‘We’re not ready’: NY, NJ still building for extreme weather 10 years after Hurricane Sandy

NEW YORK — As Hurricane Sandy barreled ashore, bringing battering winds and crushing waves, thousands evacuated their homes in New York and New Jersey before the storm cut a $69 billion swath of destruction across the region, crippling public transit and causing a historic shutdown of Wall Street trading.

When Timothy Cochrane and his family returned to their bayfront property in the sleepy Queens neighborhood of Breezy Point, he found it unrecognizable. The tempest launched a nearby dock through his front door. His second floor was obliterated, possessions entirely wiped away by Sandy’s 14-foot storm surge. Among the debris, he found a mailbox from a Brooklyn neighborhood at least a mile away on the opposite side of Jamaica Bay.

“You just can't comprehend it's going to get like that,” said Cochrane, who serves as chair of the Breezy Point Cooperative, which manages the private community of roughly 2,800 homes. “Nobody knew.”

But 10 years after Sandy, many of the bold improvements planned in the hurricane’s immediate aftermath remain incomplete or behind schedule in New York and New Jersey. So Breezy Point and other neighborhoods remain unprotected, along with many lives and valuable property. Not because the money isn’t there, but because of delays, red tape and politics.

In Cochrane’s neighborhood, the feds pulled funding for a major storm protection project after residents refused to open their private beaches to the public, which the city said was a condition under its Waterfront Revitalization Program.

New York received $43 billion in federal disaster aid. But a recent report by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander found that more than one quarter of the city's $15 billion share has yet to be used — much of it tied up in major resiliency efforts, as well as projects to repair, replace or restore publicly owned facilities damaged by the storm.

“What we need to wrap our heads around is the complexity of these projects,” Mayor Eric Adams said as he marked the storm’s 10-year anniversary this week. “We’re not talking about just building a highway, or just building a building, or just building a wall. We’re going into unknown territory of building projects at this level of complexity.”

New Jersey’s top environmental regulator, Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Shawn LaTourette, said government officials need to be honest with people about the risks of another tragic storm and ever-rising seas.

“We are not ready, period,” LaTourette said. “Neither is New York City. Neither is most of the country.”

‘A never-ending process’

Back in Breezy Point, top environmental officials and local residents couldn’t come to an agreement on a $58 million sea dune project paid for by federal and city funding. City officials said the project was contingent on providing public beach access, but the private community said that was a non-starter. The cooperative, which is supported by monthly fees, has instead spent $2 million building its own dunes with plans to add more, but that work will likely fall short of the plan officials had initially envisioned.

“We're not fully protected, and we're still working to try to get there,” Cochrane said.

The scenario exemplifies the difficulty in launching multi-jurisdictional projects — which require cooperation from the community, city authority, state representatives and the federal government.

While it appears to be the only project outright canceled over irreconcilable differences on how to use the funds, many proposals across both states have run into delays or been altered amid backlash.

New York City’s $1.45 billion East Coastal Resiliency Plan to fortify Lower Manhattan with floodwalls and an elevated park has fomented such strong community backlash that it became a flashpoint in a recent congressional race.

The project was supposed to break ground in 2017, but underwent controversial design changes the following year that spawned an unsuccessful lawsuit, only further delaying progress. It’s only just beginning to yield results. Officials recently unveiled the second of the plan’s 18 movable flood barriers, which are now slated for completion in 2026.

A similar local fight has broken out over a $221 million resiliency plan in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan.

Then-President Donald Trump summarily yanked study funding for a $119 million sea wall across New York Harbor, and the Army Corps is now floating a less-costly, $58 million approach. Any work won’t get underway until 2030, and it’s unclear how the two states — which have fought over funding much smaller projects, like a train tunnel — will pay for the endeavor.

Across the Hudson River, top New Jersey officials face a never-ending stream of lawsuits filed to block major dune-construction projects. The very waterfront property owners the dunes would protect are suing to instead protect their views.

“That is almost a never-ending process,” said Daniel Kelly, the head of the New Jersey governor’s disaster recovery office.

The dunes are slowly being built, but many of the state’s boldest initiatives are still in the works, like a $230 million flood management project in Hoboken and a series of projects meant to protect New Jersey’s low-lying Meadowlands.

The market forgets

As the government continues to work on flood protection, communities have been rebuilt and are more valuable than ever.

