how others varied from city to city, and what is similar across all three of our cities is that they, much like the Outer Banks, lie along the Eastern seaboard of the United States and thus face roughly the same SLR threat. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [15] estimates that, between 2022 and 2050, SLR will be 1.21–1.64 feet in New York City, 1.15–1.54 feet in Boston, and 1.38–1.87 feet in Norfolk. Using NOAA’s Sea-Level Rise Viewer, Figure 1 shows estimated inundation levels at 2 feet of SLR. Some of the primary impacts of SLR on all of these cities include the loss of coastline and associated infrastructure, increased erosion, saltwater intrusion to groundwater supplies and coastal ecosystems, and greater flooding during storms [16].

Reflecting in part their shared vulnerability to SLR, Norfolk, New York, and Boston were also chosen to be part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities” (100RC) program, which provided funding and support, primarily for resiliency planning and for establishing the position of a chief resilience officer. In addition, Rockefeller partnered with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development in its post-Hurricane Sandy National Disaster Resilience Competition. Among the winners of the competition were New York and Norfolk, awarded funds primarily to pay for coastal resiliency projects including new parks and opening up historic creeks [17].

In other respects that may well be significant from the standpoint of GMs, the three cities look very different. For instance, if GMs are more likely to be a larger presence in cities where land is worth more money, then the fact that Boston and New York’s median values of owner-occupied housing units ($732,100 and $684,900, respectively), median gross rents ($1714 and $1981), and median metropolitan-area listed price per square foot of housing ($523 and $464) are far higher than those in Norfolk (where median owner-occupied units are $254,200, median gross rents are $1188, and median listed price per square foot of housing is $210) suggests the greater potential for GMs in New York and Boston than in Norfolk. Similarly, if homeowners are more likely to pursue use values rather than exchange values and thus be less receptive to GMs, then Norfolk’s higher homeownership rate (44.8%) than in Boston (34.8%) and New York (32.9%) also suggests less potential for GMs in Norfolk [18,19].

And finally, if a city and its metropolitan area is more populous, that reflects a larger housing market and thus more total housing value upon which a GM might grow. And while Boston and New York City tend to look similar in terms of housing value, homeownership, and incomes, in terms of metropolitan area or city population, Boston and Norfolk (with estimated 2023 city populations of 653,833 and 230,930, and metropolitan area populations of 4,919,179 and 1,787,169, respectively) are much closer to one another than the colossus of New York City, with a 2023 estimated city population of 8,258,035, and metropolitan area population of 19,498,249 [20].

3. Climate Change, SLR, and GM Membership: A Literature Review

A fundamental shortcoming in the GM literature is that it largely fails to define GMs in much more than a cursory fashion, most likely due to the typically unstated but relatively obvious and ubiquitous assumption that, because of the ways in which capitalism commodifies both localities and land, growth becomes a structurally inherent interest among local actors. Perhaps the most extreme example is Peterson’s [21] claim that all city residents have an inherent interest in the growth of their own city.

Given the structuralist assumptions in the GM literature, most studies make little effort to demonstrate that there is actually a coalition of city-level actors who consciously come together specifically to encourage growth—or increase “exchange value” through the “intensification of land use” [1] (p. 13). GMs are more typically defined by lists of occupational titles or broad categories of interest, as in Molotch’s [22] (p. 314) original claim that GMs were likely to consist of “property owners and investors in locally oriented financial institutions, … lawyers, syndicators, and realtors”, but also “those who, although not directly involved in land use, have their futures tied to growth of the metropolis as a whole”. Later studies offer similar lists. For instance, Erie, Kogan, and MacKenzie [23] (p. 4) described San Diego’s “once-potent local growth machine, which includes real estate developers, professional sports team owners, the tourist industry, organized labor, public agencies, business groups, and self-interested politicians seeking legacy projects and reelection”. Even more vaguely, Jonas, Gibbs and While [24] define the GMs (or “entrepreneurial regimes”) that they claimed were part of a “new environmental politics of urban development”, simply by reference to such broad categories as “business and political elites in cities across North America and Europe” (p. 2539).

Because GMs are typically only vaguely defined, any form of development that might possibly create profits is often considered a form of GM activity. Thus, for instance, Clement and Elliot [25] examined the impact of GMs on greenhouse gas emissions, and simply assumed that US counties that had relatively large populations, high median incomes, active economies (that is, higher county GDP and industrial employment), and greater government spending, also had GMs (and also produce more emissions).

In the more case-based literature, ostensible GM members are typically mentioned fleetingly and in an ad hoc manner. For instance, Dilworth and Stokes [26], in their study of an attempt to incorporate LEED standards into Philadelphia’s tax abatement program for new construction, identified specific members of what they claimed was an insurgent “green growth machine”, including lawyers, bankers, architects, and engineers. Yet, in identifying the city’s more traditional GM, they identified only one group, the Building Industry Association. Dupuis and Greenberg’s [27] study of the ambitious East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project in Manhattan makes specific mention of various community groups who are ostensibly not part of a GM, but in discussing the actual GM they only make vague reference to “the usual development corporation actors—major actors in nearly every other major New York City development project over the last 50 years” (p. 8) and specific reference to Pace University (which has a campus near the ESCR site), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration—though whether these organizations might actually count as GM members is never explicitly stated. In Jocoy’s [28] history of the Playa Vista planned community in Los Angeles, she explains some of the connections the original developer, Summa Corporation, had to one city councilwoman, members of the California Coastal Commission, state legislators, and the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Director. However, this was a developer-specific coalition and the only apparent connection between it and a more permanent GM is the claim that the councilwoman “had a reputation as a member of Mayor Tom Bradley’s pro-growth coalition” (p. 395), about which nothing else is said.

It is also largely unclear whether city residents might be considered parts of GMs, as growth does come with obvious residential benefits (increased home values, more abundant retail, increased street traffic that deters crime) as well as burdens (potential displacement, less parking), and the actual role of resident groups such as civic or homeowner associations in encouraging or facilitating growth—or the opposite—is unclear at best [29]. The lack of clarity in the relationship between residents and GMs is particularly notable in the gentrification literature, in which there is no clear consensus or evidence as to whether gentrification is driven primarily by demand (that is, higher-income individuals bid up prices in central cities as they respond to larger structural changes—see [30]) or supply, potentially in the form of GM-induced demand [31], or what Bouzarovski, Frankowski, and Herrero [32] (p. 845) have called “a pronounced role for the state in changing the social and material composition of urban districts…” There is also little agreement regarding the consequences of gentrification [33].

