Consider This from NPR - Who Pays When Sea Levels Rise?

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

Rising seas are threatening coastal communities around the world, which will need billions of dollars to protect themselves. It's clear the water is coming. What's not clear is who pays. This tension is playing out on the shoreline of San Francisco Bay, where the wealthiest companies in the world have built their headquarters next to low-income communities of color. Both need protection, but as cities there plan massive levee projects, they're struggling to figure out what's fair. Will the cost fall on taxpayers or private landowners who benefit the most?NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer reports from San Francisco.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org There are big plans for a neighborhood in Silicon Valley called Moffett Park. So I want to start with just a brief Moffett Park overview again. Moffett Park is in the city of Sunnyvale in the San Francisco Bay Area. Right now, it's mostly office buildings.

At a city council meeting earlier this year, city planners laid out a new vision for the neighborhood. 20,000 households, new streets, community facilities, two activity centers, office space, public parks and plazas, and five potential new neighborhoods. Sounds great, right? Especially in a place like the Bay Area, where they cannot build new homes fast enough. All right, we have time for one last question. But here's the catch. Moffitt Park is in a flood zone. To protect it from rising sea levels, local governments want to build a massive levee

that could cost half a billion dollars and take decades to complete. So the question some residents have is... Why increase development in the low-lying areas along... Well, a lot of the landowners want to. One of the biggest ones is Google. Silicon Valley tech giants buying up land. Today, Google made another big move, this time in the south-based city of Sunnyvale. Over the last five years,

Google has bought more than 70 properties in Moffett Park, worth almost $3 billion. So what cost should the company bear for building in a flood zone? The problem is going to exist whether we do more things in Moffett Park or not. Google's real estate development director in town, Jeff Holzman. We kind of need projects like Moffett Park and others to move forward so that it creates the economic ability to contribute into these solutions. Consider this. Rising seas are threatening coastal communities around the world, which will need billions of dollars to protect themselves.

What's clear is the water is coming. What's not clear is who pays. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Tuesday, July 27th. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Nature Valley Granola Bars, who believes the best energy comes from nature. Whether you want to relieve stress or re-energize after a long day, Nature Valley invites you to take in the outdoors, starting with this nature break. For more, visit TakeInTheOutdoors.com. Good question. That's a really good question. It's a great question. This is free therapy. Thank you for asking me that. God, that's such a good question. That's an interesting question. But what Fresh Air interviews are really about are the interesting answers. Listen and subscribe to Fresh Air from WHYY and NPR.

It's Consider This from NPR. We're talking about two tech companies in this episode, Google and Facebook. Both are among NPR's financial supporters, but they don't have any influence in our reporting. The reporting in this episode was done by NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer, and she's going to take it from here. One area tech giants have had a big influence is in Silicon Valley real estate, where one of the biggest headaches is housing. Oh my goodness, housing here is extremely expensive. Sunnyvale has a very high cost of living. Michelle King is a city planner in Sunnyvale, where the median home price in May

was $1.8 million. The city knows that's too high, which is why it's excited about a development like Moffett Park, which would include a lot of higher density housing and walking distance of public transit. You know, one of the most sustainable things you can do is put people where they work and put people where transit is. So this is a huge opportunity. An opportunity for the town, but also for Google. Here's their Sunnyvale real estate director, Jeff Holzman, again. We're incorporating sustainability into everything we do in our developments, and we're doing it to support our employees, but also the community and hopefully the environment. But the environment is likely to be a big problem for Google. Sea level rise has already happened. I mean, we've seen about a foot over the last hundred years.

Christina Hill is a professor of environmental planning at UC Berkeley. We're standing on the edge of the bay where a high tide is coming in. Hill says sea level rise will make these tides even higher by as much as seven feet by 2100. But that's not the only problem. There's also seawater in the soil under our feet, the groundwater. And as the sea rises, that tow of saltwater under the soil is going to rise also. The groundwater will get closer to the surface. That can cause flash floods during rainstorms because the ground is already saturated and runoff has nowhere to go. It's like a sponge that's already soaked and full of water. So you can't get any more water into it.

Sunnyvale knows this could be a problem for building in Moffett Park, which is why it's working to get a levy built. But the first section of levy next door to Sunnyvale has taken 15 years of planning and still isn't under construction. Local agencies have had to come up with an extra $100 million for the projected cost overruns. Google says it will help pay for the levy, if other businesses do, as part of building new offices and homes for thousands of people. That's ridiculous and backwards, right? We're going to put people at risk, put families at risk so that we can change the economics. AR Siders is a professor at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center. She says while developing in risky areas could

help pay for protections, it puts more people at the forefront of disasters. So I think we're setting ourselves up for a future where people think they're safe and we build in reliance on this infrastructure. But then if we don't maintain it, if we don't continue to pay every single year, it will leave people more at risk than they are now. Land use tends to get locked in, she says. So whatever decisions cities make now, they'll have to ensure those buildings and the people in them can withstand a climate that's changing increasingly fast. 20 minutes up 101 from Moffett Park is Menlo Park, where Facebook's campus offers a waterfront view of the bay. And it's also raising questions about who should be paying to deal with climate change.

