The New Math of Climate Resilience

April 18, 2024

By Jim Morrison

When architecture and engineering students started canvassing her Norfolk, Virginia, neighborhood asking about flooding, Karen Speights was ready.

She'd moved back into her childhood home in the largely Black neighborhood of Chesterfield Heights in 2008 with a plan to stay only a few years to help her aging mother. Not long after the move, a nor'easter hit. She and her mother were on the first floor eating dinner when they saw water flowing underneath the house through the floor vents. But they weren't worried. The house had never flooded.

Within minutes, though, they were splashing about in water over their shoes, moving things higher as small shocks nipped at them when their low outlets filled with water. "It came in so fast, just like a wave," Speights remembers.

Insurance paid for repairs. A year and a half later, it happened again when Hurricane Irene smashed into Norfolk.

That storm triggered a series of activities — Norfolk winning a $112 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) National Disaster Resilience Competition in 2016 and the implementation of the Ohio Creek Watershed Project, which was completed in 2023. The latter effort is different in a few ways, including its start as a student project and the deliberate and thoughtful community engagement that Speights and her neighbors provided.

It also made social vulnerability — rather than just property values — a key driver in deciding where to invest in resiliency. In fact, in the city's HUD proposal, it calculated that social benefits would provide 49 percent of the project's value, while less than five percent came from property protection.

Norfolk officials and others expect Ohio Creek may now be a model for how planners approach resiliency planning, and it's happening at a time when federal funding of water resource investments is getting a second look. In February, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed a rule change requiring that environmental, social, and economic benefits be considered for federal water resource projects.

The start of a solution

The students who spoke to Chesterfield Heights residents were from nearby Hampton University and Norfolk's Old Dominion University. The beginnings of a solution to the flooding and other problems related to sea level rise and the impacts of climate change in the area came in the form of the students' Tidewater Rising Resiliency Design Challenge project — developed by a local nonprofit, Wetlands Watch, in conjunction with nearby universities. They met with civic leagues, explained their plan to canvass residents, and then went door-to-door gathering experiences.

"They went through the neighborhood talking to us, and that's when everything really took off," Speights says.

It turned into an innovative way to calculate the benefits of a resilience project by going beyond property value, which is the usual focus of analyses used for federal projects funded by the Army Corps and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). "Investments should prioritize the most vulnerable first," noted an Urban Institute 2021 case study report. "Flood mitigation infrastructure is, ultimately, a safety net."

The report noted that people with low incomes and people of color "are undervalued and frequently overlooked in public investment." Because nontraditional social and environmental indicators were used in addition to traditional property and economic measures, the report concluded, the Ohio Creek project's benefit-cost ratio was 10 times higher than it would have been in a standard approach.

"The breadth of what was included in the considerations was much wider for the Ohio Creek Watershed Project than what we saw for other projects," says Rebecca Marx, a research associate in the Climate and Communities practice area of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a coauthor of the report. "It really hits that there are multiple dimensions of resilience."

That also was the focus of the Army Corps' proposed rule change for water resource investments, announced in February with public comments due by April. The proposed principles, requirements, and guidelines text (PR&G) notes that the "focus on national economic gains sometimes resulted in an unduly narrow benefit-cost comparison of the monetized and quantified effects" of investments. For decades, feasibility studies by the Army Corps have focused on property values.

"The PR&G emphasizes that relevant environmental, social, and economic effects should all be considered and that both quantified and unquantified information will form the basis for evaluating and comparing potential federal investments in water resources," it continues. "This more integrated approach would allow decision makers to view a more complete range of effects of alternative actions and lead to more socially beneficial investments."

Writing a new rulebook

Norfolk has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast, according to a report from the Virginia Institute for Marine Science. Adding to the issue are the area's many creeks and wetlands that have been filled in over three centuries. Today, those creeks flood repeatedly.

Chesterfield Heights sits along Ohio Creek, a tributary of the Elizabeth River, where wave and storm action in recent decades has eroded the shoreline. Isolated from the rest of the city years ago by an interstate, the neighborhood has only two entrances — and one of them often closes because of flooding from storms and high tides.

