The 709-unit community, called Sendero Verde, is an affordable housing development. It is also a clue to a longstanding riddle: How do we make Americans care about climate change?

A version of this riddle is being posed by proponents of the emergent “abundance” movement, a drive for political change that is gaining attention in progressive policy circles. But the endorsed solutions fail to anticipate how climate change is altering the economics of everyday life. 

As journalist Ezra Klein and others promoting the abundance idea argue, the key question of the moment is, What do we need more of and how do we get it? Their response is a long list of national, largely middle- and working-class needs, including an expanded national electrical grid powered by inexpensive, carbon-free energy; greatly extended transit systems; affordable housing; and a renewed construction base that will supply a wealth of good-paying jobs. As for how to get it, abundance proponents call for an aggressive reduction of regulatory red tape to enable the rapid development of the needed infrastructure. 

The movement has been rightly praised for its potential for effective coalition building on the political left. If there is a single lesson to be observed from the present moment, it lies in the galvanizing energy of swift and decisive governmental action, even when its object is a dismantling of national economic, cultural and moral power. But a key response to the What do we need element of the abundance equation is overlooked. 

We need not just carbon-free energy but a meaningful resilience to climate disruption — both physical and economic. The abundance theorists are largely silent on this point, but it may be the strongest card in their hand.

Climate Economics

It is increasingly evident that Americans do not view climate change as an urgent issue. While nearly 70% acknowledge that global warming is happening, only about a third believe it to be a major problem — a proportion that has fallen in recent years. In fact, few Americans rank climate change among even the 10 most challenging issues confronting the nation. Economic issues, such as inflation and the cost of healthcare, top that list.

Lurking behind rising inflation, however, is a clear climate-related signal. Insurance rates for autos and housing are climbing at unprecedented rates due, in no small part, to a rising incidence of climate-driven natural disasters. The cost of the average auto insurance policy increased by an ominous 31% over the past two years and has emerged as one of the leading drivers of core inflation. Also sensitive to destructive weather events, the average cost of homeowner insurance policies increased by 24% over the most recent three-year period. Inflation in the cost of food, due in part to climate-driven losses in agriculture production, is projected to reach up to 3% annually over the next decade. 

Another issue high on the list of critical national challenges, according to public opinion, is the national deficit. In 2024, the four most costly items in the U.S. budget — social security, federal health insurance programs, defense spending and interest payments on the national debt — accounted for more than 100% of our annual tax revenues, leaving the rest of the budget to be financed through deficit spending. Of the remaining, non-discretionary items, disaster relief in 2024, accounting for a budgeted $68 billion and an additional $110 billion in emergency appropriations, exceeded almost every budget category, including total annual spending on transportation, public health and nutritional assistance programs. 

Only weeks after Congress passed the largest disaster-related supplemental funding bill in U.S. history, the Los Angeles wildfires surpassed Hurricane Katrina as the most costly natural disaster to date, requiring an estimated $250 billion for rebuilding. The federal share of this bill is not yet established, but the rising economic toll of climate-driven disasters promises to be an era-defining political issue.

The emerging economic threat of climate change suggests a somewhat surprising outcome: The long-delayed realization that what was once considered our grandchildren’s problem is now our own is arriving not in the form of hurricane-force winds, but as a letter of assessment from an insurer. Climate change may not pose an immediate danger to the lives of most Americans, but it is starting to chip away at our economic well-being. 

This suggests an additional response to the What do we need more of formulation of abundance proponents. We need greater climate resilience in our homes, communities and economic systems. The green energy infrastructure positioned at the center of the abundance movement, no matter how vast, accelerated and carbon-free, will not alone deliver the necessary physical and economic resilience to the climate-driven disruptions we face.

The Sendero Verde Model

To see why, let’s return to the Sendero Verde community in East Harlem. Fast-tracked through a city program providing funding and technical expertise for the construction of all-electric housing projects, the community addresses the critical need for more affordable housing in New York. More than 10% of the units are set aside for formerly homeless residents, and all units meet income thresholds for affordability.

Were the apartments to be fully powered by renewable energy generated off-site, this would be a model project for the abundance movement. But power generation is only half of the carbon-free energy equation. More noteworthy than the source of green energy to power the apartments is how little is needed. 

