Superstorm Sandy: Brooklyn's Recovery 21 Months Later

On a balmy mid-July day, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio stood on a makeshift black stage on a quiet residential street in Canarsie flanked by a host of legislators and his Hurricane Sandy Recovery team. Behind him several construction workers were in action repairing the roof of a modest brick row home. 

The building’s owner Tonyelle Jobity, a short African-American woman with closely cropped bleach-blond hair was also on the dais. Jobity had lived in the house for over 10 years when Sandy swept through the neighborhood in October 2012, and the surging water from nearby Jamaica Bay rose as high as the hoods of the sedans parked on the street, spilling over into Jobity’s downward sloped driveway and flooding her basement. At the same time, the deluge of rain and sweeping gusts of wind punctured her roof. 

Jobity emptied her savings account and maxed out her credit cards to pay for as many repairs as she could afford so at least her house would be in livable enough shape for her to stay in it. Meanwhile, she applied for the city’s Build it Back program, the housing recovery initiative instituted by the Bloomberg administration to get Sandy victims back on their feet and restore their damaged property. 

For Jobity and thousands of other New Yorkers affected by the storm, Build it Back moved at a maddeningly slow pace getting victims the help they needed. Jobity waited months before she saw a single reimbursement check for the work she had paid for, never mind getting the rest of her house fixed. 

“[Tonyelle] reached out for the help she deserved in rebuilding her home, and she believed that that help would be forthcoming, but it wasn’t,” de Blasio said in his opening remarks. “The efforts that were supposed to be in place to help homeowners certainly weren’t working at that point.” 

The press conference took place the day before de Blasio was scheduled to leave for his vacation in Italy, and it was designed to be a last hurrah before his trip. The occasion marked “significant” progress on the Sandy housing recovery effort: Rebuilding had begun on 132 houses, the repairs on 30 homes were complete, and 397 reimbursement checks had been handed out, totaling roughly $6.37 million. The occasion also served as a preliminary victory lap of sorts for de Blasio before Labor Day, when the mayor hopes to celebrate the fulfillment of his pledge to have 500 housing repair projects underway and 500 reimbursement checks distributed to Sandy victims. 

Measuring “progress,” as far as storm recovery is concerned, is an inexact science. Through these carefully choreographed events, the de Blasio administration has evidently redefined the success of the recovery effort as its ability to meet the arbitrary numerical goals it has set as benchmarks. However, in highlighting the numbers it rolled out on the day of the press conference as evidence of how the recovery has turned around under the new mayor’s leadership, the administration has also diverted attention from the fact that the number of people covered by those cheery statistics represent a little over a mere 1 percent of Build it Back applicants. 

By finally receiving a check from the city and using it to finish the repairs to her home, Jobity has been lucky, comparatively, her experience belying that of the vast majority of the more than 20,000 New Yorkers who have applied for the recovery program since its inception in 2012. While de Blasio’s goal for Sept. 1 is to have 500 reconstruction projects under way, roughly 15,000 homes require some sort of rebuilding. In some impacted neighborhoods, damaged houses sat idle for so long that mold collected, resulting in the homes being condemned before their owners got the chance to save them. Critical infrastructure such as roads and sewers remain in dire need of repair, and so many of the storm resiliency measures that experts have said in the wake of Sandy are necessary to protect against the next big storm have yet to be put in place. 

Without question, de Blasio has accelerated the pace of the recovery since taking office in January, cutting some of the federal red tape, and restructuring the recovery team and the delegation of its responsibilities. City legislators have lauded the responsiveness of the team de Blasio has appointed—a stark contrast, they say, to the previous administration. But along with this praise invariably comes the caveat that there is still much work left to be done. 

THE FRONT LINE

 City Councilman Mark Treyger, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Recovery and Resiliency, was among the elected officials in attendance at de Blasio’s press conference. A first-year councilman, Treyger represents one of the districts in Brooklyn hardest hit by the storm, an area that encompasses most of Brooklyn’s Coney Island peninsula, including parts of Brighton Beach. Treyger, a former schoolteacher, won the seat in part because of his vow to make sure that every one of the impacted communities and individuals in his district are made whole again. 

“Last year there was a complete breakdown, I don’t even think the city was talking to each other last year,” Treyger said. “This year at least now we have people we can work with. I will say for the record that I’ve found [Director of the Housing Recovery Office] Amy Peterson to be very responsive to me, and to other members who represent impacted districts, but we’re still frustrated with the pace.” 

