Flooding from extremely heavy rain in New York City on September 29th shut down the city. It knocked out the subway system, flooded tens of thousands of homes and buildings and submerged cars trapped on highways. The rainfall, equivalent to more than a month worth of rain falling in three hours (CNN 9/30), exposed the failure of capitalism to manage even the most basic functions of society. Short term profits required by the needs of the real estate developers have left basic infrastructure in the center of U.S. capitalism woefully insufficient and there is no path for the situation to be fixed under capitalism. The massive changes needed to solve flooding in New York require an upheaval to the way society is organized that can only come through revolution and the building of a communist society.
Storms are getting worse as capitalism continues to wreak havoc on the environment. As society literally swerves between floods and fires the real estate developers at the top of the food chain in NYC are continuing to build, build, build. By owning the services of the politicians through donations to the Mayor on down, the permits are approved for taller and taller skyscrapers that are popping up all over the city.
Climate change runs into anarchy of capitalist development
Capitalism needs to seek profits. NYC was once a manufacturing center with million industrial workers at its peak in 1947 (NY Times 3/22/81). Today there are 58,000 manufacturing jobs in the city (Bureau of Labor Statistics). As U.S. capitalism lost its manufacturing power the capitalists needed to find new sources of profit. New York led the way with the development of retail and real estate. As small buildings and undeveloped lots are replaced by towers as high as 90 stories, the developers don't build sufficient infrastructure to accommodate all the new people moving in.
New construction should typically be built with accompanying infrastructure that can handle a 100-year rainstorm. This means a storm that would have a one percent chance of happening in any given year. New buildings in the city are being built with infrastructure that is designed for a five-year storm, meaning a storm that has a 20 percent chance of happening in any year (theverge.com 9/29).
A second cause of increased flooding is that new development is taking away areas where rainwater can seep directly into the ground. As empty lots and undeveloped land are built on there are fewer and fewer places that are unpaved. This forces increased amounts of rainwater into the sewers. NYC sewers were built to handle 1.75 inches of rain an hour. More than that and they back up into the streets and basements and even toilets in basement apartments. Last weekend had rainfall of about 2.5 inches an hour for a sustained period. In NYC a hundred-year storm is classified as 3.5 inches an hour, double what the sewers can currently handle (NY Times 9/29). Black, Latin and Asian workers bear the brunt of the flooding as thousands of basement apartments are the last refuge for low wage workers in a city with off the chart rents.
The capitalists won’t fix this
Decades upon decades of development would now have to be undone to properly deal with the flooding in NYC. This is not something the bosses even think about as the cost of fixing the problem under capitalism would devastate their profits. Instead, they are following a gradualist approach of installing tree pits on sidewalks that are designed to drain rainwater. These tiny, performative measures are being over-run by the continuation of development and climate change making heavy storms more frequent.
Capitalism is failing again and again. The education, health care and infrastructure are all broken. Workers power through communist revolution is the only solution.