With climate change forecasts raising the specter of more frequent and severestorms, real estate developers and regulators find themselves considering worst-case scenarios.
Imagine designing office towers and high-rise condos to maximize tenants’ survivability when they’re surrounded by flood waters and disconnected from water and electricity.
“How long could they be in the building without significant threats to their safety?” said Kairos Shen, director of planning for the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). “As we go into the future, we might want to say, ‘Do you have some water supply that will maintain X number of hours without being cut off?”
Since December, the BRA has required developers of major projects to fill out a five-page questionnaire focusing on climate-related issues. Among the questions: What’s your back-up power source? Will you install barricades or flood gates? Are your utility rooms waterproof?
In the coming months, the agency will collect and analyze the data, which could be the basis for new requirements for developers.
“The data would help us decide what kind of regulations might be appropriate, if the mayor wants to go in that direction,” Shen said.
City Hall’s emphasis on the topic reflects recent studies predicting that large portions of downtown Boston, Back Bay and waterfront neighborhoods would be flooded if a Hurricane Sandy-magnitude storm were to hit at high tide. A study by Watertown-based Sasaki Assoc. identified $14 billion worth of commercial properties in Boston and nearby coastal communities that would be at risk during a major storm in 2050, when the mean sea level in Boston Harbor is projected to rise by two feet.
Neither Boston’s zoning regulations nor the state building code were written to reflect the latest climate change forecasts, and developers are just beginning to examine new industry practices for protecting properties.
In an exhibit called Sea Change Boston, Sasaki Assoc. draws on ideas from Venice to Seoul in imagining a city that absorbs rising seas while minimizing threats to life and property.
The exhibit spotlights practices like elevated and floating buildings, temporary floodwalls, and increased use of plantings in the place of paved surfaces to absorb waters.
Developers who are early adopters of such techniques would have a competitive advantage, said Victor Vizgaitis, a principal at Sasaki.
“Whether it’s a corporate tenant or someone buying a condo, the idea that you would be moving into a building that has more potential for survivability becomes a selling point,” Vizgaitis said.
One revolutionary approach that coastal cities could consider: “wet flood-proofing,” in which flood waters are allowed to enter a structure but critical systems are elevated or protected.
“You’re saying you’re accepting it, and that water is coming into the building,” Visgaitis said.
Partners Healthcare’s new 262,000-square-foot Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital that opened last August is considered a model of forward-thinking design. Designed by Boston-based architects Perkins + Will, the building has a main entrance elevated three feet above the current 100-year flood level, and landscape walls are designed to act as reefs to hold back flood waters.
“There were definitely lessons after Hurricane Katrina hit and what New Orleans went through with their hospitals,” said Sean Sanger of Boston-based Copley Wolff Design Group, the project’s landscape architect.
Cambridge Charts Own Course
Since late 2012, the city of Cambridge has been preparing its own climate change vulnerability assessment. The city hired Framingham-based consultants Kleinfelder to study rising seas impacts between 2030 and 2070, using a circulation model that analyzes how much water would get past the Charles River and Mystic River dams .
Those studies are expected to be completed this fall, said John Bolduc, Cambridge’s environmental planner. They will serve as the foundation for a preparedness plan, which could include new zoning regulations, and plans to upgrade infrastructure.
Boston’s strategy for climate change has a recent precedent in its green building code, which was enacted in 2007 and requires that all projects over 50,000 square feet be LEED-certifiable. The year before the code was enacted, the BRA asked developers to begin filling out checklist listing green building practices.
“The notion was, just by asking them to fill out the LEED checklist, the developers started to look at it,” the BRA’s Shen said. “As they filled out the checklist, they consulted professionals who they had to hire and it was a basis of educating them to do green building. By the time we adopted the formal regulations a year later, it was clear people were already somewhat familiar with the issue.”
One question that regulators will likely consider is whether to provide offsets to encourage resilient building practices, said Richard Dimino, CEO of A Better City. The Boston nonprofit is coordinating a working group of commercial real estate interests advising the city on climate issues.
For example, if utilities are moved above ground to floors otherwise occupied by offices or apartments, would the city give developers permission to add floors to offset lost revenues?
“There could be some premium costs trying to deal with this and we need to be respectful of the cost of development and being creative about how to solve these problems without having adverse economic impacts,” Dimino said.
Email: sadams@thewarrengroup.com