Where we're standing right now is the outboard levee of the Facebook campus in Menlo Park. Kevin Murray works for the San Francisco Creek Joint Powers Authority, an agency that works on flood protection in the area. We're walking on one of the levees that separates Facebook's brightly colored buildings from the bay. But Murray says levee isn't exactly the right word. They're really just mounds of dirt. The levees were left over from industrial projects and not really designed to protect people. They don't meet federal engineering standards that ensure they hold up. The structures that are providing flood barrier now are not adequate and are subject to failure if we have a really big tide or a big wind event or a big storm surge.

Now, these aging levees are being hit with even more water. That threat was clear when Facebook moved in 10 years ago. So we'll get started with public comment. Facebook needed approval from the Menlo Park City Council to build its campus, designed by world-famous architect Frank Gehry. Attracting a major employer like Facebook didn't just mean jobs. It meant millions of dollars for the city budget. These public benefits are fully embraced by Facebook. We know they will benefit our new friends and neighbors in the community that we plan to make our home, hopefully for a long time.

Facebook expanded again a few years later. Today, the properties are valued at more than $2.5 billion. But before construction started, the company knew being on the waterfront was risky. An analysis found the property is vulnerable to flooding and could be inundated with 16 inches of sea level rise, which could happen within decades. Facebook raised the first floor of some buildings to keep them out of a flood. But the roads and everything else are still vulnerable. So the region is making plans to beef up its defenses with a new 16-foot-tall levee. It'll cost around $100 million.

And it's not just Facebook that'll depend on it. So will the city next door, a city with a lot fewer resources. If we were to get hit, we would be the first. Leah Grew lives on the edge of East Palo Alto. We're walking through her neighborhood with her teenage daughter Helena and French bulldog Pua. In the distance, we can see Facebook's campus on one side and the waters of San Francisco Bay on the other. East Palo Alto is one of the few low-income communities of color left in Silicon Valley, an identity it's trying to hold on to.

That backyard right there, that used to be my friends Ashley and Mikey's house, but they had to move. It's a cost of living. Just like Facebook, Leah and Helena are in a flood zone. But it's not something Leah thought about until her daughter came home from high school talking about it. She used to brush it off.

And I'd come back to her and be like, Mom, did you know? And I'd be very enraged about it. East Palo Alto has been hit by flooding more than a dozen times. And sea level rise threatens to make it worse. I'm thinking back to the places that weren't ready. Let's talk about Katrina.

That could be us in the next couple of years. People are already getting priced out, she says. A flood could be the breaking point. They'll move us out to like, sorry, I didn't want to think about it, but we'll get moved out to Stockton, Sacramento. Leah and Helena have started going to community meetings about sea level rise to hear about plans to protect the region. Their plan included Facebook, that we have to share our resources,

which they're supposed to be protecting us with Facebook. And it was kind of irritating. She says people in the community are asking, why isn't Facebook doing more? To build the new levy, East Palo Alto is putting in $5.5 million. Facebook is putting in a bit more, $7.8 million. That's enough to protect just one section of their campus. The company's revenue is 2,000 times greater than East Palo Alto's city budget. Most of the remaining funding,

50 million dollars, was just preliminarily granted by the federal government. Hundreds of other projects around the country got nothing. Facebook declined an interview request from NPR, but said in a statement that the company is doing its part to protect its campus and neighboring communities. New development must pay its way. Carlos Romero is mayor of East Palo Alto. He says the challenge is that right now, cities don't charge developers or companies that are building in a flood zone. All of us are going to have to contribute, and I think that we should indeed figure out a way

where corporations, who are making billions of dollars, contribute to this in a significant way because their very livelihood is challenged. But the idea hasn't really caught on. Cities often want to encourage development, not discourage it with more taxes or fees. That leaves it up to companies to chip in for sea level rise however they think is fair, says Mark Lubel, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. It's not just, you know, Facebook has a part of their campus that can be flooded.

It's more like they've got employees coming from all over the region. And to protect their overall workforce from this, they need to invest in it. And they got plenty of money to do it at a scale that's much higher. Local governments are grappling with this debate all over. Preparing for climate change will take billions, more than most cities can pay. So do taxpayers fund sea level rise? Or do those with waterfront property pay more? A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware's

Disaster Research Center says there is no scientific formula to follow. Is fair share based on how much risk you're facing? Is it based on your ability to pay? This is ethics. This is personal values. This is what we all think about what is fair. In East Palo Alto and Menlo Park,

they hope to have the levee built in a decade. As for hundreds of other projects around the country, the federal government says there could be more funding available in next year's budget. NPR climate correspondent Lauren Summer. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.