We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
It’s the year 2044, and New Yorkers are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the MAGA regime’s fall from national power. It is a solemn day, but after a dark period of deportations, arrests, killings, and the deadliest flood in US history, the city is healing. Noah Fischer reports this scene from the future in the third and final issue of his speculative newspaper project, New York 2044, commissioned by More Art. We spoke to Fischer about the project and his worldbuilding methodology, interviewing deeply engaged New Yorkers (activists, architects, elected officials, engineers, policymakers, and many more …) and inviting them to imagine what the city might be like in twenty years’ time. Fischer then drafted newspaper articles reporting on what could happen in the realms of housing, immigration, and now energy, environment, climate, and public health, based on their speculation. In the “power issue,” we learn that New York City now runs on offshore wind, solar, and thermal energy, with democratically controlled utilities; that big box stores and commercial warehouses are now compelled to pay for the runoff the produce, funding green infrastructure across the city; and that Governors Island is a self-sufficient, autarkic lab for degrowth.
The stories we share below, reported from the imaginations of climate adaptation expert Amy Chester, CUNY professor and activist Ashley Dawson, and engineer Amalia Cuadra, describe how the march towards an environmentally just city is possible, even if it will be harrowing. New Yorkers tolerate the city’s last gas building holdouts, fight to protect the city’s renewable public utilities from theft and sabotage by private interests, and pass new laws that help residents move to higher, safer ground without leaving their communities, putting an end to decades of climate-fueled displacement. Bringing the good news, the contributors to New York 2044 build winnable scenarios for a world beyond the bleak present. The seeds of a better future, the project suggests, are already planted among us.
Thousands walked away from the Brooklyn Marine Terminal Wind Farm today, abandoning work on the enormous turbines and blades, and pouring into the streets. Joined by hundreds of thousands of supporters, they made their way up the ramps of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, choking it off from Bay Ridge to Williamsburg.
Briana Rabbani, a shop steward with the Renewable Energy Laborers’ International Union of North America, told us that workers decided almost unanimously to strike last night after a routine investigation uncovered graft on a vast scale. Three miles off the coast, an undersea cable bringing power from one of the locally made windmills was found to have an illegal tap cable attached to it. Others were discovered as well. It appears that Tesla has been secretly siphoning New York’s publicly owned power, and the unions believe figures within the Public Power Authority had likely known all along — receiving kickbacks while arguing for suppressed wages in the contracts of past years. The workers decided enough was enough.
“We fought hard for these union jobs that produce wind and solar power for New Yorkers, not for shareholders,” says Rabbani. “We’ve been getting a lot of shit from people about why we don’t make the bills more truly affordable for low-income New Yorkers — and we’ve been saying that, hey, power just isn’t cheap to produce. Well, now it turns out we were undermined by corruption. We’re shutting it down!”
Tomorrow, organizers say, the strikes will roll to Queens, then The Bronx. Organizers promise that not a single wind turbine will leave Brooklyn docks until the recently discovered parasitic undersea cable siphoning off power to the private grid is detached from the Public Power grid — and the workers’ lost wages are repaid. Mayor Nurse is supporting the unions while a crisis council is called with union leaders along with the City Council and NYPA leadership.
Programmed to Fail
The discovery of the siphon helps explain the particularly bumpy ride that public power has taken in recent years. Public sentiment has been gathering against the unions as power bills have continued to rise in the 2040s. Ironically, this is what led to the complete audit including investigation of the undersea cables.
Public Power watchdogs have long pointed out that the Authority ought to be able to pay higher union salaries and benefits while offering electricity to New Yorkers at fair prices and with income-based discounts — based on their calculations of megawatts produced. For years they’ve asserted that something doesn’t add up. Unable to point to evidence until now, however, anti-union critics like Green Future Choice were quick to sink their teeth into NYPA’s jugular, calling for its dissolution.
How We Got Here
Twenty years ago, renewables surged under President Biden but then were largely deflated by the Trump-Musk administration’s pro-fossil fuel decrees. All the same, the switch to renewables quietly continued, and jumped forward when a number of states took steps to secede from the United States of X in 2033 — one year after the massive flood of 2032.
After a deal was reached with the splintering federal government to retain partial Medicare benefits in exchange for partial payment of taxes, and emergency funding was raised to replace FEMA, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to a coalitional government for the Northeast Territories, and New York experienced a cultural shift toward greater sectionalism. This made it possible not only to return to climate goals set in the early 2020s, but to make Public Power — the dream of democratically controlled utilities — a reality.
It happened fast. Groups like Uprose in Brooklyn led the switch to public energy and windmill production tripled. Today, the state has made good on its promise to retrain fossil fuel workers into wind and solar jobs, even as the steady rise of energy costs have begun to fracture the alliance.
