Sea Level Rise — Two-Thirds of the City Could Flood

active• eastpaloalto

East Palo Alto faces one of the most severe sea level rise threats of any Bay Area city — and the burden falls disproportionately on a community of color that did not cause the climate crisis. Already, half of East Palo Alto sits within a federally designated flood zone, and projections show that within roughly a decade, up to two-thirds of the land within city limits may regularly experience flooding — with those areas potentially underwater during high tides by mid-century. The city has invested in a new levee along San Francisquito Creek — a 20-year-in-the-making project — but the broader flooding challenge extends far beyond one creek. Some proposed housing development sites are located on the border of protected baylands that provide natural flood buffering, raising community concern that development could inadvertently worsen flooding while promising community benefits that may never materialize — a lesson residents draw explicitly from Amazon's arrival and the jobs that never came.

Related cause: Flooding

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