(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 444: The Rising Seas
This week we’re joined once more by Susan Crawford, author and Harvard Law Professor to talk about her new book, Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm. Susan chats with us about sea level rise, city solutions, and opportunities to rethink our responses.
To listen to this episode, check it out on Streetsblog USA or find it at our archive site.
Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript. Apologies for any mistakes.
Jeff Wood (1m 21s):
\Well, Susan Crawford, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.
Susan Crawford (1m 40s):
It’s great to be with you.
Jeff Wood (1m 41s):
Thanks for being back. And before we get started, can you tell folks that might not have listened to episode 2 26 on your last book, fiber, A little bit about yourself.
Susan Crawford (1m 49s):
Well, I teach at Harvard Law School and the abiding concern for my career is the line between public and private. What is government good for? What’s it supposed to do? And when I was talking to you about fiber, I was talking about the idea of public infrastructure, basic, you know, conduit running through streets over which lots of competitors would provide internet access services seem to me just absurd, unthinkable that the United States hadn’t taken care of this over the last few decades. Well, this question I’m taking on is about what to do about sea level rise as it is gonna afflict at least 10 million, 13 million Americans over the next few decades, not centuries, decades.
Susan Crawford (2m 32s):
And what is the role of government? What should government be doing at all levels, city, state, and federal? And to tell that story, I took on the description of Charleston, South Carolina, which is quite a place,
Jeff Wood (2m 44s):
Yeah, for reading the book, I can tell, because we talked about fiber before and there’s been so much that’s happened since then. I’m wondering if you can kind of give us a feeling about your thoughts since we passed the infrastructure bill and the things that actually brought a lot of money into many municipalities and states, but also maybe it wasn’t the way that you maybe would’ve seen it or I would’ve seen it based on my understanding and reading of your book.
Susan Crawford (3m 8s):
Well, it’s a good question. The people at the Department of Commerce have done a terrific job under enormous pressure sending out lots and lots of money under the Infrastructure Act. They’re still in process, they’re doing their best. A lot of the spending decisions will be made by states. So big block grant grants will go with states. I would’ve preferred, many people would’ve preferred a real emphasis on funding public infrastructure, again, over which private services could run competitively. That’s not the story here. This is not an attempt to change the competitive structure of the United States internet access market. It is an attempt to reach more people with internet access. So that’s good.
Susan Crawford (3m 48s):
And I applaud the civil servants for doing everything they can to do a good job.
Jeff Wood (3m 54s):
The other thing that was interesting to me since then we chatted and now is that, you know, at the time I wasn’t really aware of all the state preemptions that were happening and things like, you know, them trying to say, you can’t build your own fiber optic network as a city. And your book really opened my eyes to that. And so I’ve been watching that ever since. And now you know, there’s preemption like mad from states going into cities and things like that in Florida and Texas and all other places. So I wanna just kind of thank you a little bit for at least a little bit for opening my eyes to that initial discussion about preemption because now it’s blown up.
Susan Crawford (4m 25s):
Yeah, the National League of Cities has terrific resources on preemption. If anybody’s curious, just go take a look how broadly it sweeps. How much is arguably being taken away from cities in terms of their latitude? Look, legally cities are creatures of their states. Might it make sense to devolve power to cities perhaps? You know, when it comes to climate change, it’s apparent to me that the decisions have to be made locally, but the money and the overall policy guidance is gonna come from states and and the federal government. So preemption isn’t an unmixed good or unmixed bad, it just, it’s all over the place.
Jeff Wood (5m 1s):
Well, let’s talk about the book, the new book, Charleston Race Water and the Coming Storm. I’m wondering what pulled you to South Carolina specifically?
Susan Crawford (5m 8s):
Well, Charleston plays a very important role in this nation’s history. Personally. I went there first to go interview Joe Riley, who’d been mayor there for 40 years, and was called America’s Favorite Mayor, a very charming guy who never sought any other office, loved his city mayor from 1975 to 2015. And he’s the guy who presided over tremendous growth, explosive growth in Charleston, and also turned the city from a place that had one bad pizza restaurant into a focus of food and culture and touristic emphasis right now, when you arrive in Charleston at the airport, they say, welcome to America’s number one city.
Susan Crawford (5m 50s):
And they’ve had that ranking for the last 11 years from travel and leisure. So I wanted to talk to Joe Riley and on my way to talk to Riley, I, I was lucky to be tipped off from a local, by a local journalist that it would be good to ask him about water. And I said, water. He said, yeah, just ask him about the water. And so that got me started because when I asked Mayor Riley about water, I kind of clammed up and it was apparent to me that I stumbled into a very expensive and difficult problem that I didn’t understand. And so I spent the next four years trying to understand it.