A subset of the gentrification literature that looks specifically at “green gentrification” is similarly lacking in clarity about any potential role of GMs [34]. In one case study of Brooklyn, Gould and Lewis [35,36] simply assume that “green gentrification” is supply-driven, “led by the green growth machine—public officials and private investors who appropriate unrevitalized environmental resources (like the waterfront), restore them, develop them, and repackage them for sale to the sustainability class” [36] (p. 12. Italics in original).

Finally, since most studies simply assume that GMs exist in some fashion wherever there is growth, very few are also capable of determining the actual impact of growth machines on city policies. One exception to this, and nearly every other shortcoming we found in the GM literature, is Adua and Lobao’s [37] “large N” empirical study of the impact of GMs on local government policies related to economic development, business attraction, and austerity, in which they defined GMs as local chambers of commerce, “Owners of commercial and industrial real estate, local utility companies, and general businesses that focus on the local market” that local officials ranked as being involved in the county’s economic development and planning processes (p. 477). They find that, the communities (in their case counties) in which GMs participate more in government and are perceived as more influential are more likely to support economic development policies, especially related to new business attraction, and that the influence of chambers of commerce also correlated to increased austerity policies.

4. SLR and GM Membership: The Case of Boston

While large-N studies such as that by Adua and Lobao [37] and Clement and Elliott [25] can find circumstantial evidence of the influence of potential GMs, they also lack the ability to say much about the mechanics of GM operations in specific places, such as the specific actors that might compose a local GM, the venues through which those actors might coordinate their activities, or how a GM would respond to a threat to property values, such as SLR. And as we have discussed, the case study literature, especially that which attempts to link GM activity to environmental issues such as climate change, has largely assumed the existence of GMs without providing much detail as to what they actually are or how they function.

To address this gap in the literature, we first examine the case of Boston, with a particular focus on the city’s Wharf District, a downtown waterfront neighborhood of high value property that includes a variety of tourist attractions, including the New England Aquarium, which sits on the Central Wharf that juts out into the section of Boston Harbor near the mouths of the Charles and Mystic rivers, a location that faces significant risk from SLR. We found that the pressures exerted by the need to address SLR and by green initiatives more generally have the potential to catalyze fundamental transformations to GM composition and cohesiveness, even as they fit into existing developmental trajectories that have shaped GMs.

One of the more consequential developments that has shaped Boston’s GM, especially in the downtown, was the “Big Dig”, the sprawling megaproject that had been discussed since the 1970s but which broke ground officially in 1991 and concluded in 2007. For our purposes here, the most important part of the Big Dig was that which converted an elevated expressway that ran through the downtown near the wharfs—the Central Artery of Interstate 93—into a tunnel, and which was replaced at ground level by a park, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, which officially opened in 2008. The Greenway connected the waterfront to the downtown, thereby creating a new neighborhood, the Wharf District (see [38] (p. 7)).

The Central Artery portion of the Big Dig spawned, among other things, two organizations that ultimately became important for understanding how SLR changed the Boston GM. First, in 1989, 29 companies formed the Central Artery Committee (CAC), the goal of which was to maintain accessibility to the downtown during Big Dig construction, and to make sure that the construction ultimately worked to the benefit of existing downtown interests. CAC membership overlapped with the membership of the earlier Coordinating Committee—known as “the Vault”—that was founded in 1959, also with 29 members, and “considered a shadow government at one point”, but disbanded in 1997 [39]. As Luberoff [40] (p. 6) has found, eight of the original Vault members were also original CAC members. Most notably for our purposes, the representation of real estate management and development companies in the CAC membership was twice that of their representation in Vault membership (twelve versus six, respectively).

In 2007, the CAC became A Better City (ABC) and expanded its role to cover “large infrastructure projects citywide” [41] and has become a more general business advocacy organization with a notable focus on real estate, as reflected in the companies represented among its 126-member board of directors. Notably, while the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce was an original CAC member, it no longer has obvious representation on ABC, suggesting that as ABC expanded its scope it became a competitor organization to the Chamber [42].

A second organization that emerged from the Central Artery conversion was the Wharf District Task Force (WDTF), created in 2002 to help with the emergence of the Wharf District neighborhood. In 2010, the WDTF became the permanent nonprofit Wharf District Council (WDC), the mission of which is to represent the interests of “large and small businesses, residential condominium associations, and nonprofit institutions” in the neighborhood [43,44]. The 24 members of the WDC board of directors reflect what is arguably a mix of use and exchange values, though weighted toward exchange value, as it includes representatives from six apartment or condominium buildings, one combined hotel and condominium, three additional hotels, two real estate development companies and one real estate investment trust (REIT), two restaurant owners, two tour companies (trollies and harbor cruises), one law firm, a cannabis dispensary, the Greenway park conservancy, Fanueil Hall Marketplace, the New England Aquarium, and ABC. Given the origins of ABC, it is possibly not surprising but nonetheless worth noting that seven companies, or 29 percent of the companies represented on the WDC board, are also represented on the ABC board (

Table 1. Companies with interlocking memberships on ABC, GRC, and WDC.

Company	A Better City	Green Ribbon Commission	Wharf District Council
New England Aquarium	X	X	X
Boston Harbor City Cruises	X		X
Boston Marriott Long Wharf	X		X
Intercontinental Hotel & Residences	X		X
Chiofaro Company	X		X
Related Beal	X		X
Margulies Perruzzi *	X		X
BXP		X	X
Arup	X	X
AvalonBay Communities	X	X
Bank of America	X	X
Beacon Capital Partners	X	X
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts	X	X
Boston Children’s Hospital	X	X
Boston Medical Center	X	X
Boston University	X	X
Equity Residential	X	X
Harvard University	X	X
MIT	X	X
Mass General Brigham	X	X
National Grid	X	X
Nutter McClennen & Fish	X	X
State Street Corporation	X	X
Turner Construction	X	X
University of Massachusetts Boston	X	X
Vertex Pharmaceuticals	X	X
Vicinity Energy	X	X

Note: “X” represents a board member on ABC, GRC, or WDC who has an institutional affiliation with a company in the first column. * Marc Margulies is not a board member, but president, of the WDC. Sources: ABC 2024; GRC 2024; WDC 2024.

