The only project that I am working on that has a specific neighborhood focus is ESCR, or the East Side Coastal Resilience project that centers East River Park in the East Village and Lower East Side. The neighborhood history of this area is pretty infamous in the lore of leftist radicalism in New York; in the late 1890s and early 1900s the area was largely populated by substandard tenements housing East European, Jewish, Italian, and German immigrant laborers. It was the subject of photojournalistic exposés by writers like Jacob Riis, who authored “How the Other Half Lives,” a tale of urban poverty in the age of industry and gilded wealth. The text is a good synecdoche for the progressive movement in all of its promise and falterings, and its unique combination of sympathy and hatred for the poor. It would lead to the passage of the Tenement Act of 1901 which provided baseline health provisions, and later Truman’s Housing Act of 1949 which paved the way for Robert Moses’s infamous “meat axe”-ing through communities. The Lower East Side, hollowed out after suburbanization and now populated with Puerto Rican and Black people following the Great Migration, was deemed consummate terrain for this kind of ambitious restructuring. The tenements along Allen Street were destroyed to pave the way for Moses’s Christie-Forsyth park, now named after Sara D. Roosevelt. The East River Park was another brainchild of Moses, serving as the backyard of the new public housing blocks along FDR drive. In the next urban epoch of financialization, neoliberalism, and gentrification, the Lower East Side was rediscovered after years of divestment for its charm and quaint blocks, the product of the labor of the immigrant proletarians that existed before. Geographer Neil Smith took up this phenomenon in his landmark article “The New Urban Frontier,” which considered the emergence of real estate as the cornerstone of the novel sheath of urban capitalism a “revanchist” attack on the poor. He would also clarify gentrification as a socioeconomic phenomenon not emanating from the consumptive preferences of an emerging urban middle class, but from productive forces through which landlords and developers exploited artificially rising land values at the expense of longtime residents. A new wave of privatization set forth, and landowning capitalists were able to capture this “rent gap.” Due to the relentless organizing of predominantly Puerto Rican public housing residents, the stock of public housing in the Lower East Side has remained strong against the slow shrinking of public space around them. New tactics of resistance were additionally developed, including the infamous and interrelated squatting and community gardening movements, earning the Lower East Side the name the “garden district.” In this truncated history, you can get a sense of why the East River Park is so important to the residents of public and affordable housing in the Lower East Side, and why its demolition strikes at such an emotional core for them. The area is ecologically vulnerable however, and Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the level of damage that can become commonplace if adaptive measures are not taken. Despite opposition to the resilience project by community organizations who argue for democratic solutions and green infrastructure, according to conversations I had with my supervisors, many public housing residents whose units were destroyed in the event support the city’s solution.