Sendero Verde is the world’s largest certified passive house project, a style of construction that achieves high energy efficiency. Equipped with triple-glazed windows, advanced air-sealing construction, ventilation systems and highly efficient heat pumps, each apartment uses 50% to 60% less energy for heating and cooling than conventional affordable housing units.

This halving of energy costs both increases long-term affordability for residents and renders them less vulnerable to fluctuating prices over time. Utility costs are further reduced through the collection, storage and use of stormwater on site, limiting the volume of municipal water needed for irrigation and stormwater utility fees. 

Sendero Verde’s location is an additional source of economic resilience for residents, who live just blocks from a subway stop and can take advantage of Manhattan’s vast walkability. Going car-free in a city today allows people to allocate 20% of their monthly income to other expenses. Sendero Verde was also designed to provide greater protection against extreme weather conditions. As a byproduct of high-efficiency insulation, indoor temperatures change very slowly in response to power disruptions in both hot and cold weather.

The threat of displacement due to flooding is low as well, as all units are at least two stories above ground level, along with essential mechanical systems. And there is almost no ambient noise from the city streets thanks to the sound insulation of passive house construction.  

In a climate-changed world, these benefits — a stability of household expenses, reduced risk of displacement from natural disasters and the ability to weather long power outages during heat waves — will soon be viewed as essentials of contemporary life. None of these core elements of climate resilience is provided by carbon-free energy alone.

It is in this simplified formulation — equating the whole of climate change management to the narrower goal of a clean energy grid — that the abundance theorists fail to fully leverage the power of their critique. If it is to accrue a broader base of support, the movement needs a better story than a carbon-free grid; Sendero Verde is a good first draft.

The Politics Of Resilience

Climate change progressives have underestimated the power of resilience as a compelling political narrative for decades. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I was surprised to discover just how much warming in cities was attributable to the urban heat island effect (the concentration of buildings and heat-absorbing materials) as opposed to the global greenhouse effect. Both forces, to be sure, have an accelerating influence on urban temperatures, but only one can be moderated through local action alone. Why not address the warming challenge on both fronts by working to minimize the intensity of urban heat and reduce planet-warming emissions?

To present such a proposal at an academic conference back then was often viewed as aligning with the propaganda machinery of the “American oil cartel.” The logic there, I came to understand, was that any alternative strategy for reducing the threat of extreme temperatures in cities was a distraction from the core aim of carbon emissions reduction.

This thinking relied on a wager that has yielded few dividends in the intervening years. The potential to avert dangerous levels of heat, flooding, drought and wildfire through aggressive (or even moderate) emissions reductions has not been realized. 

We have now passed the absolute global warming threshold set by the Paris Climate Agreement for the avoidance of highly destabilizing climate impacts, and the consequences are upon us. In response, abundance theorists emphasize the need for a clean energy transition — which, even in the most optimistic scenarios, will yield almost no protection from extreme weather for many decades.

Without equally advocating for climate resilience, they fail to grasp the reality of what Americans need more of right now. It is true that reducing emissions is the only route to solving the climate crisis, but these reductions are best delivered as the quiet army inside a Trojan Horse of climate and economic resilience. 

Consider, for example, the titling and composition of the largest climate-related bill ever enacted by Congress, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The emissions reductions it sought were delivered not in the form of clean energy mandates, but as incentives for better performing vehicles, lower operating cost HVAC systems and green manufacturing jobs. The Biden Administration’s decision to emphasize the consumption side of the carbon-free economy was based, in part, on the spectacular failure of emissions-related bills dating back to the Clinton Administration, such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003 and the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

Few Americans may care to understand the inner workings of the global greenhouse effect or the technological processes through which electricity is generated and delivered to their homes. But they do care about affordable housing, jobs and, increasingly, avoiding displacement and bankruptcy from extreme weather events.

Reimagining Urbanization

My concern with the abundance movement’s call for a dramatic acceleration in the pace and scope of infrastructure development is not with the scale of its ambition, but with the modesty of its aims. To rapidly construct millions of new affordable housing units without ensuring that they lower the demand for energy through their construction, moderate the risk of flooding through their design and enhance the quality of life within their communities is to set one’s sights too low. 