The New York City comptroller report found that market rate values of real estate in the 100-year floodplain have increased 44 percent since Sandy, to over $176 billion — despite their proven exposure and few new significant resiliency measures.

“It only took about three years for the market to forget that the storm had taken place,” said Clinton Andrews, a professor of urban planning at Rutgers University who looked at property values in hard hit Monmouth County, N.J., before and after Sandy.

New Jersey has also seen an increased value for coastal property near New York City — in part because new homes have been elevated above storm surges, but also because rebuilt homes are even larger than the ones they replaced.

“I’m thinking you must be crazy to rebuild in the exact same spot and hope elevating the house is enough to obviate the risk,” said Andrews. “That said, people are doing it and having great summers.”

State officials are still working on a slate of resiliency measures as demand for waterfront properties grows unabated.

In New Jersey, there’s a $160 million beach and dune project on Long Beach Island that was finished, along with ongoing projects like a $289 million multi-part resiliency project in Union Beach, a $265 million flood protection project at Port Monmouth and $236 million in periodic beach nourishment.

Two major projects to provide backup power in the event of the storm have faced setbacks amid opposition from environmental groups because they would rely on burning natural gas. One of the plants is for New Jersey Transit, the state’s main public transit agency that lost power during Sandy, and another is for a wastewater treatment plant that also lost power from the storm and had to dump over 800 million gallons of raw sewage into New York Harbor.

Ongoing similarly scaled projects across New York include the $107 million “Living Breakwaters” project to restore shoreline in Staten Island and a $140 million initiative to provide back-up power in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx.

A turning tide

After a tumultuous decade of planning, city officials said the tide is starting to move in the right direction. They plan to break ground before year’s end on the “Raised Shorelines” initiative to prevent erosion in coastal areas, beginning with Old Howard Beach, Queens. The city recently began construction on a $522 million plan to add flood walls and deployable flip-up barriers in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan.

Heralding the flood wall on Wednesday, Adams acknowledged the need for faster progress. The mayor threw his backing behind a new state bill that would allow the city to use a “design-build” approach to capital work — expediting the current two-step procurement process for construction projects. He also called for dedicated federal funding for coastal resiliency work, stating the city needs $8.5 billion to complete ongoing projects.

“It will cost more to bail out New York City than to protect it,” he warned of future flooding.

The state has completed its $1 billion program to rebuild or buy out 11,000 properties that were affected by Sandy, which includes 3,400 home elevations and repairs to 1,700 rental properties. More than 700 households sold their properties to the state and relocated, most of which were in Staten Island neighborhoods that were devastated by the hurricane. In New York City, 12,500 homes were rebuilt or repaired under its Build It Back program, and 247 properties were acquired.

In 2014, New York City codified new standards requiring more resilient construction for buildings in the 100-year floodplain. But only 3.5 percent of structures covered under the rule were built or last altered since the new standards were adopted, according to the city comptroller report.

New York officials describe their approach to vulnerable infrastructure as a balancing act, weighing the desires of the community while also creating new standards for home construction in vulnerable areas.

“The longer-term major resiliency, it takes time,” said Katie Brennan, executive director of the New York Governor's Office of Storm Recovery. “There's the community planning, there's listening to what folks want, figuring out what's possible, going through the design and construction phases, getting all of the permitting taken care of, and then — especially when you're talking about a major resiliency initiative — it's a large construction project and a complex one at that.”

The remnants of last year’s Hurricane Ida reminded officials of the danger of flooding caused by heavy rain. The storm killed at least 42 people in both states. Yet New Jersey has struggled to put in place new rules to harden riverside construction from such flooding, and New York officials are still grappling with how to make an estimated 100,000 basement apartments safe.

Even some relatively modest recent storms caused major erosion along the coast, which prompted LaTourette, the New Jersey DEP commissioner, to do a flyover of the damage.

He saw Strathmere, a South Jersey community wedged between wetlands and the ocean. As LaTourette held up a photo of the scene from his phone, he wondered what his kids would think about the “crazy people” who built here, beside a rising ocean.

“What drove us to come off where the parkway is, drive through all this marshland to a sandbar and build a community on it?” he said. “But hindsight is 20-20. And now we have all these assets and all these lives, and we've got to protect them. We've got to. That's where we're at.”