A century-old neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Places, Chesterfield Heights features interpretations of Colonial Revival and Queen Anne architectural styles. In the Ohio Creek project, the neighborhood is joined by nearby Grandy Village, which has more than 300 public housing units. The two neighborhoods, where the median household income of $28,600 is significantly lower than Norfolk's median of $44,500, are among the city's most socially vulnerable. Most of the 450 houses protected by the project are occupied by people who meet the state's low-to-moderate income definition.

In August 2011, when Hurricane Irene slammed into Virginia, killing five people and leaving 1.1 million without power while causing tens of millions of dollars in damages, it also flooded Karen Speights's house for the second time in almost as many years. Her insurance spent more than $80,000 on repairs.

"They come in, they fix your flooring, they give you some new appliances, they put in some cabinets," Speights says. But that wouldn't stop her house from flooding again. "I was asking the question: What can I do to prevent this?"

As part of the two-phase HUD competition, localities were required to look at both recovering from a disaster — Hurricane Irene, in Norfolk's case — and protecting people and property in the future. HUD didn't specify how to evaluate benefits for proposed projects, so Norfolk staffers pushed the boundaries.

Rather than just considering property values to determine investing in resilience infrastructure, Norfolk also focused on community vulnerability. Looking at everything from mental health effects to environmental benefits to neighborhood cohesion, the city and partners asked who would be most harmed if resilience measures were not taken.

"HUD didn't really write any playbook or restrictions or guidance on how you calculate benefits," says Kyle Spencer, Norfolk's chief resilience officer. "So, we were able to put numbers — quantitative numbers — to things like social cohesion, environmental justice, you know, those sorts of more maybe ambiguous things."

Norfolk planners and officials, with the help of the firm Arcadis, prepared a 354-page benefit-cost analysis for their application. It evaluated benefits in four categories: resiliency values, such as physical damages; environmental benefits, such as reduced stormwater runoff; social and recreational benefits, such as increased physical activity and reduced mental stress; and economic revitalization, such as redevelopment of the public housing community.

They used a variety of metrics to justify benefits, including the Social Vulnerability Index developed by the University of South Carolina's Hazards Vulnerability & Resilience Institute and FEMA's Hazus program. Methodologies from Earth Economics, economic and health benefit studies by the Trust for Public Land, the East Carolina University Physical Inactivity Cost Calculator, and FEMA's values for ecosystem services also served as valuable resources.

"The city and their partners really did put together projects that looked across social vulnerability and put together solutions that transform that community," says Emily Steinhilber, director of Climate Resilient Coasts and Watersheds for the Environmental Defense Fund in Virginia, who has followed the project from conception. "I think it's a really unique and shining example of what can be done."

Several interesting circumstances helped the application, and the final plan, come together. After seeing the university students' presentation, Norfolk city staffers included Chesterfield Heights in a five-day Dutch Dialogues charrette in 2016 and invited the students. The charrette featured representatives from the Royal Netherlands Embassy and Waggonner and Ball Architects, based in New Orleans, who presented design ideas that combined Dutch approaches to "living with the water" with American gray infrastructure expertise. Their ideas became part of the first phase of the competition's application. The city's HUD-approved plan included a combination of gray and green infrastructure.

Paula Shea, AICP, the acting director of planning for the city, says the charrette drove a change in the solutions proposed in the grant application, combining hard infrastructure with nature-based solutions.

Norfolk also benefited during that time from being named one of the first resilient cities in 2013 by the Rockefeller Foundation, a program that provided for a resilience officer and support for identifying and sharing innovative climate crisis strategies before ending in 2019.

Forging bonds with the community

The relationship building that started with the students continued and grew once civic leaders and the City of Norfolk picked up the mantle. Throughout the project, it was cultivated through some 40 meetings and events and more than 20 quarterly updates mailed to residents.

