What it is

Down by the Water is a podcast-led documentary project about communities meeting climate change at the water's edge and shaping an era of renewal along American shorelines. The audio podcast is the front door. A companion limited documentary series for PVOD is the long-form expression. The stories come from inside waterfront neighborhoods, from the community leaders, residents, and business owners building resilience, equity, and access into the places they live.

Season 1 anchors in New York City and New Jersey: Bronx Point in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, the Jersey shore. Future seasons can pick up any American shoreline where the same question is live.

Project site: DownByTheWater.org.

Subject

The series takes listeners and viewers to the edge of transformation in waterfront neighborhoods. The themes are resilience, equity, accessibility, and the convergence of people, culture, and climate solutions. Episode subjects include future residents of Bronx Point, young activists in Queens, the Billion Oyster Project, a Brooklyn port operator, and long-time New Yorkers and Jersey residents whose lived experience is the substance of the season. Every story carries two perspectives in parallel: the industry view (developers, planners, public officials, regulatory context) and the human view (residents, organizers, lived experience). Neither one is allowed to do the talking alone.

Themes

• Coastal and waterfront climate adaptation at the neighborhood scale.
• Public-private development and the community engagement that actually shapes it.
• Equity and accessibility in urban waterfront redevelopment.
• Cultural heritage and place. Bronx Point as a hip-hop origin site. "250 Years Afloat."
• The convergence of industry and human perspectives in every story.

Format

Two formats in one project.

• Podcast (audio plus visualizer video). The front door. Built for listening platforms first, with a visualizer cut for YouTube and social.
• Limited documentary series (PVOD). The long-form companion, drawing the same cast and story arcs into cinematic shape for a transactional video-on-demand audience.

Season 1 is planned as a 15-episode arc with a dual-frame template that pairs an industry perspective with a community perspective on every subject. The early episodes anchor in Bronx Point and the South Bronx; the season then opens out to Brooklyn, Queens, and the Jersey shore.

Production model

Down by the Water is the VoicesFlow platform's first co-production. It is run jointly by Five59 Labs and Out of the Blue Solutions under the Blue Five Collective banner, in association with Waterfront Alliance.

That structure matters. Where the platform's other topical projects (The River We Build and 13 Degrees) are Five59 Labs solo productions, Down by the Water is the prototype for how VoicesFlow takes on external co-producers and association partners. The patterns that come out of this co-production (creative authority, editorial decision-making, distribution rights, branding) become reusable when the platform brings on the next outside partner.

My role

I am co-Executive Producer with Sivan Schlecter of Out of the Blue Solutions. My side of the work covers editorial and creative direction, the documentary cut of the project, the platform integration into VoicesFlow, and the production craft Five59 Labs brings to the partnership.

Where it sits in the platform

Down by the Water's distinct contributions to the umbrella:

• First podcast-led project. Extends the format toolkit beyond film, exhibit, digital, and XR.
• First PVOD distribution path, rather than festival, broadcast, or installation.
• First co-production with an external production company and an association partner. The organizational pattern the platform will reuse as it scales.