), and several other ABC board members represent companies with land interests in the Seaport District, just south of the Wharf District.

In the same year that WDC was established, 2010, Boston Mayor Thomas Mennino established the Boston Climate Action Leadership Committee (CALC) and the Community Advisory Committee, known collectively as “The Committees”. The CALC was established to receive the input and support of various powerful constituents for the city’s climate mitigation and adaptation planning, while the Community Advisory Committee was designed for broader residential support of use value constituents. This division was relatively obvious in the Committees’ 2010 report, Sparking Boston’s Climate Revolution [45], in which the 22 listed CALC members are identified by the companies for which they worked, while the 36 Community Advisory Committee members are identified by the neighborhoods in which they live.

The CALC was clearly both a GM- and sustainability-oriented group; in addition to organizations such as the Climate Action Network and Union of Concerned Scientists, the companies represented in its membership included the Staples office supplies company (headquartered in nearby Framingham), Boston Properties (one of the largest REITs in the country), the Boston Building Trades Council, the owner of a major hotel near the city’s airport, an energy intelligence and information firm, a sustainability consulting firm, a sustainability-focused venture capital firm, Harvard University, Northeastern University, Boston Architectural College, the New England Aquarium, and ABC [45]. Moreover, the CALC cochair was James Hunt, the city’s chief of environmental and energy services, who had been working closely with major landowners and developers in developing a “green zoning code” that required “projects larger than 50,000 square feet to undertake specific measures to conserve energy and reduce environmental impacts” [46].

An even more GM-focused group connected to the city’s climate initiatives is the Green Ribbon Commission (GRC), a limited-membership group of executives also created in 2010 at the behest of Mayor Menino, composed of representatives of industries typical of a chamber of commerce, including real estate, healthcare, insurance, utilities, higher education, law, government, architecture, and construction. Unlike the CALC, the GRC is a permanent organization structured around working groups, including one on commercial real estate, through which it has a partnership with ABC, to provide support around the city’s “resilient design strategies” [47] (see also [38] (pp. 9–10)). As of November 2024, 19 of the 34 organizations with representation on the GRC also have representatives on the ABC board (Table 1).

In 2015, the GRC, in partnership with the city, and with funding provided by the Boston-based Barr Foundation, launched the Climate Ready Boston project, at the core of which was the Boston Research Advisory Group (BRAG), a research team led by faculty and staff from University of Massachusetts Boston, but with faculty from other schools, most notably Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Northeastern University [48].

The first BRAG report, released in 2016, estimated a SLR of between 2.5 and 7.4 feet between 2000 and 2100, and the 2022 update to the original report estimated that, in the most extreme case, 100-year flood events would occur annually by 2100, and by 2050, “Boston may experience flooding that lasts for at least an hour a day for half of the days of the year” [49]. These estimates were of significant enough concern to the WDC that in 2019 it established the WDC Climate Resilience Task Force, a “public/private partnership” that was to develop a plan for how the district would adapt to 2070 SLR estimates, focusing in particular on a flood retention wall [50].

The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce (GBCoC) was largely uninvolved in any of the city’s resiliency or adaptation initiatives. In 2019, the Chamber listed “climate readiness” as the last of its public policy priorities, but there was no additional information or evidence of any work on SLR or other climate issues except for an “energy and sustainability leadership council”, chaired by the director of sustainability for Bentley University, which appeared to be largely inactive. By 2024, the GBCoC listed “climate and energy” as one of its standing policy focus areas, where its positions tend to suggest balancing the interests of businesses against the climate mitigation policies of the city and state governments; its website notes, for instance, that “The Commonwealth has set ambitious statewide carbon reduction requirements, but there are many outstanding questions about how individuals and businesses can actually achieve those reductions in practice” [51].

A GM-focused role in climate resilience has thus evidently bypassed the GBCoC and been taken on by newer interlocking organizations such as ABC and the GRC, and more localized groups focused on high-value and high-risk land such as the WDC (Table 1). At least some cursory evidence suggests a very different GM membership dynamic with respect to sustainability in New York City than Boston. For instance, the Partnership for New York City, an elite business organization similar to Boston’s Vault, formed the nonprofit Campaign for New York’s Future (CNYF), to support the city’s first sustainability plan, PlaNYC, in 2007. CNYF was thus an organization similar to Boston’s GRC or CALC, but with a notably different membership that included such organizations as the New York City Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Manhattan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, National Supermarkets Association, and Chinese Chamber of Commerce of New York, among others [52]. There were no similar chamber-like organizations represented in Boston’s GRC or CALC.

If the ABC represents a new organizational vehicle for at least a portion of the Boston GM that evolved out of the Big Dig megaproject, the partnership between ABC and the GRC indicates that this portion of the GM is focused in particular on issues around resilience, most notably in the face of SLR. This also suggests that the traditional focus in the GM literature on organizations such as chambers of commerce may very well not capture how GMs have responded and evolved so as to address threats such as SLR.

A focus on SLR further suggests that responding to such a threat highlights the roles of organizations not typically considered as part of GMs. The first are universities, and most notably in the case of Boston, those universities that had been most involved in the 2016 BRAG report: University of Massachusetts Boston, MIT, Harvard University, and Boston University, are all represented on both the ABC and GRC boards, and Northeastern University is represented on the GRC board. As large organizations with numerous and often diverse interests and typically extensive land ownership, colleges and universities are perhaps not surprisingly GM members—and indeed, some GM-related literature does discuss universities (see, for instance, [53]), especially in the context of the “eds and meds” sector [54]. Yet what is surprising is that none of the colleges or universities that have representatives on either ABC, GRC, or both, are member organizations of the GBCoC, suggesting that they have chosen to be part of chamber-like organizations that are focused on issues relating more specifically to climate change and SLR.

A second type of organization hardly ever discussed in the GM literature, but which has a notable presence in the Boston GM, is architecture firms. Indeed, it was an architect and urban planner, Antonio DiMambro, who proposed what was probably the earliest climate adaptation plan for Boston, in 1988—a topic discussed in a later section. More recently, Arup, which describes itself as a “global collective of designers, engineers and technical experts”, has a Boston-based practice with representatives on the ABC and GRC. Notably, Arup was chosen by the City of Boston to lead one of the main sections of the “carbon free Boston” portion of the city’s 2019 update to its climate action plan [55], and more recently was one of the consultants for the WDC’s climate resilience plan, in which it recommended “enacting a new 1.5-mile-long protective wall following the results of a new study calling for an $877 million flood barrier protecting the central waterfront of Downtown Boston” [56]. Notably, none of the architecture firms involved in ABC, GRC, or WDC were involved in a report from Sustainable Solutions Lab at University of Massachusetts Boston, which found that “shore-based systems” were less costly and would be equally as effective as a barrier wall (though the report was sponsored by the GRC and supported by the Barr Foundation) [57].

