DOTTY 2024 Awardee B.J. Jones: Guiding A ‘New’ New York Through Climate Change

B.J. Jones said that was he quite happy about the weather in New York City on March 7, specifically the fact that the week’s “deluge of rain was behind us.”

It would be a fairly standard observation for anybody walking around Manhattan that day, but Jones isn’t any mere New Yorker; he’s a public planning savant when it comes to the increasing effects of climate change on local residents. For someone with Jones’s formidable list of accomplishments on that front, the weather is not a casual topic of conversation.

After all, Jones formally led the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) from 2018 to 2023, a period well known for the unveiling of the public corporation’s Resiliency Action Plan. It was conceived after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, an experience that molded Jones’ career and shaped his mission, given that he oversaw the recovery’s temporary shelter program under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

The resiliency plan, which is ongoing, seeks to fortify Lower Manhattan’s coastline against supercharged storms and rising sea levels. In other words, when it comes to the borough’s efforts to reduce the impact that climate change will have on its residents, Jones has written and distributed much of the playbook.

It’s a vision that has taken patience, and great administrative skill, to implement. A southern element of the project, the “coastal flood risk management system,” remains under construction. A northern and western component is in the design stage.

Jones formally left the BPCA last July. He said the ongoing resiliency plan was vital, not “just on a day-to-day basis, but when it comes to thinking about the BPCA’s viability in the future.”

Of course, Jones has always tried to tweak public policy more broadly. During a pre-hurricane stint at the city’s Department of Buildings, for example, he spearheaded a complete overhaul of the New York City Building Code. It was the first time such changes had been made in nearly four decades.

Such “comprehensive regulatory reform” had a broader goal, he said: “It showed how much you can make government serve the public better, and it exposed me to all the wonderful hardworking public servants that are trying to do just that.”

His latest job, creating a “New” New York, may be the most ambitious of them all. He’s now the executive director of “Making New York Work For Everyone,” a project which could be described as boiling down City Hall’s current agenda into 40 attainable goals. Arrived at as part of a collaborative “New” New York panel convened by Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul, these goals have been grouped into three buckets: making mass transit better and more widespread, fostering “inclusive growth,” and transforming the city’s commercial districts.

In other words, Jones is now heavily involved in nudging city agencies to address many of the problems that Mayor Adams or the New York City Council have sought to tackle in the past couple of years. Whether he’s involved in efforts to make zoning laws more housing-oriented via the “City of Yes,” or immersed in re-conceptualizing trash cans, Jones said he’s in frequently in the middle of an “all-hands-on-deck moment.”

For a man that helped reimagine Manhattan’s coastline in the span of a few years, it sounds like an adequate challenge.