Jeff Wood (6m 23s):
It’s interesting because I feel like he clammed up because he knew it was an issue. And there is not a lot being done about it necessarily because why
Susan Crawford (6m 33s):
It’s not altogether Charleston’s fault. There’s a whole set of structures and realities in governance now. And also lack of capacity, lack of money that drives cities to who are dependent on property tax. Not to say a whole lot about the ravages of sea level rise, Charleston to its credit is trying to develop a water plan so it can figure out where the water is and how to move it around, but it doesn’t have the money to do much about it. And Riley, to his credit, had tried to drain the streets of the peninsula, but there was a lot of water to move from place to place. And he made little progress against his 1984 strategic plan for water.
Susan Crawford (7m 15s):
So he knew that he’d left the incoming administration in 2016 with a lot of work to do and not very much money. And it’s, in a sense, it’s nobody’s fault. But I thought telling the story of what’s happened over the years and who that puts at risk was worth telling.
Jeff Wood (7m 33s):
You say there’s nobody at fault, but it seems like the people that built on that specific piece of land might be at fault to start with. And you go through this in the history of, of Charleston. Can you give us a little bit of background of the city and how it was formed? And some of its more evil history as well?
Susan Crawford (7m 49s):
Yeah, you know, if your reader’s interested, there’s a wonderful book by Amitav, gosh, the Great Derangement, which points out that in the colonial era, these very domineering dominant cities were just plopped next to the water. So Charleston and New York were put in places where no one sensible would’ve built a city. And in fact, when the earliest settlers came, they’re basically second sons of English lords who were trying to make their fortune on Barbados and the sugar trade. They initially came to Charleston in the late 17th century funded by investors in England, and those investors urged them really strongly to move 30 miles inland where it would be a lot safer.
Susan Crawford (8m 30s):
But they liked the views, they liked the water, and they really felt at that point that they could dominate nature, that nature was no match for them. So the founding of Charleston is accompanied by enslavement as well as a colonial attitude that it was the first and the only of the, and I’m not sure that’s that’s right, about only certainly the first of the English colonies to have slaves in place from the very beginning. And enslaved people really built Charleston’s economy and filled in a lot of the marsh with rubble and built the city and were the backs that were broken in the course of making tremendous amounts of money in the rice and indigo trades.
Jeff Wood (9m 14s):
And that history, you know, brings us to today as well. I mean, there’s a connection to slavery and the attitudes of people in the city and how they’re treated. I’m curious about the undertones or overtones of racism and how it connects city planning and the city at large as it pertains to right now.
Susan Crawford (9m 31s):
Well, I was fortunate to be introduced to black residents of Charleston who tell this story in their own words. And what they conveyed to me was that there was a almost sort of benevolent paternalism on the part of the city leaders not paying much attention to African American residents of Charleston really feeling that the city knew what was best for them. And it’s a city that from the beginning has been focused on profit and growth. And there are very few African American advisors to the city. The leadership is largely white. There are few black members of city council, but the people that I spent time with, the black residents of Charleston who are quoted in the book said they felt that there was at best complacency and sort of indifference to the fate of lower income and black residents of the city.
Susan Crawford (10m 24s):
But check out the book, if you wanna hear the words of people who actually live through that day after day. That’s not my experience, that’s their experience.
Jeff Wood (10m 32s):
We talk about water and the Rising tides, sea level rise. You know, your book scared me probably more than many others. And you know me, I pay attention to this stuff fairly closely. You read the newsletter, you see that I mix in all this stuff that relates to this. But I mean, Charleston specifically, you don’t really, from my perspective anyways here in San Francisco, and even though I look for national news, you don’t see much about it and you don’t hear much about it in the national news. And I don’t know if that’s because the coasts are so dominated by New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, or if it’s just kind of running under the radar to a certain extent for most of us where we are. And so I’m interested about this issue of water and the flooding that happens and the amount of change that’s happening in that flooding.
Jeff Wood (11m 14s):
And you know how that relates back to what you were talking about, how slaves basically filled in many parts of the city and now the sea level rise and where the moon is at any given time of the year can affect sunny day flooding, which is another thing that I’ve seen and heard of before, but I didn’t think that it was to this extent.
Susan Crawford (11m 31s):
We really hear about Miami a lot. Miami’s sort of the poster trial for sea level rise, and Miami’s got a special problem, which is permeable limestone underneath the city. Charleston is extremely low, and it’s also the focus of a lot of tourist attention. So it’s not clear to me why Charleston hasn’t been a big sea level rise story in the past. I think it’s very well known to the people who live there. June, 2023 was a month that saw the most flooding of any June since records began being kept in Charleston Harbor. And the top 10 years for flooding are all in the last 10 years, and it’s been rapidly accelerating. In 2019, the city flooded 89 times and in 2022 it flooded 70 times.