Several days after the press conference, Treyger stands inside the gutted former police headquarters of Sea Gate, a gated community on the westernmost tip of the Coney Island peninsula. One of the largest of the city’s private communities, it was once a more exclusive enclave and home to political luminaries such as Al Smith, and even, for a time, “Boss” Tweed, who hid out here after being ousted from Tammany Hall and before he fled the country. Now the neighborhood is firmly working class, with an area median income of $37,800, according to the most recent available census data. 

Inside the building, the dank musk of mold and rot is inescapable. The walls have been stripped to a bare skeleton. Cables and wires droop from the ceiling like jungle vines. Debris is scattered across the linoleum floor. 

“Where you’re standing right now, the water was about up to your chest,” said David Wynn, the 55-year-old president of the Sea Gate Civic Association. “These buildings all got washed out, I’ve been out of this building for three years. Still waiting for FEMA and whatever aid we can get, still jumping hurdles for that.” 

Treyger stands plaintively as Wynn, the gregarious, barrel-chested “mayor of Sea Gate” rattles off an unofficial rundown of the community’s devastation: Of the 850 homes in the neighborhood, he estimates 825 were flooded; 18 homes were in such disrepair that they were torn down completely; 450 homeowners have applied for Build it Back—not a single new home has broken ground in the 21 months since Sandy. Many displaced residents are now, in Wynn’s words, “trailer trash,” living in makeshift housing while they await repairs. 

Wynn’s SUV rattles and bumps its way through the development en route to the western coastline of the peninsula. The neighborhood’s streets are a patchwork mosaic of tar, mini-sinkholes and cracks—scar tissue from Sandy, and a glaring reminder that the recovery effort, in Sea Gate and elsewhere, extends beyond rebuilding homes. 

During Sandy, Sea Gate was hit by a convergence of storm surges from three bodies of water: the Atlantic Ocean, Gravesend Bay and Coney Island Creek. The water carried sand that packed into the sewers, cracking pipes and causing sewage to seep into the streets and sometimes into homes. The sand underneath the pavement has also made the roads unstable. However, because Sea Gate is a gated community, the city claims that the residents are responsible for sewer damage, passing the buck to the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the state, by default, to handle any repairs to critical infrastructure in the area. 

“I’ve raised this issue before with the administration that if you rebuild a home but don’t fix the sewers, you’re not making the communities whole again,” Treyger said. “Sea Gate has its own complexities because it’s a gated community, but my position has been, and always will be, that these people here pay city, state, and federal taxes, they pay water fees, sewer fees, and we know they’re not cheap. We are not going to abandon families in this neighborhood.” 

The stunning panoramic vistas from Norton Point on the westernmost tip of Sea Gate underscore the area’s need for resiliency improvements. Before Sandy, a 1,500-foot-long, 18-inch-thick concrete bulkhead at Norton was all that stood between rising tides and the flooding of not only Sea Gate but the entire Coney Island peninsula. Now, all that remains of the bulkhead are several large slabs of concrete that would barely block a large wave, let alone a surge of ocean water. 

Standing on the expanse of sand that fills the space once occupied by the bulkhead, Wynn contemplates what would happen if another Sandy hit this year. 

“You’re gonna lose the community,” he says with certainty. “We get another [Hurricane] Irene—forget Sandy— you’re gonna lose everything.” 

Back in his truck, Wynn points out houses on a street abutting the Atlantic coastline that are either newly rebuilt by homeowners who paid out of pocket or have been abandoned. Stopping in front of a fenced-off property, Treyger explains that its owner waited so long for a response from Build it Back that eventually the building was condemned. Asked whether the fact that so many Sea Gate homeowners had been left to their own devices in the wake of Sandy means that the city had failed them, Treyger considers his words carefully, as he always seems to do before saying something that might be perceived as critical or harsh. He clearly understands the value of maintaining a solid working relationship with the de Blasio administration, even as he becomes increasingly frustrated by the city’s inertia in addressing the needs of his constituents. 

“I really have not seen Build it Back getting any [housing] completions done here,” Treyger said. “They are getting some completions done, I heard, in the Rockaways and Canarsie.” 

Treyger pauses to collect his thoughts before adding: “Listen, I’m happy that work is being done, period, but we have to make sure the work is being done across all the neighborhoods, and they are committed to that, but I would like to see some of this work expedited, cut through red tape, cut through bureaucracy and to give all communities signs of progress. [The city has] said, ‘Mark, we’re absolutely committed to that,’ but we want to see it. I told Amy [Peterson] I want to see a nice event here as well and to show a completed home here in Sea Gate or in Coney Island, and they said they will. I will keep fighting until those days happen, until the very last victim gets help.” 