Other architecture firms with representation on the ABC board are CBT Architects, Sasaki, STA Design, Perkins & Will, and Marc Margulies, of Margulies and Perruzzi Architects, who has been WDC president since 2015 [44]. Notably as well, Sasaki was hired for most of the design work related to the 2016 BRAG report and Climate Ready Boston [58]. Other companies with ABC board representation have architecture practices that are not part of their main business, such as the vertically integrated development and real estate company WS Development. CBT Architects in particular has carried out extensive work in and around the Wharf District; and WS, CBT, and Sasaki have board representatives on another organization, Boston Harbor Now (BHN), which is involved in the cleanup, development, and co-management of the city harbor.

The third and possibly most unexpected member of the Boston GM is the New England Aquarium, one of the most prominent organizations in the Wharf District, which attracts more than 1.3 million visitors each year, and which has board representatives on ABC, GRC, and WDC, and which the Boston Globe noted in 2017 was becoming one of the “increasingly influential players in the world of waterfront development” [59], in large part because of a feud in which it found itself with a major Boston developer and one of the original CAC members from 1989, the Chiofaro Company, run by Donald Chiofaro, who also serves on the WDC board, is a member of the WDC Climate Resilience Task Force management team, and on the executive committee of the ABC board.

In neglecting to discuss much of the details of GM membership, the GM literature tacitly assumes that membership to be cohesive around the consensus of the intensification of land use. Yet the feud between Chiofaro and the Aquarium suggests the instability and potential lack of cohesion of Boston’s resilience-based GM as members come into conflict over land use decisions.

In 2007, Chiofaro purchased a large parking garage in the Wharf District and proposed to replace it with a development that included a 780-foot tower and 1.5 million square feet of space that “was to include a 200-room hotel and 100 condominiums”. The project faced a “a tidal wave of criticism” and was vehemently opposed by Mayor Mennino. Under a new and more receptive mayor (Marty Walsh) in 2014, the city and WDC, among other stakeholders, began the process for creating a new harbor master plan, for which Chiofaro proposed a scaled-down though still very large (1.3 million square feet) project [60].

In 2015, the Aquarium formally objected to the Chiofaro development plan, arguing that “construction could drive visitors away and harm the health of marine animals” [61]. In fact, the Aquarium’s objection may have been a bargaining chip to enlist the developer in its own expansion plans. The Aquarium had contracted with CBT Architects to develop a “Blueway” that included a new park stretching from the Greenway to the waterfront and which would “see the aquarium building’s size grow significantly in phases over the next decade or so as public amenities are added: a promenade, two restaurants, a man-made island” [62]. The plan also required that “Chiofaro would need to concentrate all of the public open space on his site in one spot” [61].

In 2017, the Boston Planning and Development Agency approved a new municipal harbor plan that allowed for Chiofaro’s project [63], yet the following year the Aquarium hired a new and more activist CEO who revised the Blueway plan and joined in another formal objection to the overall harbor development plan, arguing in court that it was improperly approved by the city. In 2021, after Walsh resigned the mayoralty to serve as secretary of the US Department of Labor, acting mayor Kim Janey sought to veto the plan but was blocked and thus worked with the city council to amend it, arguing that the 2017 plan did not reflect “the new realities of climate change” and “does not take into account the moment of renewed civil rights and racial equity” (quoted in [64]). In 2022, the state Supreme Judicial Court upheld the decision nullifying the plan, and the new mayor, Michelle Wu, signaled her dissatisfaction with it, focusing instead on the East Harbor [65].

And thus, Wharf District development and resiliency planning currently stand largely at an impasse, though there is significant planning and work being carried out by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and through a variety of private developers throughout the harbor. Yet, the pandemic has slowed investments in commercial real estate, and with so much resiliency planning dependent on that investment, it has also slowed the response to SLR.

5. GMs and the Financialization of Real Estate: The Case of REITs

One notable aspect of many of the real estate companies involved in any of the sustainability- and resilience-based business organizations in Boston—for instance, BXP, Boston Properties, AvalonBay Communities, and Beacon Capital Partners—is that they are real estate investment trusts (REITs), publicly traded companies that have existed in the United States since 1960, investing in income-generating real estate, and then selling securities based on that income. There are approximately 1100 REITs operating in the United States, approximately 225 of which are traded on major stock exchanges, with “a combined equity market capitalization of more than $1 trillion” [66].

As Hansen has eloquently described it, REITs

revolutionized the market for investment in commercial property in a number of ways. It is possible to buy and sell properties in smaller parts, which facilitate new types of investments. REITs open up for borderless investment in commercial property, radically facilitating the rescaling of a traditionally localized market. While REITs clearly contribute to the financial fluidity of otherwise fixed capital, they are unable to change the localized character of the fixed capital they liquefy.

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As publicly traded companies that open up real estate markets to broader investment, REITs nationalize and globalize the concern of maximizing the local exchange value of land, ostensibly further diminishing any concern with residential use value. As Fainstain [68] (p. 1504) noted in a summary of a special issue of Urban Studies devoted to the financialization of real estate markets, REITs and similar vehicles “allow financial specialists to make calculations based on rate of return without necessarily having any particular knowledge of the location of buildings or infrastructure”.

Thus, the GM literature typically treats REITs as part of the globalization and financialization of real estate, which ostensibly exacerbates the exploitative and predatory characteristics of GMs. Yet even a cursory examination of REITs and their interests in a specific city suggests that their behaviors, especially with respect to SLR threats in that city, may well be variable and contingent, and can hardly be collapsed into easy formulations that they are somehow less concerned about a given location simply by virtue of being REITs.

For instance, in the case of Boston, the presence of so many REITs on the boards of so many local business organizations suggests that many of them do indeed have an interest and concern in the specific location of specific buildings and infrastructure—they are, after all, investments—and even more so, especially with respect to the impact of climate change and SLR, to the communities of which those buildings and infrastructure are a part. As the vice president of corporate responsibility and energy management of AvalonBay Communities noted in 2021, “Some cities are making significant investments in infrastructure to manage climate risk, and there is real opportunity to invest in those markets … there is also an opportunity to help make cities more resilient and support investments in infrastructure” [69].