Susan Crawford (12m 17s):
Now when I say flooding, I mean it hit levels that the National Weather Service uses to raise an alert and say, watch out, be careful. It’s a signal that more and more frequently the city is gonna be gradually inundated with water that today’s flood will be tomorrow’s high tide, just regular high tide. And Noah says that’s gonna happen as soon as 2050, that there’ll be a real phase change in flooding. But Jeff, if you really wanna be scared, go read, the Heat Will Kill You First, which is a terrific book out right now from Jeff Goodell. He’s pointing out that heat is the source of all of this, and we’re all seeing around America 120 million of us today, or under some kind of heat warning that the earth is warming far more rapidly.
Susan Crawford (13m 8s):
Jeff just clutched his fleece just
Jeff Wood (13m 10s):
To, I clutch my fleece because it’s 59 here in San Francisco, so
Susan Crawford (13m 13s):
Maybe not you, but I’m in Washington DC where it’s over a hundred.
Jeff Wood (13m 16s):
I believe it, and I understand it. I grew up in Texas, so I get it in Houston, right?
Susan Crawford (13m 20s):
It’s, it’s humans. Were made to live at about, you know, 72 degrees. And our bodies are really not capable of adapt. There’s no adapting for humans. We can’t evolve quickly enough to handle what’s happening around us. And that heat in turn is driving unbelievably dramatic changes in sea level rise right now, this summer, the last two months, big studies coming out saying West Antarctica, the Seas around it are much warmer than anybody would’ve thought even five years ago, that the Arctic is melting four times the rate of the rest of the globe as a result of that. That’s why the jet stream keeps getting stuck and creating these big heat balloons over the United States and Europe, Europe.
Susan Crawford (14m 3s):
But that also means that as the Gulf Stream slows, as the Antarctic melts, as the moon wobbles, all these things are happening, that there are red alerts about sea level rise. The last time carbon levels will were this high in the atmosphere and the last time temperatures were around where they are now, sea levels were at least 20 feet higher than they are now. And many feet, people say a hundred feet higher than they are now. So there is uncertainty as to when exactly this is gonna happen. But given the level of carbon already in the atmosphere, it seems to many scientists right now that the changes are coming much more quickly than they would’ve anticipated.
Susan Crawford (14m 46s):
And that by 20 40, 20 45, we’ll see a real phase change in the amount of water slapping up on coastal cities all around the globe.
Jeff Wood (14m 57s):
Why do you think people ignore the claxons of climate change? These warnings that we continue to see in the news? It seems like a theme of the book almost kind of ignoring it, ignoring it, ignoring it, but it’s showing itself, and I’m reading from your book that you know, by 2050 there’s supposed to be 240 days of flooding in Charleston. And so I’m wondering why, how you could ignore that or how you can believe that that’s not gonna happen, or the low end of it is gonna be what’s gonna happen? As some said in the book,
Susan Crawford (15m 24s):
We’re humans, we’re capable of enormous self-deception that no maps, nothing, no data will really change anybody’s mind until they experience it. Unless you’re an utterly rational scientist and you say, well, I’m not living in that mess, but just something like only four or 5% of the moves inside America right now, people relocating are being made based on climate and in fact people are rushing towards increasingly risky places. Huge numbers going to low tax warm places in Florida, and huge numbers of retirees are going to Charleston and Texas and Maricopa County. You’re seeing the most growth of, you know, the most inbound residents of any, it just, it is literally deranged, it’s mad, but we are capable of denial and boosterism and a sense that we control nature that couldn’t possibly happen.
Susan Crawford (16m 21s):
There’s a uncanny sense this summer, this month to me feels like the very beginning of March, 2020, there is something terrifying being unleashed on the world. We can see it coming, we see all the data and yet it doesn’t quite feel as if it’s gonna affect us, but it is, people are dying in the extreme heat right now, and you won’t die as quickly from sea level rise, but it will make life miserable for a lot of people, particularly low income people who can’t move away from Rising. Seas.
Jeff Wood (16m 58s):
That brings up something else that you mentioned the book and struck me and the idea of climate change as a cliff rather than a slope. So something that’s gonna hit us kind of like a tidal wave rather than maybe this edging up, you know, slow rise of water, inundating a piece of property or a street.
Susan Crawford (17m 14s):
Well, a lot of your readers will know all about this, that the positive feedback loops in this system create the risk of genuine tipping points where we move quickly from one phase to another without in a non-linear fashion. And as it is, even very small changes in temperature can have outsized effects on extremes. So with more extreme weather and more risk of tipping points, which is happening right now, we’ll have a much higher level of risk that we’ll lose our ability to plan. And that’s what troubles me, that we have an opportunity right now to be doing that long-term planning. It takes decades to carry this stuff off after the 1953 enormous Dutch floods in the North Sea.
