The Plan To Literally Expand New York City - Cheddar Explains

Hello! I produced this video. Pop any questions you have below!

"…welcoming to all income levels…" I have lived in New York City all my life, and I can assure you that’s not how this would play out.

I get the feeling that even if this plan went through, it would NOT be allocated towards affordable housing.

As a New Yorker, if someone here puts the words “housing” and “affordable” together, it’s a bigger lie than Hitler’s promise of “Just this bit of Czechoslovakia and THAT’S IT.”

I love that “football field” is a common unit of measurement in America. they’ll measure with fucking anything as long as it’s not meters.

Yes of course it would be “affordable housing”, haha. That’s always what it says in the planning proposal. The property developers ribs must be quaking with laughter as they pen that in.

“Affordable housing” 😂😂😂 Funniest thing I’ve heard this century, good one 🤣🤣🤣

After the Great Storm of 1900 (deadliest hurricane in US history), Galveston built a seawall and began the Grade Raising, which raised the entire island 10+ feet. This took about 14 years, but it greatly improved living on the island. Today most new homes are being built at least 20 feet above sea level to give added security.

I think it is interesting and important that this land reclamation plan includes a wetland barrier. Obviously environmental risk assessments will have to be done to try and find out if the destruction this project would inevitably cause is worth the potential benefits it is meant to bring. I am just glad that “green infrastructure” is being factored in to this plan because it is a tool that is so often left out of development projects. Green infrastructure is the use of natural elements (like man-made wetlands, storm water ponds, parking lot rain gardens, etc.) to mitigate problems like flooding in urban areas. There is a huge urban development project going on in downtown Toronto right now that will use a lot of green infrastructure to solve water management problems as well.

What would I really love to see? The post-pandemic closed offices being turned into apartments. We would have to change a ton of zoning laws to make that happen, but I think it could really help.

As a Dutchman I approve of this plan. It should be called New Amsterdam 😉

There’s no way housing in this hypothetical lower Manhattan neighborhood would actually be affordable. 1 bedroom apartments in lower Manhattan go for $3,000+. There’s also so many empty buildings in this city that could help address the housing issue.

To me, it seems like the thing that separates this from other infrastructure that NYC might struggle with is that this should pay for itself while infrastructure is paid tangentially. It could also help connect Manhattan to State Island and the southern part of Brooklyn. Making those connections easier could even further make housing more affordable in Manhattan based on some recent research on home prices.

forgive me for sounding cynical, but having lived in new york, i highly doubt that adding this land would help the housing crisis in any significant way. whenever new chunks of land become available in manhattan, it is immediately used to create housing for the wealthy, a fair portion of which is owned simply for speculative purposes. this would be another instance of the hudson yards development effort.

As a person from New Orleans, building on top of land that is supposed to be water worked out really well for us.

Thanks for a really interesting and informative video. YouTube channels like yours are so much more interesting than tv.

The los angeles harbor commission has been enlarging the land of terminal island. But they have also been raising the island level when they redo an area . They are compensating for sea level rise but also to offset the slow sinking do to oil production causing terminal island slowly sinking.

Literally Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island need so many improvements. It is not all about Manhattan and Brooklyn

reclaiming land to fix a shortage of housing but the land is worth a zillion dollars, does that not defeat its own purpose? New York can't even build a subway in modern times

Literally hire the Dutch to do this project, including the subway system and bicycle lanes and walkable neighbourhoods. We know what we're doing and we're great at building cities + unlike American cities we do not go bankrupt.