Inwood, NY Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 5.2 miles southwest of Inwood, NY?
The coast 5.2 miles southwest of Inwood, NY is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.59 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 5.9 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Inwood, NY is the nearest named place, 5.2 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 40.58, -73.84. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
What 0.59 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 0.59 ft/yr accretion rate 5.2 miles southwest of Inwood, NY for 25 years would add roughly 15 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 50 individual transects averaged together, 0% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.35 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1043. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Channel Islands Beach, CA sits at national rank 1106 for growth (0.99 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2503 miles from here. 1.4 miles away, Inwood, NY is the nearest other measured stretch: slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.59 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Inwood itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.