It is notable as well that, when Mayor Menino’s “energy czar” James Hunt left the city in 2012, he was quickly replaced by someone who had previously worked at the Boston Properties REIT [46]. Indeed, Boston Properties, which also has significant investments in New York City, is known nationally as a leader in resilience and adaptation. As Ben Myers, Boston Properties’ sustainability director, was quoted in REIT Magazine, “there is compelling evidence supporting the case for proactively adapting for a changing climate. We should anticipate the risks associated with sea level rise, severe storms, and heat. We need to be prepared to manage the impacts of these events” [70].

As companies that typically have to answer to sophisticated investors, we would expect REITs themselves to be more sophisticated and have different incentives than local GMs, and thus to be more aware of the extent to which SLR threatens individual real estate markets. For instance, in a 2017 interview in REIT Magazine (a publication of the National Association of REITs), Beth Ritchman, an investment manager for the highly influential California Public Employees’ Retirement System, noted with regard to evaluating the climate risks to property investments that “I don’t think there’s currently a great tool for investors yet. My dream tool would be a ZIP code scenario analysis showing the physical risk, resiliency of the surrounding infrastructure, and estimating climate change related tax and insurance risks for a particular asset or portfolio” [71].

Two years later, following a report by the climate risk consulting firm Four Twenty Seven [72] and the real estate technology firm Geophy, which scored REITs worldwide on their exposure to SLR risk, REIT Magazine covered attempts by REITs to evaluate the climate risks to their assets. The article focused most notably on how the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark—an organization founded by pension funds that assesses sustainability for the real assets industry—has included resilience in its assessments; and the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, a Bloomberg-led effort that provides guidance on how to report the climate risks of investments. Notably, the article described climate change as both a challenge and an opportunity. As the article notes, “resiliency can be perceived as a liability, but also a chance for REITs to differentiate themselves” [70].

6. GM Strategies in the Face of SLR: Investment or Retreat

Returning to the case of the Outer Banks, the strategy of suppressing information about the potential impacts of SLR, and Willo Kelly’s later comments that no one expects oceanfront properties to last forever, reflect a strategy of inaction and thus effectively a strategy of disinvestment or retreat. By contrast, the proposal in Boston by Arup and the WDC to invest nearly $1 billion in a barrier to prevent flooding, or the $400 million bond issue approved by Miami voters in 2017, reflect the distinctly different strategy of investing in infrastructure so as to avoid retreat. Brief comparisons of Boston, New York City, and Norfolk, among other places, suggests that GMs are often defined by the variable weight of arguments in favor of investment or retreat, and the practical financial challenges of investment, which further define the nature of specific cities’ GMs.

Both investment and retreat are adaptation strategies, which the 2023 Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities”. By contrast, mitigation strategies seek to “reduce emissions or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases” [73] (pp. 120, 126), as many city sustainability plans attempt to do. In many instances, mitigation strategies are simultaneously adaptation strategies, and vice versa—such as, for instance, green infrastructure that reduces stormwater runoff and flooding but which also absorbs greenhouse gases. For our purposes, however, both investment and retreat can be considered adaptation strategies regardless of their mitigation effects.

To return to the case of Boston, there is an obvious preponderance of investment strategies, one possible explanation for which may be the possibly uniquely outsized role of architects in the city’s GM. As previously noted, the first SLR-related investment strategy was proposed in 1988 by architect and urban planner Antonio DiMambro, who won a Boston Society of Architects competition by proposing to remove Logan Airport out of Boston Bay and building “a tidal surge barrier, reconfigured harbor facility, transit line, highway, reclaimed land, and industrial, commercial, and residential development” [74] (p. 27).

DiMambro followed up that plan with fellow architect Hubert Murray in a 2010 article in ArchitectureBoston (a journal of the Boston Society of Architects, the city’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects) which, as one reporter in the Boston Globe said, was “widely discussed” [75]. The article noted that by 2050, SLR in Boston has been projected to create $409–460 billion “exposed risk” of “property damage and consequential loss”. Though they offered little in the way of any new proposals and largely relied on DiMambro’s 1988 plan, they also offered an eloquent formulation of the city’s choices regarding SLR that neatly encapsulates the strategies of investment or retreat:

There are two choices before us as a city and as a country: to do nothing (or too little, too late); or to do what has to be done, and fast…consider the do-nothing or “proceed cautiously” approach. Absent government intervention, decisions will be left to individuals and corporations. Some may choose to ignore the warnings, some may take adaptive measures, and others may choose to move inland out of trouble. And some, the poor, will have no choice at all except to bear witness to a generation of disinvestment followed by a catastrophic failure of the infrastructure. In other words, to do nothing is to make an undemocratic and unjust choice. Every man for himself and let the devil take the hindmost is not a strategy—it would be an abdication of leadership and social justice.

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Thus, the author of Boston’s earliest coastal adaptation plan continued to promote that plan more than twenty years later, in an influential article in which he and his coauthor framed climate adaptation in terms of either making greater investments or abdicating social responsibility.

In 2018, Boston architects Peter Papesch, Franziska Amacher, and Vernon Woodworth [76] expanded on Murray and DiMambro [74] to propose an even more ambitious “14-mile dike barrier between the shoulder highlands of Cohasset and Swampscott” that they estimated would cost $30–50 billion—far more than the Arup barrier plan, but similar in that all proposed significant investments would be made by architects and engineers.

The previously discussed 2018 Sustainable Solutions Lab report recommending on-shore solutions rather than barriers, and the city’s 2016 Climate Ready Boston plan, are more modest proposals for investment. Climate Ready Boston, for instance, largely followed the soft adaptation model of “Living with Water” without large-scale barriers and dikes, but intended to create amenities in the process of adapting the city to climate change, through the “multiple benefits” approach. As the report notes, “Flood barriers that also provide recreational open space, developable land, or upgraded roadways represent examples of multiple benefit solutions” [48] (p. 18).

At the same time, there have been some marginal discussions about the ultimate need for coastal retreat and relocation. For instance, Julie Wormser, former deputy director at the Mystic River Watershed Association (MRWA) who is now chief climate officer for the City of Cambridge, wrote in the local press during her time at MRWA that investments would be needed to “implement major civil engineering projects across a broad region and hundreds of property ownerships”, also acknowledging that “We will need to develop financial mechanisms for transferring real estate value away from the coastline without devastating either real estate values or Boston’s tax base” [77].