Susan Crawford (18m 0s):
It took them 20 years to create the armoring of the Dutch Coast that they’re so proud of. Now we’re not even thinking about adaptation as a country. We have no national adaptation plan. We’re the only developed country that doesn’t have one. We don’t have a set of priorities, we’re not really directing funding in this direction. Actually, the last economic report of the president signaled pretty strongly that there was no appetite for intervening where the private marketplace was gonna do its work. In other words, lots of developers are already looking at places in the interior of the United States that might be climate refuges of one kind or another, whether it be ample fresh water and maybe more temperate climate and existing infrastructure Transit otherwise.
Susan Crawford (18m 44s):
So people can live in high dry and connected areas. They’re working on that corporations know all about it. The people who won’t be helped are those homeowners and renters who are living in low lying conditions along rivers as well as coastlines in this country.
Jeff Wood (19m 1s):
The Dutch came to Charleston and gave some ideas, but as it happens when experts come to cities in the US it usually gets watered down by politics. Can you tell me a little bit more about the Dutch, and not necessarily the Dutch in the Netherlands, but maybe the Dutch in Charleston? Well,
Susan Crawford (19m 18s):
I was really privileged to get, thanks to the generosity of Dale Morris, who’s now working for the city as its emergency manager. I was lucky to get access to meetings called Dutch Dialogues meetings in July, 2019. And I met with many of the absolutely top flight Dutch landscape architects who came, and I recorded a lot of the sessions and I listened to all their presentations. And what they were saying was that essentially no one should be living anywhere less than six feet above sea level in this entire region. And between six and 10 feet, maybe a few isolated structures up on stilts, but nothing else.
Susan Crawford (20m 1s):
And then the only maybe safe land might be 20 feet above sea level or higher. Well, at least a third of the residents of Charleston right now are living 10 feet or less above sea level. And nobody is suggesting that they move. That was not, you know, the advice of the Dutch in, in a very real sense was not translated into policy recommendations by the city. They’re to bind, there’s a lot of private property, no one wants to be liable for takings claims. So there’s an enormous law form effort and big thinking effort that’s needed here. We need to create land trusts to which people could perhaps donate their properties and then have them decommissioned after a set period of time so that cities don’t have to keep funding infrastructure in these very risky places.
Susan Crawford (20m 53s):
Because here’s the bottom line, it looks as if in the United States it’ll take a series of disasters very close in time to each other, or perhaps some coastal cities going bankrupt for anybody to make big moves in response to this issue. That’s the problem.
Jeff Wood (21m 10s):
It’s interesting what’s happening now, and we’ve talked about this on several shows recently. The insurance markets are going kind of bonkers right here in California and Florida and other places, state Farm and farmers and others, major companies are pulling out any new policies of in those states, right? So like we just, we know that we won’t be able to afford it when the next hurricane hits or the next wildfire hits. And so we’re, we’re done, we’re outta here. And so I’m interested how, you know, that private market works and, and then also, you know, when that happens, who’s left behind? Like you said, there’s a lot of impact on people who don’t have money versus the folks that do have money. And I think this plays out in your book and in Charleston over time as well.
Susan Crawford (21m 49s):
Well, from my perspective, the fact that the private insurance market is leaving should be a big red flag saying don’t live there because this is not a policy issue that’s susceptible to insurance. Insurance does nothing but transfer risk. So at the moment we’re putting a lot of risk on the federal government that is the only giver of flood insurance. And that flood insurance program is $20 billion in the red and completely dysfunctional and based on terrible maps, as your listeners have already heard. If we actually wanna reduce risk, you help people leave, you get them away from harm’s way in a really thoughtful process with a lot of community consultation full of grief.
Susan Crawford (22m 31s):
This is just of the terrible options ahead of us. This is the better of the worst options. But what you don’t wanna do is pretend that the risks are low. In fact, insurance should be out of reach. It shouldn’t be available. We shouldn’t be allowing people to live in floodplains. It is bananas that we have so many people living in these highly risky areas and yet such a shortage of housing. There’s so many parts of this puzzle that need to be addressed. Much denser housing, better served by Transit in safer places with a mix of affordable and luxury units. Instead we, we seem to be doubling down on, on very luxurious housing in very high risk areas.
Susan Crawford (23m 15s):
And then assuming that those people will take care of themselves.
Jeff Wood (23m 19s):
And I hadn’t thought about this before, you know, maybe I did in a way that, you know, we should always be planning ahead for the future scenarios in one way or another. But you know, there was a quote from Alice Hilt from the Council of Foreign Relations specifically saying, you know, spending our money before a disaster happens might actually be more valuable than spending it after. And I think that, you know, people don’t necessarily think like that when you spend the money beforehand. You can actually make a plan that keeps people safe and move them to other places if you’re doing ans retreat. But then, and we see this all the time with FEMA and others, you know, they’re like, we’ll give you money for your house that was just blown down by a hurricane or by a flood. But people basically rebuild in the same spot, increasing the risk even more that it’s gonna happen because of global climate change.