Last year’s battery fire was an additional setback, as were the cyberattacks over the past two decades which hit the New York City grid. But today, the Public Encryption Firewall is robust. However, physical tap lines into undersea public cables had not been well considered.
New York is proud of the engineers who built the semi-autonomous power grid which is today powered by 100 percent renewables. This year, the thermal heating system is also going citywide.
Tesla Spies and Undersea Subterfuge
And yet, it turns out that an unknown portion of this celebrated engineering crew was covert operatives — former Tesla engineers who had presented false credentials.
Following last week’s discovery, teams of forensic electrical engineers have identified hundreds of undersea transmission sites where high-voltage direct-current cables transporting offshore wind-generated electricity to terrestrial substations and along the coast were covertly tapped/spliced into unauthorized UXA Tesla-type conduits. These conduits siphoned off an estimated several terawatts of electricity while maintaining near-undetectable loss readings. The forensic engineers found that in-line power conditioning modules had been placed on the main lines, which manipulated current and voltage signatures, effectively masking the output readings by stabilizing fluctuations and compensating for phase distortion in the power flow analytics. This system prevented the siphoning from being discovered.
“Our enemies are pretty clever,” says Rabbani as she leads a cadre of blade-polishers down the BQE. “But when we stay together, we always win.” 
Brandon Carbonari leans against a gleaming gas boiler — one of the last in New York City. Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Carbonari is reminiscing about the blackout of 2003. He was 21 then. “The city was like a playground that night. The trains weren’t running and our flip phones stopped working,” he says. “So, me and my buddies drove into Manhattan and it was wild. Pizza ovens lighting up dark restaurants like campfires. Strangers kissing strangers in the dark. Commuters had to walk home or sleep in the stations, but at the end of the night, we just jumped in our car and headed back to Bay Ridge, ran our house on a generator. Because we used to have this thing called gas, see. Great way to produce power. People have lost their minds with this electrification.”
Carbonari, now 62 and balding, wears a custom-printed varsity jacket, grey horseshoe moustache and thick rimmed hipster glasses with one lens blackened like a bandit. Carbonari is leader of the DINOS — a local chapter of the gas holdout movement. (DINOS stands for Determined to Ignore New Obsolete Standards, which is how they see electrification.)
He has this to say about the recent blackout: “For one thing,” he growls, “it occurred in the depth of winter. You know why the grid goes down in the winter? It’s those damn heat pumps. Never used to happen when we had these beautiful oil and gas boilers — they keep the whole place cozy and it’s a wonderful heat. Hearty old-fashioned high-quality heat, and not too dry. But now they got us dependent on the grid — totally infantilized! No more fixing the system with a wrench and a screwdriver. Try fixing a micro circuit board or a leaking battery! And don’t even get me started on those lame thermal pipes — what a joke! I’ll take the strong stuff — no water in my pipeline, thank you very much! Only over my dead body will they take the boiler out of our basement!”
According to City health law, New York’s natural gas system must remain in use until it’s fully replaced by electric heating and cooling, as it has in 98 percent of buildings. “As long as the DINOS are here, that gas is gonna keep flowing,” says Carbonari. “Bet on it.”
The Awkward Neighbor
Carbonari’s neighbour is named Liang Voss Kim. The awkward part of this arrangement is that Mx. Kim is the engineer technically responsible for changing out Carbonari’s heating system. Mx. Kim is a chief engineer for New York Power Authority, tasked with overseeing the upgrades in South Brooklyn toward meeting the 100 percent electrification goal.
She has observed many tense standoffs from her window as local politicians, environmental groups, and the police have tried to pressure Carbonari to electrify. But Carbonari has thrived off this notoriety, inventing an outlaw identity, and his building has become a hub for like-minded holdouts who trade antique gas fittings and laugh at fossil fuel-related standup comedy routines on a makeshift stage near the boiler. In fact, Carbonari has turned the entire basement into something between a clubhouse and a fossil fuel themed museum. The tricked-out and highly polished boiler stands at the center of it all. And over the past year, something that can only be called a cult has sprung up around this man and his boiler. But zooming out to the larger picture, the numbers of gas holdouts are miniscule — and diminishing.
The NYC grid now runs overwhelmingly on non-carbon producing energy — offshore wind and solar and an expanding thermal system which recycles heat back into a system of hot water pipes that link buildings together. The introduction of an SMR reactor in Brooklyn last year will likely send electric prices further down, and experts believe non-carbon energy will reach 100 percent by 2050. But not if Carbonari can help it.