Possibly even more so than Boston, New York City has been a leader among cities in responding to climate change, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation, yet surprisingly there is more evidence of retreat strategies in New York than in Boston. Under Mayor Bloomberg—a businessman who was certainly an ally of developers and of growth—the city developed PlaNYC, released in 2007. PlaNYC anticipated large-scale development and growth, notably planning for a city that would have 900,000 more people in it by 2030. More so than similar documents produced by other cities at the same time, such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago, PlaNYC put climate change at the very center of its efforts, not only with typically ambitious mitigation plans (a 30% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030), but also with a climate adaptation plan—a relatively uncommon addition at that time. The adaptation plan called for the creation of an intergovernmental task force charged with protecting the city’s critical infrastructure systems (this became the New York City Panel on Climate Change, created in 2008), developing “site specific strategies” for vulnerable neighborhoods, and launching a citywide adaptation planning process.

Even prior to Hurricane Sandy, New York City at least considered the feasibility of retreating from shorelines as a strategy for confronting the threat of SLR. The Department of City Planning’s comprehensive waterfront plan, Vision 2020, was released in March 2011, and included discussion of three possible strategies in relation to climate change: “retreat, accommodation, and protection”. Of these three, the report evaluated retreat as largely unfeasible, for several reasons, namely that “It could displace residents and neighborhood institutions, disrupt transportation and business activity, and impede the city’s achievement of its PlaNYC goals for sustainable, dense development to accommodate a growing population. The city’s vast infrastructure—including transit and sewer systems—cannot be moved to higher ground” [78]. The actual recommended strategies focused primarily on planning, outreach, and possible suggestions regarding regulatory changes that would require more resilient building (pp. 112–113).

After Hurricane Sandy—which caused an estimated $19 billion worth of damage to the city—a retreat policy was in fact implemented in the case of two of the most damaged neighborhoods in Staten Island, Ocean Breeze and Oakwood Beach, which became eligible for a buyback program through the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery. Under the program, homeowners in the two areas could sell their homes to the state for a small percentage over its pre-storm value, and the state then left the homes to return to nature, thereby hopefully rejuvenating what had previously been marshlands so that they could serve as future storm buffers. One commentator claimed the program had “mixed results” [79] (p. 139) and a more recent report described Ocean Breeze as “mostly empty, but complicating matters are the residents who refuse to leave. In Oakwood Beach, where most of the land is going back to nature, remaining residents struggle with lack of trash pickup and crumbling roads” [80].

In 2013, Mayor Bloomberg, at the unveiling of a city report regarding the impact of Sandy, proclaimed that “As New Yorkers, we cannot and will not abandon our waterfront. It’s one of our greatest assets. We must protect it, not retreat from it…” (quoted in [81]). Yet the very fact that the mayor felt compelled to address the issue of retreat suggests that it had gained more salience as a strategy after the superstorm. Indeed, even a boosterish business website such as The Bridge—which describes itself as focusing on “the breakthrough companies, entrepreneurs and trends that have made Brooklyn a worldwide brand and a growing economic center” published an article that described the future of one of the borough’s neighborhoods as follows:

The truth is that with the seas around New York pegged to rise by several feet by the end of the century, there may be no truly long-term future for waterfront neighborhoods like Red Hook—at least, no future that resembles the present. “The only answer is going to be to plan for the inevitable on sea-level rise, and that could mean retreat from the shoreline”, says Nicolas Coch, a coastal geology expert at Queens College in New York. “But no one wants to think about that”.

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And the New York Building Congress (NYBC)—a “membership association” with “550 constituent organizations” and which broadly promotes the interests of the “contractors, architects, engineers, unions, real estate managers, developers, and owners who comprise the building community” [83]—in 2017, released a set of recommendations that included coastal protection but which also clearly indicated at least some level of strategic retreat. More specifically, NYBC recommended establishing three zones for development: Highly populated and high-value coastal “protection zones” where investments in adaptation technologies made economic sense; less populated and lower-value “prevention zones” where development should be discouraged; and “promotion zones” outside of the flood plain areas, where development should be encouraged. Property owners in the prevention zones would be provided transferable development rights (TDRs), so that their land would be made profitable by virtue of the fact that they could sell the TDRs for development in the promotion zones [84].

In suggesting retreat as a viable SLR strategy in New York, at least some select business groups and trade associations are clearly at odds with the thinking of the city, reflected not just in Vision 2020 and Mayor Bloomberg’s announcements, but also in Mayor de Blasio’s OneNYC 2050 plan, which focuses on recommendations for more planning, new design guidelines for making buildings and infrastructure more resilient, and for making flood insurance more readily available [85].

In comparison to Boston and New York, Norfolk is a less populous and more thoroughly middle-class community with a higher homeownership rate, lower median housing price, and lower median family incomes. It is also somewhat unique for at least two reasons. First, Norfolk is “sinking into the ocean faster than any other place on the East Coast due to land subsidence and rising seas”. Second, the city is “home to 18 military bases, shipyards and military facilities, including Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval base”. As a result, it most likely receives more federal funding for infrastructure investments that improve climate resiliency [86], including a $2.6 million US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) project that includes “storm-surge barriers, nearly nine miles of floodwalls and levees, 11 tide gates, and ten pump stations, along with a series of nonstructural projects that include home elevations, basement fills, commercial floodproofing, oyster reefs and living shorelines” [87].

Thus, as a city whose primary anchor industry is the US military, much of the investment in infrastructure to protect against SLR can hardly be attributed to a local GM—and the large presence of the miliary in Norfolk may inhibit the establishment of a local GM. In addition, as compared to Boston or New York, there is less money to be made in real estate in Norfolk, the major anchor institutions are ostensibly less locally growth-oriented, and the city government has fewer resources.

We would expect a relatively weak GM and thus a different response to the city’s very real problems with SLR. Indeed, despite the ostensibly greater relative investment of the federal government in resilience efforts in the city, Norfolk still faces substantial challenges. The USACE project is still just a plan, and one-third of it would have to be paid for by someone other than the federal government. The city’s own plan for a resilience infrastructure project—“new flood gates, higher roads and a retooled storm water system”—was estimated at $1 billion, or slightly less than the city’s entire annual operating budget (by comparison, Boston’s budget is approximately $3 billion and New York City’s, $86 billion). And as one Norfolk councilwoman put it. “When we’re talking about floodgates and building bulkheads, then you’re talking about the big bucks that even the feds don’t have. And then you’re competing with New York, Miami—even Hampton” [88].