Jeff Wood (24m 1s):
I’m curious what your thoughts are on that, on the idea of planning and spending all that money that would be spent after beforehand,
Susan Crawford (24m 8s):
We have more than 30 federal agencies dumping money on disaster relief from one direction or another, sort of uncoordinated to, that’s another problem. And Congress is constantly passing bills, sending billions off in response to disasters. We have disaster driven planning to the extent there’s any plan at all, it is just reactive. And we could be spending a seventh, a 10th of that money and planning ahead for better places for people to live. It’s just the legal and political obstacles to that kind of thinking are profound as they are, for example, with public health. We know that another pandemic is coming, that because of climate change, you know, the animal world is getting much closer to us.
Susan Crawford (24m 53s):
Another terrible virus is gonna leap into humans, and yet we’re incapable of planning ahead for the next one. I continue to be optimistic that the best of us this summer, I hope provides a turning point, especially as the risks to human life become so obvious. Clearly we need to have a better way of approaching this set of questions, but what I try to document in the book is Charleston doing its best overshadowed by a lot of racial history and a certain blindness about how this is treating low income and residents of color in Charleston sort of shambling forward without much of a plan and grabbing at the one plan available, which is to build a big sea wall around the historic peninsula, a sea wall that will ultimately be overtopped very quickly by the storms we see coming and will have a lot of Katrinas all across the country.
Susan Crawford (25m 48s):
And Charleston’s just a useful vessel to tell this story about all the perverse incentives and ways of thinking we have in America about this pretty fundamental issue of keeping people safe.
Jeff Wood (25m 58s):
Also, I feel like people that do understand that there’s a need to move might actually still wanna stay in part because of the history between them and the people who run cities. So in the book, there’s a lot of discussion about places being taken and turned into apartments or homes being taken through nefarious ways from lack of homeowners. And they don’t wanna take the deal and move because they’ve been burned so many times before. Or they know people that have been burned so many times before, they think that this is actually gonna be another plan just to kick them out of their property rather than an escape valve for them to actually go somewhere that might be long-term beneficial. And I think that that’s an interesting piece of all of this and the discussion that happens all over the country, not just in Charleston, but there’s fear and there’s mistrust about these whole processes.
Jeff Wood (26m 46s):
And so there’s something that needs to be done about that specifically too.
Susan Crawford (26m 50s):
Absolutely. We have a painful history in this country of relocating people against their world without consulting with them and then rebuilding where they were so that we can make more money. And so who has to move where they have to go? And what happens to the landlords left behind is actually the subject of an enormous amount of work across the country. I went to a conference at Columbia last month with 300 people all talking about strategic relocation and how it could be done in a community based manner. Lots of local experimentation along these lines. The problem is, it’s all kind of ad hoc and unconnected to the levers of power and the levers of funding and the, that leadership, true leadership at the federal level is completely absent.
Susan Crawford (27m 38s):
There’s no dedicated agency, there’s no dedicated funding, there’s no real coordination. Nobody waking up every day saying, how are we gonna do this over the next few decades? How can we help communities plan together for their own culture and their own people to find their way through this enormous transition? And so that’s where I see this book fitting in this entire discussion, that there are a lot of people with the very best intentions, who are very aware of the, of this distrust and trying to solve it on a community level, but it’s unattached to reality to the scale of the problem, the scale of the need, the scale of the funding that’s gonna be required to get this done.
Jeff Wood (28m 17s):
You tied each chapter of the book to a person, and I’m wondering if these people represent archetypes of people all over the country.
Susan Crawford (28m 25s):
That’s such an interesting question. I I think they do. They’re also real people. Yeah, there’s that wonderful book Common Ground about fussing in the South Boston that was written in the eighties. It’s a classic. It was created along these same lines, tracking several families and their stories as a way to tell a larger policy story on a small scale. That’s what I tried to do here. And so there’s a terrific a m e minister Joan Darby, who’s a leading character here. He’s the one who told me that Charleston’s, just like Confederate, Disneyland, you know, he’s also the one who said that there was raging friendliness all over Charleston. And it was a real problem for the city. Raging politeness, sorry, that was his phrase for it.
Susan Crawford (29m 5s):
And there’s a young entrepreneur who actually left Charleston because she felt there was no future for her there. There’s a woman about my age who went to law school at the age of 50 because she wanted to make sure that the interests of black residents of Charleston were taken into account and they stand for themselves. They stand on their own two feet. They’re fascinating people, but they also represent the best of us. The hopes we have for everybody with a belly button deserves to be treated fairly and with dignity and respect, and they have a sense of humor about the way things happen in Charleston, but they also recognize the unfairness around the edges. But it’s unfairness at every level.
