New York City has more waterfront property than Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland together, and recent years have seen the transformation of this coastal bounty into public treasure.

Recent waterfront wins include completion of the impressive Hudson River Park, stretching from the newly opened Pier 25 at Battery Place to Riverside Park South (Crains). This waterfront windfall gave the city’s residents a wealth of new room to run, bike, walk Fido or just watch the sun set over New Jersey in addition to athletic fields and courts, playgrounds and fountains, nature sanctuaries and community space. The High Line turned long-unused space into an internationally-celebrated triumph of public art and innovative landscape architecture. In Brooklyn, Brooklyn Bridge Park took its place as what may be the city’s best spot to view the spectacular Manhattan skyline.

A recently-announced plan (NYTimes) for the next phase of waterfront development ups the ante on the city’s “treasure coast.” For 520 miles of waterfront–what the mayor called, “a no-man’s land of rotting piers, parking lots, and abandoned industrial sites,”–cleanup and redevelopment plans include the addition of 50 acres of new parks, 14 new esplanades and a new ferry service as well as the completion of the East River Esplanade and Brooklyn Bridge Park, which, when completed, will stretch 1.3 miles along the East River from north of the Manhattan Bridge to Atlantic Avenue.

Add to that a new residential complex on the Hunts Point peninsula in the Bronx and, in Queens, the largest below-market-rate housing complex to be built in 30 years at Hunters Point. In Manhattan, one of the last big parcels of Hudson waterfront, the West 50s, will be green-ified, and on the East Side from South Street Seaport to Harlem more than $150 million in new piers, parks and greenways are in the works with the hope of creating the East Side equivalent of Hudson River Park and its positive impact on property values in nearby neighborhoods.