First, the city has a long way to go.
“There’s a multitude of different climatic events that impact the city,” says Francis Suarez, Miami’s new mayor.
He checks off a handful of threats: sea level rise, intense rainfall, hurricanes that produce up to 8 feet of storm surges, and king tide flooding. “They’re real,” he says, sitting in a 40th-floor conference room in downtown Miami. “Forget about the modeling, forget about 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now. I’ve seen them.”
Residents just voted in favor of the Miami Forever Bond, a $400 million general obligation bond intended to shore up the city’s ability to withstand extreme climate events. “They have voted to tax themselves,” Suarez says. “That’s very unusual, but when you think of your most prized possession, oftentimes your biggest investment is your home.”
Although famous luxury buildings such as the late Zaha Hadid’s upcoming One Thousand Museum or the architect Rafael Viñoly’s One River Point might be able to ride out a storm unscathed, thousands who live in houses and older apartment buildings are vulnerable to storms and flooding.
The City of Tomorrow
What seems likely, planners say, is that in the middle to long term, even Miami’s lower-class neighborhoods will be modified, upgraded, walled in, and, wherever possible, literally jacked up. It will become a city that’s elevated to withstand a weather-related siege.
In an area along Brickell Bay Drive, which features multiple buildings that were constructed in the 1970s and 1980s, “what will most likely be the solution there is a raised sea wall,” says Suarez. “You are not going to raise all those buildings to the necessary height, and the buildings that are adjacent to them are newer and built at a higher level.”
Water management might function in tandem with water removal. Suarez suggests creating a handsome urban reservoir. “Where [water] pools, how it pools, shouldn’t be something that creates disjunctions. It should be something that creates an enhancement of our landscape,” he says. And then, of course, there will be pumps. (The “meat and potato” stuff, he explains.)
There are also, Mowry says, possible modifications to the buildings from the ’70s and ’80s that could raise them to a resilience comparable to that of Monad Terrace.
“Water-tight envelopes,” for instance, which are basically membranes that keep rain and sea spray from soaking through a building’s walls, should probably be a basic requirement, he says. (New luxury buildings are generally made from nonporous materials.) Without that coating, even if a building survives a storm, its masonry could get soaked through, leading to toxic mold or rot.