THE NYCHA PROBLEM

 The Sandy recovery effort has three key components— housing, infrastructure, and resiliency—but there is a fourth that Treyger wants to ensure is not being overlooked: quality of life. On that front, few populations of New Yorkers have dealt with more hardship in trying to get back on their feet than public housing residents. 

NYU’s Furman Center estimates that 402 New York City Housing Authority buildings were damaged by Sandy. Between them these buildings encompass over 35,000 housing units—20 percent of the total number of NYCHA units across the five boroughs. Nearly 80,000 residents were left without heat or electricity as flooding damaged boilers and electrical systems in the basements of these buildings. 

NYCHA was already dealing with a ballooning capital deficit, and Sandy only exacerbated this problem. Many of the buildings, some of which are over 30 years old, have long required major upgrades to the roofing, heat and electrical systems, to say nothing of the massive backlog of repairs to individual housing units. 

Surfside Gardens in Coney Island is a classic NYCHA development: two drab brown brick high-rises with a courtyard and a deteriorating, pockmarked basketball court. As a group of kids play a game of “21,” they dodge dangerous cracks and crevasses in the pavement. One hoop is missing completely, swept away in the flooding, while the other hoop is devoid of a backboard save for a sliver of plexiglass in the bottom left hand corner of the frame. 

Very little about the city’s public housing system is pleasing to the eye; it harks back to a time when city planners, in an effort to modernize the city, were worried more about relocating the city’s working poor and maximizing its precious land than architectural aesthetics. 

The appearance of public housing buildings does not sit well with Treyger—“These things bother me so much,” he says at one point—and while listening to the grievances of a group of Surfside residents in the courtyard, his frustration is evident. One of the underpasses is still completely flooded, says one woman, talking over another, who describes how the poor air quality in the apartment aggravates her myriad medical issues, which include cancer and asthma. 

Behind the basketball court, what looks like a long white trailer sits outside the Surfside building. These are the temporary boilers the Federal Emergency Management Agency put in place, Treyger explains. When the building’s main boilers broke down, the federal government stepped in with the temporary equipment to provide heat and hot water for the residents. However, as some residents later discovered, even as a stopgap, these boilers came with their own set of problems. 

“A resident leader went down during the winter time when [one of the temporary boilers] wasn’t working and found a sticker on it that read it shouldn’t operate below 40 degrees,” Treyger recalls. “It was zero degrees outside, freezing cold, snowstorms and these things broke down, and families across Coney Island, even into Red Hook, the Rockaways, Lower Manhattan, had no heat, no hot water, some for many days. FEMA’s argument was that if we give you money we don’t want you to replace [the boilers] in the basement, because that’s where it flooded, we want them to be more resilient—which is understandable— but it shouldn’t take 15, 16 months to figure this stuff out.” 

Treyger adds that these boilers are not environmentally friendly, as they burn oil, and the fumes they emit are not healthy for residents to breathe. City Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who represents several impacted NYCHA buildings in Red Hook, another waterfront community flooded by Sandy, says that the city hopes to remove all of the oil-burning boilers and replace them with more efficient natural gas-burning boilers. 

Menchaca notes that repairing the roofs for these NYCHA buildings is also crucial to the everyday quality of life of the residents, especially given the city’s plans to place all backup generators for the buildings as high up within them as possible. 

“The maintenance stuff that they’re doing at the lower apartments gets undone because water keeps on trickling down,” Menchaca explained. “What’s interesting about that, as it connects to Sandy, is the overall sense of the resiliency of these buildings— people really don’t believe that these buildings are holding up after hurricanes. NYCHA needs to tell us, are these repaired? Because we’re not just talking about hurricanes, we’re talking about climate change bringing torrential rains that we really haven’t seen [before].” 

Both councilmen, whose joint public hearing at the Carey Gardens Community Center in February helped shine a light on the post- Sandy conditions of public housing developments, are hopeful that a recent block grant of $1.8 billion from the federal government earmarked for NYCHA repairs will help remedy some of these issues. But so far the money has been slow to come in, and every day that passes, residents get more restless. 

Treyger notes that some NYCHA developments have still not seen repairs to their community centers, depriving residents of an outlet to keep children off the streets and out of trouble. He mentions the killing of a 27-year-old man several weeks ago at the Gravesend Houses in his district as a possible by-product of the poor conditions of the development. 

Still, Menchaca remains hopeful that Council members can be the mouthpiece for these residents, communicating their needs to an administration that, if nothing else, has indicated it is more than willing to listen. 

“[This City Council] has only been in power for six months, building our offices from the ground up, in the middle of trying to redesign the budget process, redesign the legislative process, and so much of this first six months we’ve been building while going,” Menchaca said. “We’re starting to see a shift [in priorities]. Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not. Will we get there? I believe that we [will].”