In a quietly remarkable event this week, people began moving into Nevins Landing, the first of four new buildings in a complex with thousands of apartments situated on Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The developers, Charney Companies and Tavros Capital said that leasing at what’s called Gowanus Wharf has been brisk.
Meet the delicious contradiction between “scientific” prognostications and public common sense — to wit, the proliferation and raging popularity of Big Apple waterfront living, notwithstanding warnings that climate change in the form of biblical flooding will soon put us all under water.
The doomsayers repeat and realize the claim until we’re blue in the face. For example, leftist magazine Dissent calls our plight “perilous.”
The apocalypse might come by 2100, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Or we might be swept away as soon as 2050, according to advocacy group Climate Central.
As early as the mid-2030s, water levels off lower Manhattan could rise by 11 inches — as much as in the entire preceding century — as per the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment this month.
Harvard geologist Daniel P. Schrag cites “Hurricane” Sandy’s 13-foot storm surge in 2012 as a preview of what will, by mid-century, be the “new norm on the Eastern seaboard.”
Ah, Sandy. Its undeniably terrible toll — 43 deaths, a devastated Broad Channel, months-long evacuations of apartment and office towers in lower Manhattan, and billions of dollars in damages — was cheerfully hijacked by climate alarmists to warn us, You ain’t seen nothing yet!
But Sandy, which wasn’t a true hurricane by the time it hit our shores but a “post-tropical cyclone,” wasn’t a climate event but a tragic and specific weather event. Yet to the zealots, every rainstorm — particularly one as serious as Sandy — augurs imminent doom.
The city, state, and federal governments are nonetheless spending many billions of taxpayers’ dollars on “sea walls” — including along the East River and on the Hudson River in Battery Park City, requiring the (supposedly temporary) destruction of two beloved parks.
You’d think, given the purported inevitability of watery annihilation, that people would avoid living on the city’s 520 miles of waterfront.
And this would include the Gowanus Canal, which although a mere 100 feet wide and 14 feet deep connects with our Upper Bay’s Atlantic Ocean doorstep.
But to the exasperation of climate-apocalypse true believers, homes on the city’s harbor, rivers, canals, and even the mighty Atlantic are more in demand than ever.
Consider how many recently opened or are planned.
In Coney Island, developer John Catsimatidis put up two successful rental towers called Ocean Drive directly over the beach and wants to add another two right next door.
A project called 80 Clarkson St. will bring a pair of high-rise condo towers to the West Village waterfront — the very Hudson River location where Sandy came ashore with maximum force.
New towers have already brought tens of thousands of residents to river shorelines in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Long Island City, Hunters Point, Astoria, the South Bronx, and Staten Island. Can the people who moved there all be a bunch of science-snubbing chuckleheads?
The trend irks and perplexes media mouthpieces of the climate-change lobby.
A New York Times article last September was headlined, “Home Sales in Flood Zones are Booming. Here’s Why Buyers Take the Risk.”
Its lame theory was that low-lying, flood-vulnerable parts of town seemed more affordable to lower-income immigrants unaware of the higher insurance costs they might face.
Undeterred enthusiasm for areas where “settled science” guarantees catastrophe also causes ulcers at the Washington Post.
It strained to fathom why “more than 300,000 Americans . . . moved to flood- or fire-prone counties last year, despite the growing threat posed by climate change.”
But allow me to posit a common-sense explanation.
For starters, City Hall, for all its posturing over flood risk, not only doesn’t discourage waterfront housing — it promotes it with tax breaks and other incentives to build there.
It’s currently mulling a rezoning of industrial Red Hook to allow apartment towers over the harbor.
Flood-peril panic dissolves at the prospect of filling the municipal coffers with tax revenue the projects would generate.
And — more importantly — most sensible people don’t believe the watery end is nigh. Despite the climate hysterics, they know that very slowly rising ocean levels hardly portend the world’s end. At least not in their lifetimes.
My friends who had to move out of their apartments temporarily after Sandy couldn’t wait to return; they correctly reckoned that the likelihood of an encore superstorm was remote. They’ve yet to be proven wrong.
scuozzo@nypost.com