Susan Crawford (29m 47s):
It’s turtles all the way down. When the army is planning these walls around the country, they only look for cost benefit analysis. They’re looking for where the biggest payoff is for your buck. Well, because of historic practices of redlining and ways we’ve treated minority communities for decades in the United States, often the wealthiest communities will not be those where black people are living. So they don’t get protection just because we’ve decided that’s our way of making decisions. And that’s wrong. We have to change that. The Biden administration’s making some very strong gestures in that direction. But it’s going to have to be a, a much larger effort and and also an effort directed at everybody, at all of our coastal cities.
Susan Crawford (30m 32s):
And I recognize here, Jeff talking to you that it’s, it’s too large, it’s gonna be put on the two hard pile, but it seems to me that would be too bad if that happens.
Jeff Wood (30m 41s):
You mentioned the Army Corps of Engineers a number of times and specifically the the wall that they wanna build. And I, all I can think about when I hear that is when we used to go on Boy Scout trips to a place where the corps maybe did something, maybe it was the Mississippi River and New Orleans levees or something like that. And there’s always a diorama of like what it looked like before and then what it looks like now. And then they have a thing where the water rushes in and it shows you how they channeled it and everything like that. And I can only imagine what that diorama would look like for, for Charleston when they did the sea wall. And it’s planned to be overtop so that the city can get more money anyway.
Susan Crawford (31m 15s):
Yeah. Well the Army Corps relies on extraordinarily conservative estimates of projections of sea level rise. They’re saying just two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century when the E p A and FEMA and everybody else looks at five or six. And they’re also planning that, by the way, Jeff Ford, the Galveston dike for the Ike Dyke, same conservative planning. And so the risk is we’ll spend billions on these walls and they won’t work. The one for Charleston was planned the way it was planned because if it was any higher, it would interfere with the freeways that run into Charleston from the airport. And that was just felt to be too expensive. So it didn’t pencil out. It’s not some larger principle that’s driving the creation of these plans.
Susan Crawford (31m 59s):
It’s just what will make sense given the payoff, the protected structures, not people’s lives, not all the residents, and even the levies and walls in New Orleans as rebuilt. Were not designed to protect a whole bunch of poor areas to the south of New Orleans. So lots of failures and we can’t possibly armor the entire coastline. That would make no sense. It would make life miserable behind those walls. Also, the walls can have all kinds of un unanticipated consequences as water lands behind them and then doesn’t go anywhere. You know, as your connection to the water is cut off and as sea levels get higher and higher and the walls are closed all the time, you’d have to, and there are big rainstorms that hit behind the wall.
Susan Crawford (32m 47s):
You then have to pump all of the rain out back over the wall into the ocean. So it becomes elaborately expensive. There are lots of foolish things going around all over the country, renourishing beaches over and over and over again. And what is concerning from a policy point of view is, is the lack of strategy to all of this.
Jeff Wood (33m 6s):
Yeah. And even industrial, like we can’t do this past 2050. I mean, they’re doing that now, right? They’re pumping, they’re, they’re building walls, they’re doing all the stuff that, you know, the cities in the US wanna do, and they’re very good at it. And they understand basically where water should run and not run and relocating people and all that stuff. But even they’re saying according to what’s in your book is that by 2050 we can’t do this anymore. And we’ve have to figure out a way to move people closer to Germany.
Susan Crawford (33m 30s):
They’re looking at a variety of avenues, but at least for them, one of the avenues is moving. It’s an option that remains on the table in the United States. We can’t even talk about it as a large scale strategy option for major cities or minor cities. We just, all we’ve done so far is move a few tribes and we’ve taken decades to do it. And the programs we have don’t match the scale of the problem.
Jeff Wood (33m 55s):
You know, this is usually an urban planning transportation podcast. And we are talking about urban planning, obviously. But there is a transportation connection to this too. And I noticed this a lot in the book, is that if you have all these days where basically the streets are created so that they can take water away from houses, the streets are flooded and you can’t go anywhere, you can’t get to the hospital, you can’t get to your church, right? You can’t get to the places where you wanna go. And so this has a, a very important connection to transportation that I think that people might miss as well.
Susan Crawford (34m 23s):
Yeah, I, I think people may not know that often streets are used as storage repositories for water that houses are built up on fill and then the street being lower takes all the water. Well, what if you need to evacuate during a Storm? If you’re using an electric car, you’ll roll up the windows and then never be able to roll ’em down again and the car stalls and you’re stuck forever. Then what happens? And we are so reliant on individual cars all over America, also, having no Transit in the Charleston area seemed like a good reason to write about Charleston. It’s sort of emblematic of our failure to plan adequately for public Transit. Like you, I’m a big fan of public Transit and it was striking to me how difficult it was to move around the Charleston area.
Susan Crawford (35m 6s):
But yeah, you’re absolutely right. All of these issues, housing, Transit, public health, economic growth, everything is tied to sea level rise.
