Yup. Forget the island. The root of this problem isn't that the city failed to maintain the bridge, it's that banishing citizens facing challenges in their lives to an inaccessible island is an anachronism of a solution better suited to 1814 than 2014.
Spend $80 million on new shelters on the mainland, and let the island go. I'm intrigued by the flood barrier idea, but honestly that's probably too big of a project to be used as a solution to this particular crisis.
Unfortunately an exit from Long Island is something they would've had to plan for in advance. It's too late now to start site selection, deal with all the community input and opposition that would entail, and build the new facility. A money dump into bridge repair is unfortunately the fastest means of resolving the issue and getting some/any large facility back online.
It's an epic cock-up. Hate to say it, but the city richly deserves to take a bath on this fix from their lack of foresight. Even though it wasn't a problem of Walsh's making. A lot of the blame has to go to Menino for over-focusing on that kids camp as a legacy project while ignoring the bridge, ignoring the sustainability of the shelter, etc. The seasonal camp is something you can run by boat. The shelter and rehab facility aren't; they need land access and transit.
The bridge repair is pretty much sunk cost at this point. There's just no way to pivot fast enough to change the game. I think these repurposing proposals and talk of seawalls are unfortunately moot because there's just no way to tend to the area homeless and addicts on the scale that LI provided. And that's already hurt them badly with that many new people forced onto the streets with winter less than 2 months away.
What they should do going forward is start the long-term planning process for getting a mainland shelter and more distributed rehab facilities going. Get a 10-year transition plan going for moving the LI social services to a more accessible location and redeveloping the island for recreation and eventual takeover by the National Park Service like the other islands. The kids camp can stay since that's a growable asset in a Nat'l Park setting. And a downsized detox facility may be a good thing to retain as a specialized facility for people who are most helped by the time-out from city temptations and the isolated natural setting helping with breaking addiction. Just get the mission-critical facilities on the mainland with a reasonably long time limit they can stick to which allows for the necessary funding and neighborhood approval to do something better and more comprehensive than the LI facility. At least that would show some applied knowledge and lessons learned for the long-term, and possibly let the city make amends by becoming something of a national leader at well-run social services. Recover the fumble and move forward.
Maybe they can just get the bridge
substantially rehabbed so it's good for another 20 years of reliable use before it's officially at end-of-life and must come down.
Then immediately start the conversation about seawalls or boat-only access, since a flood barrier is the type of megaproject that will take 20 years to EIS, engineer, and build and federal funding is likely to be available several years from now where it just isn't today.
But I just don't see any way they aren't pinned in to an urgent job of repair-and-reopen. New facilities can't happen as fast as a bridge repair, and this is an emergency enough situation to qualify for a federal waiving of the strictest EIS requirements and accelerated engineering like they do every time an interstate bridge gets condemned due to tanker fire ruining the substructure. State and City Hall will have to scramble and line up the funding fast to get such an exemption, but because of the social services cut off it would absolutely qualify for an expediting waiver despite its limited usage.