Yes, we urgently need more affordable housing, high speed rail and cheap renewable energy. We also need accelerated investments in these areas to respond to the inexorable reality of a rapidly changing climate: housing that is more resilient to weather extremes, layered and redundant networks for transportation and building-integrated power generation that can operate during periods of grid disruption.

We must do more than expedite our permitting processes; we must reimagine urbanization. It is in this reimagining that we find a compelling story for climate politics.  

For the techno-optimists like Klein and other abundance advocates, emerging technologies for generating abundant, carbon-free energy (such as nuclear fusion) and scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide are an exciting and future-oriented platform for managing climate change and amassing political power.

An ostensible benefit of these innovations, as with most technology, is that they require no fundamental changes to how we design and experience our communities. Fusion reactors can be sited outside of cities, avoiding the need to transform our homes into small-scale power plants; machines for sequestering carbon dioxide negate the need to change how we commute to work, structure our food systems or incorporate nature into our neighborhoods.

But avoiding change can also mean continuing harmful patterns. Cheap, abundant energy enables us to drive our cars without worrying about how our auto dependency impacts our well-being and amplifies climate risk. The same argument can be made for technological change in the form of hyper-connectivity, reduced social engagement and remote learning.

Perhaps more than any other environmental challenge, climate impacts are only moderately responsive to technological fixes. A recent study of heat stress in large cities assessed the capacity of an array of strategies — both technological and design-based — to cool down urban neighborhoods during hot weather. Not only were nature-based solutions, such as an expansion of street trees, found to be more effective than shading buildings with solar panels or repaving streets with reflective materials, green design outperformed technology in the hottest settings by a factor of four. 

The same is generally true for flooding, drought and wildfires: Designing our communities to absorb and retain more rainwater and to limit expansion into high-risk areas is more effective in managing the impacts of extreme climate events than any technology presently available or in development. 

An additional downside of the techno-optimist worldview is that it tends to concentrate power in private hands. The project of retrofitting our cities for climate resilience will be long lasting, uneven in deployment and costly (albeit less so than the constant rebuilding it positions us to avoid). It is also a project fully within the purview of local governments and community institutions.

Outsourcing climate change management to corporate energy companies, auto manufacturers and, soon enough, AI companies risks allowing these entities to impede progress when it suits other market or political objectives (see: Elon Musk). 

The long-term project of a physical redesign of our cities for climate resilience properly positions political control within the communities confronting intensifying risk. Abundance proponents should acknowledge a truism well known to community planners: Technology centralizes power; human-scaled design disperses it. 

Herein lies an expanded narrative for the abundance movement. The most effective means of responding to climate change also enhances our physical and economic resilience: affordable housing that generates its own power and requires less energy use, communities redesigned to support a diversity of inexpensive transportation options, public greenspaces that double as critical infrastructure for heat regulation and flood management, the opportunity to grow your own food. The early returns from communities designed to deliver these amenities show them to be popular, with a growing number of U.S. cities adopting policies to integrate their affordable housing and climate resilience investments. 

Catalyzing this movement through an acceleration of public investment and regulatory approval is no less imperative than an infrastructure agenda focused on renewable power transmission and conventional approaches to affordable housing. A resilient abundance differs only in delivering more of what Americans say they want.  

The abundance theorists are correct to call for a renewed national approach to undertake big projects, but there is an austerity to their ambitions. Our crossing of the planetary threshold for tolerable warming has fundamentally changed the political moment: Moving forward, there is no economic resilience to be had for most Americans absent a climate resilience. This is a story still waiting to be told.

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Christened in the press as the “Green Dot” map, the proposal ranks among the most profoundly unsuccessful plans ever issued by a municipal body and would never be put to a vote in the city council. But it would give life to an idea that has only grown more compelling in the subsequent decades: We cannot engineer our way out of climate change; retreat is inevitable — and not just in coastal cities.

