Judy Huynh

The City: Amy Chester, director of resiliency nonprofit Rebuild By Design, saw “Flood Sensor Aunty” in Astoria, Queens, in September and was impressed. She proceeded to award Sethi Unni a grant through the Rainproof NYC initiative, which sought to address the urban challenge of extreme rain. “Even though the characters are somewhat outrageous, they’re also […]

The Hill: No part of the United States, red or blue, is exempt from weather disasters. Rebuild by Design, a disaster-mitigation think tank, notes that climate-related disasters occurred in all of the nation’s congressional districts except two during 2011-2024. Over 95 percent of Americans live in counties that experienced one or more major disaster declarations

News Break: Amy Chester, director of Rebuild by Design, agrees with Castor’s concerns. She explains that transferring FEMA’s responsibilities to the states would be complex and time-consuming. “It would be incredibly complex to solely rely on a state to respond,” Chester observed. Both sides emphasize the need for a responsive disaster agency. While some advocate

Fox 13: Amy Chester, the director of the non-profit Rebuild by Design, has dealt with FEMA a lot over the years and said transferring its responsibilities entirely to the states would be a complex process. “We are able to show that 90% of counties across the US and 99.5% of congressional districts have experienced a

Green Builder Media: Rebuild by Design coupled innovation and global expertise with community insight to develop solutions to the most complex needs of the affected cities and regions. The result of this was a multi-billion-dollar New York City project called Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency (LMCR), or its more-familiar name, “The Big U,” for its shape

Urban Omnibus: The stories we share below, reported from the imaginations of climate adaptation expert Amy Chester, CUNY professor and activist Ashley Dawson, and engineer Amalia Cuadra, describe how the march towards an environmentally just city is possible, even if it will be harrowing. New Yorkers tolerate the city’s last gas building holdouts, fight to

The Guardian: Back in 2014, Alaska, the Pacific north-west and the midwest were identified in the New York Times as “places that will fare much better than others”. Since then, record hot weather, worst-in-world air quality and bomb cyclones have proven such predictions wrong. From 2011 to 2024, “99.5% of congressional districts experienced at least

WKYT: In this map created by Rebuild by Design, a non-profit at New York University, you can see a high concentration of incidents in eastern Kentucky since 2011. Areas like Magoffin, Breathitt, Perry, Johnson and Knott County. WKYT asked Governor Andy Beshear what it would mean to the Bluegrass State if FEMA were to be