Jeff Wood (35m 16s):
The housing issue is a traffic issue is something that came up too, where folks are talking about, well, if we do move people or we have to push people to move to the outskirts of the city and they still need to commute back in to work at the restaurants or work anywhere else, you know, there’s gonna be a traffic issue because you’re creating more trips, you’re creating more need for people to go from one place to the other rather than living next to where they’re working and maybe walking or biking or or taking a bus if it does exist. And so that’s another thing that comes up is if you’re thinking about public housing, if you’re thinking about relocation of folks, even manager treat, you have to think about the transportation related to that because it will be important in the future.
Susan Crawford (35m 52s):
Absolutely. And Charleston, like Santa Monica and lots of other places had a trolley system that was terrific. They took it out and so now it’s all private cars that it’s just starting with some bus rapid Transit and I wish them well with that. But you’re absolutely right. This, this Transit issue is at the heart of what’s gonna happen with strategic relocation. But let’s be optimistic, this is an opportunity to plan in a much better way for the future of cities and to perhaps look at places like Buffalo and Minneapolis, places that may be climate havens and help them build up their Transit system so they can serve even more people. I’ve gotten really curious about Bangladesh, which is facing these issues in advance of us.
Susan Crawford (36m 34s):
They’re already getting a lot of sea level rise and flooding millions of people, and they are apparently planning with 20 of their, not hugest cities, but larger cities in the upland area to be receivers of refugees. And I’m gonna find out whether they’re also planning for Transit. I hope they are. But that’s clearly part of the equation.
Jeff Wood (36m 55s):
You also have Jakarta Indonesia’s capital moving their whole capital city to another island in order to avoid the sinking from all the, you know, basically the, the water they’re pumping outta the ground and and lowering the level of their land.
Susan Crawford (37m 8s):
A lot of stories like that in the Indonesian case, it’s a case study because actually the plan is not to move the 11 million residents of Jakarta.
Jeff Wood (37m 16s):
Oh no, yeah, yeah.
Susan Crawford (37m 17s):
It’s basically the civil servants and the community surrounding them. And people don’t hear that when the story is told that Jakarta is moving, they just hear, oh, that sounds sensible. They don’t realize that a lot of people will be left behind by that. Yeah. So you get another underscoring of the big problem,
Jeff Wood (37m 32s):
And I always like to share this fact, but Indonesia is almost the same size as the United States in terms of population, which is pretty amazing to me when you think about everybody talk about India and China and like, you know, the big populations, but there’s a lot of countries out there that are basically the size of the United States, and they have a lot of things to teach us as well. And I think that’s
Susan Crawford (37m 47s):
Interesting. That’s right, that’s true.
Jeff Wood (37m 49s):
You know, I was thinking about the connection you made also, there was an earthquake in Charleston at some point. And so obviously here in San Francisco, I make those connections and you know, and I moved here, and I’ve known this for a long time, and I think a lot of folks know this. They understand that earthquakes are not good, but there’s an extra not good about going living in the marina, right? This is something that I would, you know, I have, when I moved here back in, in 2005, and I moved into San Francisco in thousand six, I had friends that wanted to move to San Francisco who were college friends and or high school friends. And they said, well, where should I go? And I would say, don’t go to the marina. There’s a map here. Look at this map. It’s a liquifaction zone map. Don’t live in any of these red zones and you’ll should be okay. Most of it’s bedrock. There’s 48 hills here, you’ll be okay.
Jeff Wood (38m 30s):
And I, I find that very interesting in thinking about, you know, how the national media covers San Francisco and other places at the moment. There’s real threats like liquefaction zones and daytime flooding and those types of things. And then there’s stuff that we can work it out in eventually. You know, like the office vacancies and stuff is not as big a deal as say, you know, having your city flooded 240 days a year, but that 240 day year flooding is maybe more important than some of these kind of sensational things that we’re talking about. And maybe it’s this stuff that’s going on in Florida in Charleston and Houston with rain that’s 60 inches in seven days or whatever it was in Houston for through the hurricane. That might be more important. And so maybe we should focus on that.
Jeff Wood (39m 10s):
I’m, and so again, it makes me wonder like what your thoughts are on the national discussion, what people think is important versus what is actually important.
Susan Crawford (39m 18s):
I wanna give a shout out to the commercial real estate problem because it’s a big problem for cities if they can’t collect the property tax that their states require them to use to run everything else that, that they need to do as a city. So these two things do tie together. And just a footnote on the marina, you have Charleston to thank for the licorice faction risk in the marina because after a big earthquake in Charleston in the late 19th century, the Charleston city father said, what’s great after an earthquake is just to push the rubble out and create some new land and build on top of it. And then they acted as consultants to the city of San Francisco and said, here, go do this. And so the phrase I use liquefaction doesn’t seem to speak to people, I just say it’s gonna turn into cake batter.
