Flooded basements, soaring energy bills, hospital visits resulting from heat, cold and wildfire smoke. Global warming is expensive. At least that’s how the city’s new climate chief, Louise Yeung, sees it.
“The climate crisis is inextricably linked to the affordability crisis,” said Ms. Yeung, whom Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed to the role — one that is becoming more common in cities across the globe — in January. “When you have people who can’t afford to turn on their air-conditioners during sweltering heat waves,” she said, “that is an affordability issue.”
Ms. Yeung is a policy wonk with a soft spot for rom-coms and science fiction. She grew up in Chicago and has a master’s degree in urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In her new role, she will focus on immediate needs that New Yorkers are already facing because of climate change, she said. But Ms. Yeung also understands the long game. In 2016, her first job in New York was managing a multibillion-dollar project to protect Lower Manhattan from coastal flooding. Three mayoral administrations later, it’s still years away from completion.
“Working in climate change always has this tension of urgency and time scale,” she said.
Ms. Yeung, 40, lives with her 16-year-old cat, who has no name, and her two snails, Lady Godiva and Richard, in Kensington, Brooklyn.
She spoke with The New York Times recently about her goals for the city. (She also leads the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.) The following interview is edited and condensed.
You live in Brooklyn. What have you noticed about the borough as an urban planner with an eye on climate risks?
When I moved here, I specifically looked for apartments that were on high ground. There was one that was a ground-floor unit. I looked at the city’s flood maps. And I also knew that New York had passed a law for flood risk disclosure for renters. So I asked about the flood risk for both. I learned that the ground-floor apartment had repeatedly flooded, so I did not choose that apartment.
Every renter should know that they have the right to ask about flood risk or the history of flooding in their unit.
You were the policy director for the Mamdani campaign. In terms of his big three — free buses, free child care and the rent freeze — how would you connect these goals to climate change?
For bus corridors, one of the challenges is going to be how we are bringing on new locations that serve child care centers and home-based providers, and how they all intersect with flood and heat risk.
We need to think about the experience of a bus rider when it’s 98 degrees outside and they’re waiting for a bus. We are also working on a cool corridors project with the Department of Transportation that looks at heat resiliency design for streetscapes, using trees and other shade mechanisms, as well as more cooling centers.
As the climate crisis accelerates, affordability can’t stop at the rent check. As far as housing is concerned, a rent-stabilized home isn’t truly affordable if it’s unsafe or sitting in a floodplain. More than 55,000 rent-regulated apartments are already at risk, with thousands more threatened by flash flooding in low-lying neighborhoods.
How are we going to keep utility bills down?
Rate cases — where utility companies request approval from a state regulator to change the rates it charges customers — are notoriously opaque. The average person probably doesn’t even know that there is a participatory element to the rate cases. So the Mamdani administration has made a commitment to fund what we are calling “interveners.” These are groups that will serve as parties in the rate case to represent the needs and interests of working New Yorkers.
So these interveners will be translators for all that weird lingo on the state regulator’s website?
We want to make sure the interveners can actually understand the technical elements and translate that to what it means for your utility bill every month, and really advocate for the customer.
I often think about New York City 100 years from now. It’s hard not to envision a retreat from at least the beaches, the Rockaways and Coney Island. How do we help these residents in the short term?
What I’ve learned from my years of doing community planning is that when you put 100 people in a room and ask them about their vision for the future, you could get 100 different answers. So we are setting up processes that allow us to talk more about our collective future and have a shared vision for that.
The new Office of Mass Engagement will program neighborhood planning workshops and talk to communities about climate risk and preparedness.
Do you have personal habits that help the environment?
I’m excited about composting.
Do you do community composting or the city’s curbside program?
I used to go to my community garden until I got curbside, and now I’m excited just to bring it to my sidewalk.
I am a renter — top floor — in a detached single-family house. When I moved in, I didn’t see the brown food scraps bin, and so I asked about it gently. I said, “Hi, I would love to compost.” I sent them a link to the Department of Sanitation website, and they ordered one.
Would you support continuing to fund community composting?
Yes.
What else do you do?
I try to be mindful of my pollution and my emissions. Buy less packaging. I don’t have a car; I’m a transit rider and have a bike. And everything that I’m wearing is actually thrifted. Well, not my tights. I found this green blazer, which I love, at a thrift shop on the Upper West Side. The skirt I’ve had for 20 years.
I also believe that we need to hold corporations accountable for climate change — like this is really where it’s at. The work we want to do as a city needs to be focused on that, rather than making people feel guilty about every single thing that they might be purchasing.
What do you do when you don’t want to think about climate change?
I love rom-coms. My best friend and I started a creative practice together called romantic urbanism that explores how cities can be designed to foster love, care and connection. We created a speculative bureaucracy called the Department of Tenderness that imagines what it would look like for a city government to actually do that work.
Last summer, we installed a booth with a map in Brooklyn, and we asked people where they fell in love with the city. We’ve also done rom-com screenings. It’s been a fun project to explore, in a lighthearted way, what urban planning can look like if we take love just as seriously as we take climate change and affordable housing and good jobs.
What’s your favorite rom-com?
“When Harry Met Sally.” It’s very multimodal. Over 15 years, they meet on the plane, they meet again on the sidewalk at the bookstore. It’s got all the elements of how good urban design can really help to bring people together.
Hilary Howard is a Times reporter covering how the New York City region is adapting to climate change and other environmental challenges.
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