Strategies for Multifamily Building Resilience – Enterprise Community Partners, New York City

The Resilient Design Institute, collaborating with Linnean Solutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Curtis + Ginsberg Architects in New York City, wrote the manual, Strategies for Multifamily Building Resiliency: Disaster Preparedness for Affordable Housing Organizations, which is part of the Ready to Respond initiative of Enterprise Community Partners, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit housing advocacy organizations. The Resilient Design Institute led this effort with Laurie Schoeman of Enterprise.

This initiative emerged following Superstorm Sandy, which severely damaged nearly 150 multifamily housing facilities in New York City. The 152-page manual, which was completed in 2015, includes 19 specific strategies for enhancing the resilience of existing multifamily buildings serving affordable housing needs.

While most of these strategies are focused on the buildings themselves (for example, elevating mechanical equipment, installing sewer backflow preventers, and maintaining backup power to critical systems), four of the strategies address the often-more-challenging needs of ensuring community resilience.

If your city or community is interested in developing a set of resilient design strategies, please reach out to alex@resilientdesign.org .

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David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.