Zach Robinson, an architectural and urban designer now working as a project manager at Brooklyn Navy Yard, was an architecture student at Hampton University at the time of the project. He went door-to-door in 2014. He says residents originally were skeptical but grew to trust students with encouragement from civic leaders. "I remember being able to have genuine conversations with people," says Robinson, who later worked on the project as a community liaison with Work Program Architects, a design firm hired by the city.

Residents told students that basements were flooding. One house might have a sump pump keeping their basement dry, while a neighbor without one would flood. They heard about the problems getting in and out of the neighborhood when one or both of its two access roads flooded.

"What we learned from going into the community was that these house-by-house solutions often create more problems for other houses that can't keep up with the upgrades," Robinson says. That led to the exploration for neighborhood-wide answers.

The final design incorporated versions of several solutions from the 2016 Tidewater Rising report, including a living shoreline that helps mitigate flooding. Permeable pavers that replace asphalt on one street and bio-retention cisterns along sidewalks filter pollutants and slow runoff. Raising one of the two roads into the neighborhood allows for safe passage, even during storms. Notably, the plan did not recommend raising houses after the students' report said that might endanger the neighborhood's historic status and would sacrifice its "porch culture."

"The residents really appreciated that we actually took the time to talk to them and hang out with them and hear their perspective instead of trying to get an agenda . . . pushed through," Robinson says.

Extensive engagement continued even after the HUD grant was issued in 2016, although the start of the COVID-19 lockdown two weeks before groundbreaking in 2020 forced a switch to online meetings. That wasn't always easy. Many of the civic league members were older and lacked familiarity with things like Zoom meetings, so the city also used email to keep residents involved, Spencer says.

One example of the project partners' efforts to maintain community engagement — and buy-in — came in 2018. To help residents visualize the changes to come, city workers brought in hay bales and used them to create a mock-up of the proposed berm, Spencer says.

"It's one thing to look at a two-dimensional idea of what a berm looks like, it's another thing to have [it] in front of your house, [changing] that viewshed," says Doug Beaver, who was Norfolk's chief resilience officer when the project began and is now a deputy city manager.

Residents were invited to pick the pavers and the pattern for the permeable street, and although Norfolk city parks typically aren't lit, there is lighting in the new park connecting the two neighborhoods, because that was what neighbors wanted. It was "very hands-on" and personal, Spencer says, noting that "a lot of our interactions were in the yards or in the street."

A plan come to life

The Ohio Creek project relies on traditional infrastructure, including 1,000 feet of floodwall, 17,000 feet of stormwater pipes, and two new pump stations. One road was raised and moved, and a tidal gate was added.

Natural solutions include a living shoreline and restored wetlands. Street-side, concrete-lined bioswales planted with perennials retain and slow infiltration of stormwater. A resilience park — designed to flood and then let the water gently seep into the land — connects the Chesterfield Heights and Grandy Village neighborhoods. New amenities include a fishing pier, basketball courts, walking trails, playing fields with underdrains, and hundreds of newly planted trees.

With construction complete, residents and the city continue to discuss what works. Residents remain unsure about the bioswales, which some say look like weedy ditches.

The Ohio Creek project, Spencer says, remains an experiment in seeing not only what resilience measures work but also how they will be managed in the future. Neither the plan nor the project partners identified the department responsible for the long-term maintenance of those bioswales, for instance, although the stormwater division has since taken them on.

Project costs, including materials, grew as things progressed and the city also came up against a federal deadline for using the grant. To make it work, the city reassessed the plan and budget, and contributed $9 million from a community development block grant and money set aside for flood projects. That brought funding to $121 million. Steinhilber cautions that the cost and the construction's disruption to the neighborhood won't make it easy to replicate. "I hope that we can figure out how to do this across more areas that are at risk," she adds.

As for Chesterfield Heights resident Karen Speights, she's staying. She remodeled her house again, and she recently learned that her flood insurance bill, which once peaked at $5,200 a year, dropped to $948 in 2023.

"I'm here for good. I'm not going anywhere," she says.

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