Some of America's most famous land was reclaimed from the sea. The Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and the Reflecting Pool all sit on earth reclaimed from Potomac River tidal flats in the early twentieth century. Treasure Island was built in San Francisco Bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition. Chicago's Northerly Island was filled in from Lake Michigan to complete Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan of the city.
If the legal barriers to reclamation were lifted, we could build hundreds of thousands of new homes near the centers of our most valuable cities. We could build new airports to refresh ailing transportation infrastructure, and we could protect low-lying coastal areas from sea level rise. The disappearance of land reclamation is a choice that we have the power to undo.
Posted by works-in-progress
3 Comments
Every so often, someone reposts a render of an extended Manhattan as a housing solution, but I’d actually love to see smaller Great Lakes cities — Cleveland, Milwaukee, Toledo, Duluth — experiment with land reclamation first. They have shallow freshwater coastlines, shrinking populations with room to grow, and lower political stakes. Makes more sense as a testing ground than starting with a major metro.
What’s the LVT on land reclamation though ?
Silent Gen/Boomer (potentially hippie) NIMBYs are to blame. The easiest way to fix it is to fast-track permitting, which would be to have the government make the environmental impact reports with a very fast (like 1 day) turnaround time. We *can* actually do that now with the help of AI; all the human using the AI system needs to do is double-check.