Possibly as a result of its relatively weak fiscal capacity, retreat figured relatively prominently in the City of Norfolk’s initial strategic plan for confronting SLR. As acknowledged in the city’s long-term planning document, Vision 2100, “Norfolk’s planning and resilience staff had become mired in a singular challenge—faced with far too limited resources to harden all of its 144 miles of coastline against the threat of sea level rise, how could the City determine which of its many stable, well-kept coastal neighborhoods were to be ‘protected’ and which the City would ‘retreat’ from” [89].

Funding from the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100RC program, and the NDRC competition, provided an opportunity for greater public engagement, through which the retreat strategy was qualified, if not entirely eliminated, for one that was ultimately more similar to that suggested by the New York Building Congress, though with no mention of TDRs. Namely, the city should engage in a strategy of planning for greater density in underutilized areas at higher elevations—in other words, a relocation strategy, the showpiece of which is the transformation of the “St. Paul’s quadrant of the city”, a relatively poor area that includes three housing projects. The plan is to demolish two of the projects and to transform the area into “mixed-income” with more green space in the low-lying areas as a flood buffer, and to include more commercial spaces in the area as well. The displaced public housing residents will receive new spaces in public housing elsewhere in the city, or other assistance such as help toward homeownership or housing vouchers.

As the final report on the 100RC program notes of Norfolk’s plan, St. Paul’s will be transformed into a “flood-resilient, mixed-income community… expected to attract pioneering research and technology firms to provide employment opportunities for Norfolk residents of all income levels” [17]. This is quite clearly a strategy of at least partial retreat and relocation, and St. Paul’s was no doubt selected because it was low elevation and thus prone to flooding, but also because it was relatively poor, with low-value land and public housing, which is relatively easier for the city to deal with since it is city-owned and thus does not require takings or buy-outs. It is also a land clearance and redevelopment project, where the city hopes to use resilience as a means of increasing land value and attracting residents and businesses that will ostensibly contribute more in taxes. In short, retreat and relocation are being used as a classic GM strategy in Norfolk.

7. A Brief Note on “Climate Gentrification”

Finally, with respect to the question of investment or retreat in the face of SLR, one potential implication of a retreat strategy is “climate gentrification”—that is, gentrification caused by relatively affluent people retreating to less affluent areas less threatened by SLR and thus bidding up the price of housing in those areas. As Gould and Lewis [36] have suggested, through a case study of what they called a “green growth coalition” in Brooklyn, “There are essentially two ways to respond to coastal sea level rise: retreat or structurally mitigate. In markets that are ‘cooler’ and less dense, retreat and the resulting climate gentrification is likely to occur. But in ‘hot’, dense markets that are bound by water, structural mitigation makes market sense due to high and growing economic demand and geographically limited supply” (p. 13).

Whether it is in fact the case that such residential retreat actually causes gentrification is unclear. There is, first of all, just as much evidence that relatively affluent people have been moving into areas more threatened by SLR. For instance, even Gould and Lewis [36] note of gentrification and development around Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, that “in New York City, a hot real estate market surrounded by water, we still see the demand for waterfront property trumping concerns over rising sea levels and coastal flooding” (p. 13). And in New Orleans, Van Holm and Wyczalkowski [90] found that it was those neighborhoods most affected by Hurricane Katrina that were most likely to gentrify. Second, other authors have argued that “green gentrification” is not caused by a retreat from SLR, but rather by the installation of green amenities not necessarily related to SLR, such as parks, increased tree plantings, or energy-efficient buildings (see, for instance, [91]).

Regardless, there is some minimal evidence for climate gentrification in Miami, namely Keenan, Hill, and Gumber’s [92] finding that single-family homes at higher elevations in Miami–Dade County have appreciated in value at slightly higher rates than homes at lower elevations. Despite the minimal evidence for climate gentrification, it became a large enough issue in Miami that the city council passed a resolution to investigate the issue. There is little evidence that climate gentrification has gained the same political salience elsewhere.

8. Discussion

Regarding our claim that the threat of SLR may change the composition and cohesion of a GM, the most obvious shortcoming of our analysis is the extent to which our primary case of Boston and its Wharf District can be generalized to other cities. In many respects the Wharf District is unique, not least in terms of the relative value of property and the threat from SLR in the neighborhood, but also as a downtown tourist destination that includes unique institutions such as the New England Aquarium.

In short, our case study approach leaves us asking whether the shift in GM membership evident in Boston reflects something specific about Boston, or whether similar shifts in membership would be evident in other cities. This is true both in terms of characteristics that are potentially unique to Boston—for instance, the notable presence of architecture firms in adaptive investment strategies may well be related to the unusually high number of architecture and urban planning programs in the region’s many universities—but also unique critical junctures in the history of the city that created distinct developmental paths for growth coalitions, such as the Big Dig—or, in the case of New York City and specifically with regard to climate change and SLR—Hurricane Sandy.

Yet, for our purposes here, the actual composition of Boston’s GM is less important than the fact that GM membership appears to have changed as it adjusted to respond to climate change and SLR—a change that may well be reflected in other cities. The question then becomes: what constitutes evidence of a shift in GM membership? The evidence that we have relied on here is primarily membership in business-oriented organizations, and more specifically differences in the membership composition of groups that have emerged to address issues of sustainability and climate adaptation, including SLR. A further refinement for future research would be to more systematically identify all GM-related groups across multiple cities, clarify how specifically each group qualifies as being GM-related, and then identify whether and how those groups have addressed climate change, sustainability, resilience, and SLR—all toward creating consistent indices through which cities and urban areas can be compared to one another.

The case of Boston suggests one important developmental dynamic in GM response to SLR, namely that such a response, insofar as it is embodied in a shift in GM membership, occurs more through the establishment of new business groups rather than in shifting membership in existing groups. This may well be the case in New York City as well, based at least on the case of the Campaign for New York’s Future. Whether this is true for Norfolk is, based on our admittedly limited evidence, unclear, but given the very different nature of the stakeholders in Norfolk—most notably the US military—it seems less likely. Indeed, given what appears to be the predominance of the US military in the response to SLR in Norfolk, the city’s relatively high homeownership rate, and the fact that much of the regional tourist trade is captured by neighboring Virginia Beach, it remains an open question as to whether or not there is in fact anything there that would qualify in Norfolk as a GM.