The Green Dot map’s remarkably brief tenure can be attributed in part to its proponents’ failure to adhere to the most basic rule of community planning: Never designate the where before building support for the what. It is possible that a proposal pairing the creation of floodable space somewhere in New Orleans, alongside the offer of generous and non-compulsory property buyouts, could have engendered community support — indeed, more than a decade after the city’s almost complete inundation, space for a large floodable park was assembled from publicly acquired land in Gentilly.

But because the commission launched into climate adaptation with a list of neighborhoods to be condemned, an opposing army immediately assembled. Today, the Green Dot map endures only as a precisely-how-not-to-do-it example in urban planning textbooks and, until recently, as a small but popular French brasserie situated in one of the neighborhoods targeted for abandonment: the Green Dot Cafe (4.6 stars).

Almost 20 years after the devastation of Katrina, neither New Orleans nor the United States national government has developed a policy framework for planned retreat. Much of New Orleans recovered and even thrived in that time, but some neighborhoods today are characterized more by land vacancy than occupation and often lack the most basic of community amenities: schools for neighborhood children, markets and restaurants within walking distance, churches and other community institutions.

Most importantly, enshrining a “right to return” everywhere in post-Katrina New Orleans resulted in a greater resilience to flood risk almost nowhere. The most serious risk confronting residents today is not a levee-topping storm surge but a bowl-filling deluge. New Orleans now floods annually from heavy storm events that overwhelm the drainage network of a city that sits at a lower elevation than the water that surrounds it. A more extensive network of floodable parks is arguably the most effective strategy to prevent regular flooding of streets, homes and businesses, but there is no plan yet in place to bring this outcome about, even in low-lying areas that remain largely depopulated.

New Orleans is not unique in the extreme risk of climate change it confronts. All major cities are now at an elevated risk of three climate impacts for which they are largely unprepared: extreme flooding, extreme drought and extreme heat. This is not a future risk but one that is daily unfolding across the U.S.

In the Southwest, rising temperatures are fueling elevated rates of evaporation and years of drought, forcing a growing number of communities to rely on the regular delivery of drinking water; in the Midwest, the intensity of heat and humidity may soon render basic municipal services, such as garbage collection, too hazardous to operate during heat waves; along the east coast, high tides pull oceanside homes into the sea in calm weather. To watch a video of barrier island homes breaking up and falling into the Atlantic is — for me, at least — to experience initially a sense of awe at the destructive potential of a gradual but incessantly rising ocean. The emotion that lingers, however, is not one of wonder but of shame.

Only the most scientifically and institutionally incapable of societies would experience such impacts from annual weather events that can be forecast years in advance. Perhaps more than the most violent of storms, it is the slowest-moving climate impacts that are most clarifying: The era of retreat is underway. It is an era for which we find ourselves remarkably unprepared.

Our governmental programs for managing a rising risk of flooding assume three principal forms:

1. Engineered infrastructure to divert large quantities of rainfall and contain rising bodies of water;
2. Emergency response protocols for evacuation and post-event recovery when those systems are overwhelmed; and
3. Federally subsidized insurance and loan programs for assisting homeowners in rebuilding.

None of these is designed to relocate residents and property outside of high-hazard zones in advance of extreme weather events. Indeed, they make retreat less likely.

Homeowners residing outside of federally designated high-risk flood zones assume urban drainage systems and levees will prevent flooding, despite the fact that an estimated 40% of all claims made under the National Flood Insurance Program involved homes situated outside of these zones. The availability of federal assistance to rebuild, even for property owners in floodplains who elect to not carry flood insurance, enables residents to remain within increasingly hazardous zones for which no private insurance company would issue a policy.

The combined result is a steadily rising level of risk that is rooted as much in institutional negligence as in rapidly changing environmental conditions. Were it the stated aim of the U.S. government to maximize the human and economic toll of climate change on its citizens, its policy framework may not look much different from our current array of disaster response programs.

As I write, tens of thousands of property owners are rebuilding and repairing homes, frequently with public dollars, across an expansive area of Florida that was inundated by Hurricane Ian in 2022. A large percentage of these homes were previously rebuilt following one or more of the 10 hurricanes that have blown through southwest Florida since their initial construction — again, frequently with public dollars. It is a statistical certainty that many will again require governmental assistance for rebuilding in the coming years.