Susan Crawford (40m 0s):
Yep. As soon as there’s an earthquake. And that does seem to get people’s attention. Look, as a country, we’re so focused on individual property rights and on profit, and everybody’s in this for themselves, that it’s very difficult to talk about big issues that require government intervention and require a sense that everybody’s entitled to a basic level of safety. You may remember that in March, 2020, we felt as a country, as if we might be at that point actually caring about everybody and not just individuals that passed away, which is too bad. I am hopeful that this era where the change is so visible, it’s so dramatic and so painful.
Susan Crawford (40m 45s):
Painful will cause people to rethink their priorities. But it’s difficult, you know, extreme heat is having to compete with Barbie for coverage and Barbie’s winning by far. And yet there are people dying in America who do not need to die. We also don’t know enough. People aren’t well enough informed about why extreme heat is so dangerous to them. And so there’s a public education element to that too, as there was for Covid. But look, we have a structural opportunity to think again about what the role of institutions of government is, why we elect people. We don’t elect them just because they’re popular or we think somehow they look good in their suits.
Susan Crawford (41m 29s):
We actually elect them because they’re supposed to protect us and give everybody in this country an opportunity to thrive at our best. Americans are nevers cynical. They do recognize this need to care about everybody among us, but it vanishes pretty quickly. And I think that because this summer’s the coolest summer we’ll ever experience in our lifetimes, we might start thinking differently.
Jeff Wood (41m 58s):
Do you think that your book is displayed prominently at local Charleston bookstores?
Susan Crawford (42m 2s):
It was. When I went to speak about it, they made a big fuss over me and Reverend Arby and I actually did it, all of my events in Charleston work made jointly with people from the book. And Reverend Darby and I were downtown in the main bookstore, and then many, many, many copies of the book out. So yes, it was displayed prominently, and I’ll be back, I’m going to the Charleston Literary Festival to talk about the peril to Charleston. I think in general, cities don’t want to be alarmist about their futures. There is some sense in Charleston that the city is blessed somehow, a holy city, that the storms keep missing it. And maybe that’ll keep happening. But more and more people are acknowledging that they live in a, in a highly risky area.
Susan Crawford (42m 46s):
Whether or not they’ll act on that is, it’s difficult, it’s hard to see. And that that’s where this element of some rule for government to say, you really shouldn’t be living in these highly risky areas, is seems to me appropriate.
Jeff Wood (42m 60s):
What’s been the reaction? I mean, you’ve been down there and talked to folks about it, and obviously there’s a few folks in the book maybe feel like they might’ve been painted in a negative light. I can think of a certain city planner, but you know, I’m curious what the reaction’s been and what people have said if they’ve read it. Do you think that the mayor, the former Mayor Riley, has read the book?
Susan Crawford (43m 19s):
Oh, that’s interesting. I suspect he hasn’t. I think the current mayor has read the book a pretty confident he has. The reaction was, from everybody I talked to was a sense that they all know this. This is just writing down what everybody knows, but that it took an outsider to actually tell the story in detail that because of the raging politeness, because of the worries about harming property values in the city and the concern, there’s still a sense that if you talk about climate change, you’re in league with Al Gore somehow. And that’s, that’s not a great look, but sea level rise. They all see it and they know it’s happening.
Susan Crawford (44m 1s):
And so there was pretty widespread acknowledgement that I was just telling the truth and that it was good. I was an outsider. I think the city feels, the city leaders themselves feel that. I didn’t acknowledge sufficiently what they’ve tried to do. And after I finished writing the book, they outlawed building on Phil in the Charleston suburbs, which is a good idea. And they’re working on an integrated water plan, and they’re working on the plan for the wall. All of that is in motion. I think that they are acting within structures that are very difficult and with a real lack of money. Their bonding authority right now is only about $120 million. That’s the only Overhead they have. And yet they’re facing billions of dollars in changes that are needed.
Jeff Wood (44m 45s):
If folks wanna read about the truth, where can they, where can they do? So the book is Charleston Race Water in the Coming Storm.
Susan Crawford (44m 52s):
Oh, thank you Jeff. That’s so kind of you. Yeah. Charleston race water in the coming Storm, your local independent bookstore will send it to you. And I’d be delighted to talk to anybody about it. And it was a great privilege to work on this book. It feels like the most important story I could have worked on. And I, I wanna keep going. I wanna help with this strategic relocation set of policies. As difficult as they are going to be for cities, it seems essential if we’re not gonna plunge millions of Americans into misery.
Jeff Wood (45m 23s):
I read it. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a good take on, on what’s going on with sea level rise. As you know, as I mentioned before, I’m deep into this stuff and so there’s a lot of, like I said, truth in here and I really appreciate it. Susan, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.
Susan Crawford (45m 37s):
I really enjoyed talking to you, Jeff. Thank you.
