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Two very Bay Area crises – sea level rise and the housing crisis – are colliding in the East Bay city of Newark, where the city will consider plans to build housing on one of the few remnants of the Bay’s vast marshland. It’s a fight for the marshes’ future, which environmentalists say should be maintained as natural flood protection.

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Bay Area Housing Project Raises Concerns About Sea-Level Rise

Episode Transcript

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Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to the Bay; local news to keep you rooted. In the East Bay city of Newark, right along the water, you can find vast open wetlands, remnants of what used to be the Bay Area’s expansive marshes. On the other side is an auto yard with rolling hills in the distance. This area of land is facing the threat of sea level rise. It’s also the site of plans to build new housing.

Ezra David Romero: Some developers there want to build about 600 homes on these two sites, and that’s kind of where the tension is.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The city of Newark is debating what kind of future this plot of land will have. Will it be more housing or will it be restored into the kind of vast wetlands that once thrived here? Today, we talk with KQED climate reporter Ezra David Romero about one of the few remaining marshlands in the Bay Area and whether we should build on top of it.

Ezra David Romero: Before the Bay Area grew up, there were about 150,000 acres of marshland all around the Bay Area, and that’s been reduced to about 10%. And so these were few remaining areas like in Sassoon Marsh or down here and Newark are just the remnants of what was there in the past.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And so now there are plans to potentially build housing in this remaining land, at least in Newark. What type of housing do they want to build here?

Ezra David Romero: So at the sight of the auto wrecking yard, they want to build like 204 single family homes. I sort of describe them as like the American dream style homes, you know, two stories with a big front yard and a big backyard. There’s going to be a skate park in the community. The other property, they want to build something similar. And I think it’ll be a bit more of a mixed use type housing. So some of these small homes may be smaller ones. Those would be kind of on these like three or four manufactured islands within this wetland area. So they’d be in this razed spot and the houses would be all on that.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So why build here of all places?

Ezra David Romero: You know, there’s not that many places to build in the Bay Area because, you know, there’s like something like 8 million people here we’ve developed right up to the shoreline. So some of the only places to build an open land are in places like Newark, where there is open land to build.

Evan Knapp: We know we’re in a housing crisis. There’s no doubt about that.

Ezra David Romero: I spoke with Evan Knapp. He’s with Integral Communities. He’s one of the developers. He said there’s really this need for this middle income earner households, something like teachers and firefighters and people like that. And he believes this is an answer to get housing for them.

Evan Knapp: We can actually better the area by getting rid of an auto dump, providing housing in an urban setting.

Ezra David Romero: You know, Newark’s about an hour south of San Francisco if there’s no traffic. And so Evan talked about how, you know, Newark’s a great place to build a family and in like kind of like an Americana style place with a cute downtown and proximity to big cities like San Jose in San Francisco and Oakland. But also you can have like shoreline living.

Evan Knapp: Every house will have a yard, a side yard, a backyard. Every house will have a driveway. You start checking the boxes, looking at it. It’s an overwhelming positive for the city of community.

Ezra David Romero: There are other groups that are also wanting this to happen. I talked to the representative from the Bay Area Council. That’s a regional business association. They really support this project because they believe it’s going to help create middle income housing. And then there are residents who I spoke to as well that are also for people like Nick Valencia.

Nick Valencia: I tend to trust developers and them kind of coming up with plans on how to mitigate those impacts. I mean, I think the developer obviously has a vested interest. They don’t want to build a community that is just going to get washed away. There’s a couple of different areas too, or I think a lot more people, well, can also help Newark as well.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So the developers say that this is a great location. We need more housing. This can help make a dent in the housing crisis. But what are the concerns? Generally.

Ezra David Romero: I think comes down to like the beauty of the bay is that risk and then the future when it comes to sea level rise that these houses would be in jeopardy.

Taran Singh: I believe that if you build on this and keep building like this, Newark or cities like us would have existential crisis in the future.

Ezra David Romero: I spoke to Taran Singh, he’s this like long time Newark resident. He’s been there more than 15 years. He moved there after college. Do you go to these wetlands a lot?

Taran Singh: I definitely go every day on and off. My evening routine is to take a walk every day.

Ezra David Romero: He’s really concerned that by putting housing there would destroy this, like, vibrant place he loves to go to this.

Taran Singh: Wetlands lies in the path of so many migrating birds that come and go to the Bay Area. This land is prestigious due to the wetlands that have been here prior to human being inhabiting the bay.

Ezra David Romero: And then secondarily, he’s worried that with climate change as seas rise because of ice sheets melting and the ocean expanding, that these houses will be in jeopardy and that they could be underwater in the future.

Taran Singh: These are our only buffer zones for auction as the bay is not expanded. With the melting ice, we have no place for the water to go.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, why environmentalists say these wetlands are worth saving. Stay with us.

Ezra David Romero: So the entire bay is supposed to rise by about a foot, by 2015. It could rise by more than a meter by the end of the century. And those are like middle of the road levels. Like if the world doesn’t curb its emissions faster, those numbers could be a lot higher. And so this is an area that could soak up the seas like marshes, kind of act like a sponge as water goes into them. And so by putting houses on this marshland or what we call upland, like the little hills next to it would kind of rob Newark of this like natural climate solution that they already have that already exists there.

