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Back-to-Back Public Meetings Tonight Will Focus on Safety, Resiliency, and Vision

The Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) will host a public meeting tonight (Wednesday, June 19) that will invite participants to help shape the community’s future.

The discussion, billed as a “collaborative resilience assessment workshop,” will be held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (36 Battery Place), in partnership with 100 Resilient Cities.

That organization espouses a view of resilience that focuses not just on shocks (such as extreme-weather events and rising sea levels), but also the social stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a long-term basis. Among the challenges that the group identifies as facing New York are aging infrastructure, economic inequality, and a lack of affordable housing.

These ideas will be filtered through the prism of data gathered by the BPCA’s “Building a More Resilient Battery Park City” survey, conducted among residents and workers in May. The insights gleaned from this dialog will be used to shape the Authority’s first-ever strategic plan, to be completed later this year, with the aim of guiding BPCA policy in the years and decades ahead.

In this context, tonight’s meeting may represent a chance to bring widespread resident concerns about issues like affordability to the center of the BPCA’s vision for itself. This could represent a further step in the evolution of the BPCA’s mission, which has shifted in recent years to include both resiliency and affordability as priorities.

The resiliency assessment begins at 6:00 pm, but a separate, earlier session (at the same location, beginning at 5:00 pm) will continue the Build a Block series of meetings that features Neighborhood Coordination Officers from the NYPD’s First Precinct, who will focus on policing and public safety issues in Battery Park City, south of West Thames Street. Light refreshments will be served.

Admission to both meetings is free, but space is limited, so seating will be allocate on a first-come, first-served basis.