Were each of these homes required to carry a commercially available flood insurance policy, it is likely not one would be rebuilt — the risk of future flood or wind damage during the standard period of a mortgage is rated at 100%. But with few prohibitions on where homes can be constructed along the Florida coast and the policy commitment of the federal government to provide disaster recovery funds independent of projected climate risk, the debris fields of Florida’s next hurricane are at this moment being populated.

As high-risk climate zones expand, other national governments are restructuring programs for disaster recovery. Commencing in the 1990s, the Netherlands — a country perhaps more at risk to sea level rise than any non-island nation — undertook a program at sharp odds with the U.S. approach to managing climate risk. Rather than raise and reinforce levee systems along rising water bodies, as has been the strategy in post-Katrina New Orleans, the Dutch have pulled their levees back along several urban rivers, requiring homes and businesses in the restored natural floodways to be relocated to higher ground.

The compensation offered is generous and, in some instances, complete neighborhoods have been relocated. But the property buyouts are mandatory; residents must move. Known as the “Room for the River” program, the Dutch approach is a process of planned retreat in advance of the next flooding event; it enhances the long-term welfare of both the relocated property owners and the (far more numerous) people living adjacent to the expanded floodway. The Dutch do not enshrine for their citizens a right of return. What they do enshrine is a right of resilience.

For anyone uncomfortable with the compulsory relocation of residents and business owners from high-risk climate zones, consider what the Canadian province of Quebec did in the aftermath of destructive flooding events in 2017 and 2019 along the Ottawa River. During these floods, a large number of properties in Gatineau flooded twice; after the second inundation, the provincial government predicated disaster relief funds on a requirement that homeowners either use the money to relocate out of the expanding flood zone or, for those choosing to rebuild, consent to a permanent prohibition on any future public relief funds for both present and future property owners.

This “one-and-done” approach to disaster funds in the most hazardous areas alters the usual calculus of property owners considering a buyout option. Those choosing to remain in a high-risk climate zone must contemplate a diminished future resale value should they elect to rebuild. In contrast to post-Ian Florida, a decision to rebuild in the expanded floodplain of the Ottawa River is a decision perhaps to never sell a property that can neither be insured nor receive public disaster funds for future rebuilding.

Whatever the mechanism of retreat — mandatory (Dutch) or quasi-compulsory (Canadian) — success should be gauged in whether vulnerable residents are relocated outside of zones certain to flood again and whether contiguous land is amassed to enhance the resilience of the larger urban population. To justify the substantial public investment needed to acquire property in zones all but certain to flood again, to burn again, to fall into the ocean, the acquired land must be actively managed to mitigate climate threats.

A key distinction between these and the U.S. approach to disaster response is that retreat is understood to be fundamentally a process of land assembly rather than one of land abandonment. The Dutch and the Canadians are not fleeing — they are staying. Retreat is the mode of remaining.

Retreat as a process of land abandonment has its roots in the earliest policy documents on climate adaptation. In the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, retreat was identified as one of three options for climate adaptation and defined as the “abandonment of land structures in vulnerable areas and resettlement of inhabitants.” No mention is made in the report of repurposing abandoned land for enhanced climate resilience, and this omission persists into contemporary U.S. programs focused on climate adaptation.

In contrast to the IPCC formulation, which addresses retreat as the first of three options, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency positions retreat as the last of three possible actions, following the installation of flood defenses without relocation (protection) and retrofitting development to allow for periodic flooding (accommodation). If the most basic aims of climate adaptation are to protect vulnerable populations in advance of the next destructive event and to minimize the number of households ultimately displaced, our retreat-last approach in New Orleans, the Florida coast and, to varying degrees, all over the U.S., is failing on both fronts.

The mindset that positions retreat as abandonment is sustained by an idea that remains central to our national identity. Fueled by a vast expanse of appropriated land and a limitless cache of cheap energy, the American project of the last two centuries has largely centered on a process of continuous land development. Initially in the form of a westward migration and more recently in the form of sprawling urbanization, the most essential engine of American growth remains rooted in an ongoing process of spatial expansion.