Ezra David Romero: And the second thing is that marshes act like a carbon sink. They pull carbon out of the air and hold it in the ground. And, you know, carbon is what’s warming up the atmosphere. And so they are this like climate solution that pulls the very thing that’s warming our world out of the air and holds it underground. When we have drought or flooding from like big storms or wildfire, it’s here right now. Like we see those effects immediately. But when it comes a sea level rise, it’s this long game.

Ezra David Romero: And scientists are studying like how fast Antarctica or Greenland or melting seas could rise faster than what the scientists are actually outlined in these guidelines as of right now. So I think a lot of people hear those headlines and they question these kind of projects right on the day, because while the developer has an idea of like, we’re going to raise these houses like 14 feet, the larger question is like, should we build there if seas are going to rise and we don’t actually know to what level?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, what other ideas then, are there for what to do with this land, Ezra?

Ezra David Romero: So I think at the base level, they want to see this area restored to the wetlands that were once there. And like them, the grassy green areas above them where, like the marshes could migrate to as seas rise. So, like, those marshes have a place to go. I talked to Victor Flores about this. He’s an East Bay resilience manager for the environmental group Greenbelt Alliance.

Victor Flores: Those marshes are some of the greatest carbon capturing systems that we have out there.

Ezra David Romero: Because there are so few marshlands or wetlands anywhere in the Bay Area. So this could be a really big opportunity to save them.

Victor Flores: If we missed that opportunity. We’re going to see sea level rise, ground water continue to impact Newark, which it already has been. If you lose this section. That opportunity is going to be gone. You’re not going to come in and bulldoze 200, 600 homes. So if we don’t do this now, we’re probably going to be looking at those impacts pretty soon and regretting those decisions that were made.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This story highlights this tension between our very immediate needs for housing in the Bay Area, but also the threat of rising sea levels and climate change. Where does that leave things now? Like what is the status of the project in Newark?

Ezra David Romero: This project is going to go before the City Council sometime next year, as soon as January, and the City Council will decide what can happen with this property. And so I’m sure there’s going to be a big city council meeting with lots of people in favor and against it, talking about how they feel about it and whether it should be restored, too, or if houses should be built there.

Michael Hannon: I want to make sure that the community knows that these are not done deals.

Ezra David Romero: I spoke to the mayor, Michael Hannon. He said he heard about the project. He hasn’t seen all the formal documents for it. He’s really interested in seeing what the housing opportunities are to fill housing in the town. But he also said, like if it is going to destroy the environment or it like rids the community of a climate solution. He said he’s open to actually hearing that side of the argument.

Michael Hannon: I’m really sensitive to the issues that the environmentalists raised. I certainly don’t want to be, you know, approving a project that, you know, ten, 20 years from now. You know, folks that are living in that project are concerned about their own health and safety. And we’re not going to go into any approval of any project blindly without recognizing that these issues occur and these concerns are out there.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: You know, we’re talking about this one random patch of land in Newark. Why are we talking about this now? And what do you think it can tell us about the region as a whole?

Ezra David Romero: I think we’re talking about this now because what happens in Newark is like this microcosm of the rest of the Bay Area. We have these housing battles all around the bay, whether that’s in San Francisco or Newark or Menlo Park or Oakland, where people want to live on the shoreline. It’s sort of like this American dream, like you want to have a piece of the shore, you want a beautiful view. But like the climate crisis is like coming head on to that view of that American dream. And so we have this moment in California right now before seas rise to a point where our homes are underwater to make a change.

Ezra David Romero: And we have this very small opportunity to restore this kind of land that’s that that is this natural solution. Because the other option is to build seawalls or big barriers in the water or big levees to protect these communities that are like harden the sides of the bay, make it look very different. So this is an opportunity to make it look beautiful and have it be green and lush with birds and things like that. Earlier this week, I went across the bay to Menlo Park where they actually broke a levee and they restored a wetland.

Ezra David Romero: It was like this very beautiful sight, like you saw the water turn this like dry moonscape into like this lush area again. And that’s that is going to help protect the city of Menlo Park in East Palo Alto. It kind of gave me a glimpse of what Newark could have just across the bay, this area that could be protected in this natural way. Out of all the people I talked to, none of them were like climate denying this, right. Like, they all understood that climate change is real. Sea level rise is happening. It’s more about like where they put their trust.

Ezra David Romero: Do they put their trust in the developer that they’re going to do the right thing and build in a place and like protect this place? We all we all know we need houses. It’s like the basic tenet of life, like you want a place to live, protected from the elements. Right? But what if those elements get a lot worse because of climate change? Is the house going to be okay? So I think that’s the concern of the people I spoke to in the story.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Ezra, thank you so much.

Ezra David Romero: Thanks for having me.

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Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Ezra David Romero, a climate reporter for KQED. This 30 minute conversation with Ezra was cut down and edited by producer Maria Esquinca. Allan Montecillo is our senior editor. He scored this episode and added all the tape. If you liked this episode, share it with a friend. Word of mouth is the best way to help others find our show. The Bay is a production of member supported KQED in San Francisco. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks for listening. Peace.

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