Norfolk may thus serve as a limiting case of GM cohesion in the sense that the SLR response is limited to a small number of large organizations and thus highly cohesive. What the city suggests, in other words, is a hypothesis that, the more limited the GM membership, the more cohesive the GM response to SLR. This is based in part on the intuition that a broader GM will include a greater variety of interests and thus be less cohesive, as suggested by both the conflict between the Aquarium and the Chiofaro Company in Boston, and also by the relatively cohesive embrace of the retreat strategy in the Outer Banks, which is likely defined by a GM membership narrowly focused around short term vacation rentals.

Much like the question of shifting GM membership in response to SLR, the question of GM cohesion requires further refinement. One area for further research would be a more systematic collection of evidence of conflicts over land use and development between GM members, such as we provided in the case of the New England Aquarium and the Chiofaro Company, where those conflicts arose out of planning for an SLR response, or where SLR was leveraged either for or against one or more projects. A second step would be to somehow categorize such conflicts as a means of making consistent comparisons across cities.

Regarding our second claim, that organizations such as REITs may be important GM members with respect especially to any city-based SLR response, despite more typically being treated as entities that operate beyond the scope of local GMs, our admittedly limited analysis suggests two avenues for further research. First is the more systematic categorization of organizations similar to REITs. This would most likely include national and international organizations that have the capacity to provide sophisticated and objective evaluations of SLR impacts on specific areas, yet which often also have local chapters, such as the National Association of Realtors and the Urban Land Institute; companies that provide home and property insurance; online real estate marketplaces such as Zillow and Redfin; foundations such as Rockefeller; and federal agencies, most notably the USACE, which plays a critical role in resilience planning in Boston, Norfolk, and New York City.

Operating as they do nationally, organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the USACE play a crucial redistributive role that is often beyond the scope of local GMs, and which can thus address the issue of equity in confronting communities threatened by SLR. Especially if a GM relies on public financing for resilient infrastructure, it will need to enlist the support of lower-income groups and neighborhoods, since federal funding is typically contingent on benefiting disadvantaged communities. In Boston, this is certainly the case—indeed, its entire 100RC project was focused on equity in resilience. In New York, it is less obvious, perhaps again because of a less cohesive GM—and in Norfolk, a concern with equity appears to be largely an afterthought. Interestingly then, the available evidence suggests that a more cohesive GM may be better positioned to address equity issues in resiliency planning.

The second avenue for further research with respect to such groups as REITs would be a more consistent analysis of their local impacts in terms of, for instance, investment and GM membership. The case of Boston suggests that REITs are participants in local resilience planning through GM-type organizations, most likely because they are both headquartered in Boston and have substantial land investments in the city. Yet, if a REIT is not headquartered in a city, would it still participate in local GM organizations to advance investments that address resilience to SLR, or would it simply use the relative presence of such investments to decide whether to make investments itself in those cities?

Finally, our third area of investigation, the relative presence of investment or retreat strategies in planning for SLR, suggests two areas for further research: First, developing consistent measurements of the relative strength and salience of either argument, and second, hypothesizing and investigating what causes either argument to have more or less impact, in a given city. With respect to consistent measurements of the relative strength and salience of retreat or investment strategies, the most fruitful avenue for further research, following our strategy here, is likely content analyses of such documents as sustainability reports, planning proposals, articles in the local press, organization recommendations (such as that by the New York Building Congress), and USACE recommendations, combined with some weighting system to determine to relative influence of each information source.

With respect to the question of what causes either a retreat or investment strategy to gain greater or lesser significance in a given city, the most immediate and obvious hypothesis is that a city with more valuable land and a more active and influential GM will be more likely to pursue investment rather than retreat strategies. Yet even our brief comparison, which suggests the greater prevalence and salience of retreat strategies in New York City than Boston, despite high land values and active growth interests in both cities, suggests that the relationship between a GM, land value, and an investment strategy is most likely confounded by intervening variables.

The most obvious difference between New York City and Boston is, as previously discussed, the simple fact that New York is a much larger city—not just in population and land size, but also, perhaps most significantly, in waterfront or coastline (520 miles in New York; 47 miles in Boston). We hypothesize that the relatively larger size of New York City makes the retreat strategy more salient in Boston for two possible reasons. First, larger size simply increases the burden of the response to SLR and increases the potential cost of investment to the point where a pure investment strategy simply becomes infeasible and thus a retreat strategy becomes more salient. Second, larger size implies more diverse GM membership, and thus a more diverse set of proposals for how to confront the threat of SLR, including retreat.

The question of which specific aspect of city size—for instance, population, land, property value, or coastline—is most important from the standpoint of determining the content of an SLR adaptation strategy, is one for future research. One thing we can conjecture here, however, is that a GM with a smaller and narrower membership base only determines a more cohesive response focused around either investment or retreat and does not determine the choice of investment or retreat—evidenced by the very different weights afforded either strategy in Norfolk and the Outer Banks. We can conjecture further that an abundance of high-value land is a necessary but not sufficient condition for choosing to invest in fortifying an area against SLR. In many instances, the cost of more resilient infrastructure will be too expensive for any single property owner, and in any case, more resilient infrastructure can be more affordably supplied as a collective good that protects a large swath of land rather than a single property. In other words, there needs to be a coalition that will support and lobby for publicly funded infrastructure, and that most likely also expects to benefit individually from that infrastructure because of the investments its members have already invested in threatened land—a growth machine.

9. Conclusions

Through a focus on SLR we have suggested that the GM framework might be refined in at least three ways. We first argued that most analyses have not paid sufficient attention to GM membership and cohesion, and then argued, primarily through a case study of Boston, that GM membership and cohesion might shift in the face of SLR. Second, we argued that organizations typically treated as operating outside of traditional GMs, such as REITs, may in fact play more important roles in GMs than previously thought, especially in the context of SLR. Third, and finally, we argued that GMs, at least in larger cities, can be defined in part by the relative emphasis placed on the adaptation strategies of investment and retreat—though at least in big coastal cities, and in apparent contrast to distinctly nonurban territories such as the Outer Banks, both strategies are consistently present, at the very least as points of discussion.