New Sandy Housing Recovery Czar Grilled on First Day

The first day of a new job can be tough for anybody, especially when it involves staring down a group of New York City Council members about a Sandy recovery program that you have been in charge of for only a matter of hours. 

On Saturday Mayor Bill de Blasio named his Superstorm Sandy recovery team, which includes Amy Peterson as the director of the Housing Recovery Office (HRO). The appointments, which also included Bill Goldstein as senior advisor to the mayor for recovery, resiliency and infrastructure and Daniel Zarrilli as director of the Office of Recovery and Resiliency, were made just in time for Monday's Council oversight hearing on post-Sandy housing recovery, meaning that Peterson had little time to get up to speed on the city's efforts to get people back in their homes. 

During her testimony, Peterson noted that the city currently does not have enough money to to meet the needs of every active registrant of the Build it Back program--which helps homeowners, owners of rental buildings and low-income tenants rebuild and repair their homes--and that the HRO currently estimates that it would need an additional $1 billion to do so. Peterson added that she anticipates receiving additional funds through a third round of federal aid, but that it is unclear how much will be allocated to New York City. 

"We do not think we currently have enough funding to do the lower priority [repairs], so the higher income level people that have repair and elevation needs especially, but we're working with the federal government to ensure how much funding we need and make sure they get the funding to us," Peterson said. 

Peterson also said that of the 22,000 Build it Back applicants, only six have broken ground on new homes. Meanwhile, $100,000 of the committed reimbursement money for repairs was sent out just last week to three different applicants, with another $700,000 to come. 

One factor hindering the program has to do with the funding the city gets from the federal government through Community Development Block Grants, or CBDG funds. The city is required by law to spend 51 percent of such grants on low- and moderate-income households, which earn 80 percent or less of the area median income for the New York City region, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This requirement makes it burdensome on residents affected by Sandy to provide proper documentation to prove that they satisfy the HUD criteria. 

Another hurdle with block grant funding is that displaced residents who have already received another federal loan available to disaster victims are not eligible to receive additional aid through the block grants. 

But when Peterson was asked about recent actions HRO has taken to cut through that red tape, none of the solutions she presented directly addressed the obstacles faced in tapping CBDG funds. Instead, while deflecting blame to the previous administration, Peterson mentioned streamlining of the design process for home repairs and cutting out some of the unnecessary city bureaucracy as two positive steps. 

"Part of it is the process that was put in place by the Bloomberg administration and a lot of the checks and balances that created that red tape and delayed the process," Peterson said. "One of the things that has happened right away is the ability to move forward once your option is selected, right into the design process, without having to deal with what money you might have to bring to the table from your insurance proceeds, and that's a big step. Also being able to use some of those funds if you need to relocate for a period of time, those are huge changes that are really going to be able to advance this process and we've already seen people move quicker through the process." 

Councilman Mark Treyger, the chair of the Committee on Recovery and Resiliency who took a lead in questioning Peterson, touched on the fact that many of the community-based organizations assisting in the storm-damaged areas are outsiders with a lack of knowledge of the neighborhood's and residents' needs.

"To me, there were problems at the information-gathering stage. If the developing process was flawed, the product is therefore flawed," Treyger said. "I don’t believe we did proper outreach to inform all of the impacted people." 

Councilman Donovan Richards, the chair of the Environmental Protection Committee, suggested that the city set up regional coordination offices in each of the affected areas, as well as a task force of sorts involving community based organizations and elected officials that would keep tabs on the city's progress in meeting the needs of affected New Yorkers.