Resilient Redwood City: An Introduction

Hi,

My name is Jeremy Smith. I grew up in Redwood City and have an unusually great amount of pride for my hometown. Having gone through high school at the same time as the city’s beloved downtown started its renaissance, I became very interested with what makes a city that all people can enjoy living and working in.

I left Redwood City to go to college at the University of Southern California, partly with a scholarship from the city’s own Sequoia Awards. While in LA, I further developed my interest for cities and began to explore how they interfaced with natural systems. I was drawn to urban coasts, where dense settlement and vital ecosystems collided.

I then took a year after college to work in engineering consulting, where I worked on sea level rise vulnerability assessments for cities in Southern California. I was so interested in the topic that I returned to the Bay to go to graduate school at Stanford studying civil & environmental engineering.

Now, I’m back. I have been the local happenings closely ever since high school and haven’t really stopped, only added more topics to cover. The two topics I follow the most intensely are housing and climate change. I probably gravitate towards these issues as a product of my age. I’m 23 and starting a life of my own, and like many other people my age, I am faced with enormous barriers to finding an affordable place to live and the ever-looming prospect of how climate change will destroy life as we know it today. Simple problems, you know?

I might be more concerned than the average (borderline) millennial because of my chosen profession in climate adaptation engineering, but I’d venture the average is pretty close to “incredibly anxious.”

Luckily, the Bay Area has been making tremendous strides towards trying to solve the problem of “So what are going to do about it?” Even more incredibly so considering other regions that are also making big strides have been the victims of catastrophic hurricanes. But it’s got me thinking.

What is Redwood City going to do about it? What are WE going to do about adapting to climate change? That is the question that I’d like to tackle with Resilient Redwood City.

I have some of my own ideas, but I know others do too! In the next posts, I hope to try and explain why Redwood City should be concerned about the issue of sea level rise and what kinds of work has been done so far.

Thanks for reading!