Not Quite Waterloo
On the second day of last week’s three-day blackout, Mx. Kim found a letter in her mailbox from Carbonari, which she shared with us.
“Dear Liang,” it read. “In this difficult time of winter blackout, with the electrical grid completely useless, you must be shivering with cold. We invite you to warm yourselves in our building’s lobby where it’s roasty toasty. It’s fine old gas heat, and we have it aplenty. We are old school New Yorkers. We look after each other. Signed: Carbonari and the DINOS.”
Liang Voss Kim chuckles when she recalls the letter. “Apparently, they thought we would go grovelling to them to get warm. They didn’t understand that it was super comfy in our building. We’ve got passive house construction — the heat stays in and the cold stays out, and a solar backup on the roof is plenty to keep us warm. Maybe by the last day we wore sweaters inside, I can’t remember. Anyway, we did go over to say hi. Brandon tried to lecture us, but someone turned on music and brought out beer, it turned into a nice gathering. They ended up coming over to take a look at our setup. They seemed impressed.”
“Making it a huge thing just feeds the beast,” says Kim. “It’s become his whole life and, he keeps getting traction in the press — as you are doing now, no offense. Obviously, there are far better technologies for heating and cooling buildings than gas, which is why people have switched over. But I don’t think one or two Carbonaris spells the end of the world, either.”
On the evening of Wednesday, September 1, 2021, Hongsheng Leng was napping as the water entered into his basement apartment. At 82, his energy was diminished from years of taking the subway to Manhattan to peddle his paintings outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He lived with his wife, Aihua Shen, and together they looked after their daughter, Ling Ling, who suffered from autism. When Hongsheng and Aihu awoke, the water was lapping at their sheets and its force had pushed heavy furniture against the bed, pinning them in as the water continued to rise. Hongsheng was born in China and spent decades in Queens. His family drowned that night in their basement apartment during the flooding that arrived in New York City on the heels of Hurricane Ida.
Even with the calls for new housing, now twenty years later, the crisis continued forcing New Yorkers to double and triple up in unsafe basement apartments. Finally, that will change.
In 2041, friends who still remember Hongsheng, Aihua, and Ling Ling, stood outside Borough Hall three years ago with the mayor, holding up Hongsheng’s traditional brush paintings as the mayor unveiled the Making Space for Neighbors Program. The program makes it possible for people who were living in flood-prone areas to stay in their own neighborhoods by providing nearby options on safer ground. The recent zoning changes require additional affordable housing on higher ground locations in close proximity to locations that have been flooded for years. For the first time, there are assurances local residents who are under threat of displacement can stay in their own neighborhoods.
This program builds on decades of advocacy. In 2021, when Hurricane Ida revealed the deadly vulnerability of basement apartments with at least eleven dead, residents knew better than to complain to the city, since they would risk being evicted from the illegal apartments, resulting in homelessness. Residents from College Point, Queens, to Gowanus, Brooklyn, have been able to stay near their family and friends, making the program an early success.
This program is in contrast to the initial program put in place after The Great Flood of 2032 when nearly 14 inches of rain fell in one hour. That night, over a thousand New Yorkers died, and over 300,000 were displaced. However, the initial response to adapt-in-place using stilts to raise buildings, flood-proof basements and fancy pumps — all of which required significant private investment — displaced local residents by attracting higher paying tenants. The city was roiled by protests which lasted in different forms through the decade.
Things look different now. In the many low-lying areas where people still live — places like Mott Haven, Bronx where massive towers were constructed 30 years ago, pedestrians have grown used to the sight of fleets of lifeboats attached to buildings at street level.
But the march to higher ground is now unmistakable.
Sophie Lee is the granddaughter of another of Hurricane Ida’s victims, Darlene Lee, who was trapped behind a glass door by the weight of water as it flooded her basement. Sophie will move into one of the newly built apartments — a tower that rises over a one-story supermarket where her grandmother used to buy cabbage, rice, and spices. To “make space for neighbors,” additional nearby towers were built on a former gas station, and another over a public library.
In the days since she moved in, Sophie has found that she likes to walk down the hill to a small crabgrass green space and sit on a bench. It’s the site of the building where her grandmother Darlene lived and died. She’s glad to have some space to remember this painful family legacy. In the past few years, New York City has seen lots of changes. The city is now dotted with these micro-parks planted with salt-tolerant species — an acknowledgment that vacating areas of the city was necessary due to the increase of weather events.
“For so many years, people spoke of the need to change how we lived in the face of this flooding, but you couldn’t actually see it happening,” says Sophie. “Now people are listening to the water. We’re not moving out of New York, we’re moving up.”
Illustrations by Noah Fischer; color by Katherine Domínguez; advertisements generated by Midjourney AI
The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.