Now imperiled by too much water along its coasts and too little within its interior, the American frontier is for the first time contracting. Neither our national identity nor our governing institutions have yet reconciled with the inevitability of a spatial retrenchment. But it is in retrenchment that we may find a new unifying project — particularly in our cities.

The great urban challenge of our time is not simply climate change — it is how to tackle the multi-generational problems of social justice, affordable housing, meaningful employment and other dimensions of community well-being within the context of a rapidly changing climate. Rebuilding our cities, rendered imperative by a delayed response to climate change, will require a radically altered approach to managing flooding, to lessening heat exposure and to coping with drought — and it will require, for all of these purposes, a physical restructuring of our urban landscapes.

Moving forward, every building and land parcel will need to absorb a large fraction of the rainwater it receives, expand green cover for climate regulation and be integrated into a far more decentralized system of power generation and use. This adaptive rebuilding project cannot be separated from other longstanding urban challenges of equal import; it is a central mechanism through which expansive affordable housing, long-delayed environmental justice and a broader community revitalization can be realized. In this sense, the path forward is not to be found in climate adaptation but rather in an adaptive urbanism.

Retreat is the essential catalyst of adaptive urbanism; it is a process through which threatened or underutilized urban land is repurposed for enhanced climate, social and economic resilience. Such a movement is beginning to take shape in large cities worldwide. In Denmark, shipping containers are converted into affordable, amphibious housing. There and elsewhere, new floating communities expanding into the underutilized slips of deindustrializing dockyards offer a way to decouple life from land ownership — and they are perfectly positioned to harness cheap solar energy.

Other forms of amphibious housing constructed in expanding floodplains can rise and fall with periodic flooding, reimagining otherwise hazardous flood zones for low-cost housing. More than 10,000 floating homes are now in place in the Netherlands alone; the oldest have now successfully weathered more than 20 years of climate-intensified storm events.

In New York, as much as 50 miles of parking lanes have been converted to “parklets” and “streeteries” — gathering and dining spaces that have expanded from sidewalks into the street itself, reclaiming a small fraction of the vast amount of Manhattan’s land area that is set aside for vehicles. Better still would be if the parking lanes were removed entirely and replaced with an integrated network of bioswales (green areas along roadways for rainwater collection), bike lanes and outdoor dining spaces.

A larger-scale vision of adaptive urbanism includes repurposing surface parking lots and one-story buildings for multistory affordable housing integrated with rooftop renewable energy and stormwater collection. A recent analysis found that redeveloping underutilized land across New York could provide affordable housing to more than a million residents. Virtually all of these building sites are presently occupied by surface paving or low-rise buildings, so a rebuilding process aimed at addressing the city’s affordability crisis could be equally productive in lessening flood, heat and drought risk if designed for these purposes.

In New York and other cities, the where of climate adaptation is again equal in importance to the what. Through its highly ambitious campaign to add a million trees to the city’s canopy that began in 2007 — a campaign undertaken, in large part, to lessen heat exposure and flood risk — New York directed more than 80% of the new trees to neighborhoods already well endowed with public greenspace at the expense of lower-income and more racially diverse areas in which parks development has been underfunded. Moving forward, the opposite imperative should guide public investment in adaptive urbanism, with the most climate-vulnerable zones prioritized in time and proportion of funding — a principle I refer to as “least-first.”

The essential lesson from experiments in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, New York and a growing number of cities is that retreat is more than a process of retrenchment. One of an array of terms unhelpfully framing climate change as a mode of warfare, retreat can also be understood as a mode of transformation. Derived from the Latin infinitive retrahere, to retreat is to “pull back”; the old French word treat, derived from the same Latin root, translates as “deal with.”

Climate change is not a battle to win or lose but a dynamic set of environmental conditions that we now must deal with. Planned retreat can be both a process for relocating the most vulnerable out of harm’s way and of leveraging publicly acquired land for a greater urban resilience — one directed toward adaptive infrastructure and societal need. It is not overly ambitious to suggest that we can make our cities more resilient by making them more equitable, more beautiful and more tethered to their underlying ecology; the earliest experiments make this obvious.

Retreat, when framed as transformation, is not the end of the American frontier but its much-needed reimagining. The initial step is to make room for a broader resilience. To remain, we must first retreat.

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