The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today:

Breezy Point is a tiny community at
the far western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula. To the northwest, you can see
Manhattan, while Sandy Hook, NJ is off to the southwest. The neighborhood
started in the early 1900’s as a summer bungalow community for people from
Brooklyn and Queens. Because it was 98+% Irish, Breezy back then was called the
Irish Riviera. Until the 1970’s, most bungalows were not winterized, so the large summer
population left right after Labor Day. It has always been a tight-knit, family
oriented place.

The
Wrongologist’s maternal grandmother bought a place there in the 1920’s. This
photo from 1934 gives a good idea of how close the bungalows are to each other.

The
Wrongologist’s father’s extended family had the bungalow across the “walk” (too
small for cars) from his grandmother’s place. His parents met there, talking
across the walk over the course of a summer. Even today, family members still live
at Breezy. It has been part of the Wrongologist’s family’s life for 90+ years.

Today,
Breezy Point is a private cooperative of 3500 homes. It has its own security
force, 3 volunteer fire departments and has been for at least 60 years, a gated
community. Although it is exclusive, it is not wealthy.

It was
devastated by Hurricane Sandy and the fire that burned
110 houses to the ground on the night of the storm.  

During Mr.
Obama’s visit to NY last week, after he named Shaun Donovan, his HUD Secretary,
to spearhead federal recovery efforts, the president reflexively pledged to restore ravaged neighborhoods and
homes in Queens and Staten Island to the way they were before Hurricane Sandy.

It was business as
usual
and possibly the last thing the country should be doing.

Politics
aside, there is no logic to FEMA simply rebuilding single-family homes on
barrier islands like the Rockaways, where they will fall again during the next
major storm surge.

We need cost-benefit
analyses to answer tough questions like whether it’s actually worth saving some
neighborhoods in flood zones. Communities
like Breezy Point should be given knowledge, power and choice about their
options, then the responsibility to live by that choice.

Americans like living by the water.
But government-subsidized flood insurance
eliminates much of the financial risk in the event of disaster.

The question after Sandy is whether the country will keep paying
billions to return people to their high risk locations, or whether we’ll
instead say “build if you want, but
the risk is all yours.”

As Justin Gillis and
Felicity Barringer wrote in the New York Times, the federal government is bound by law to pay for much of the
cost of fixing storm-damaged infrastructure, including homes. It is part of the Stafford
Act that kicks in when the president declares a federal disaster that
exceeds the response capacity of state and local governments.

Add in the National Flood Insurance Program and it is clear that the federal government makes
it easier to live in a danger zone than to make the tough choice to
relocate:

• Billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing
  coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little
  consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in the same
  disaster-prone area

• If history is a guide, a large fraction of the federal money
  allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy, (an amount
  that could exceed $30 billion), will likely be used the same way

The
federal flood insurance program is already under financial strain, and
Sandy could cost as much as $7 billion just
in government insurance claims, while
the program itself can only add an additional $3 billion to its current debt
levels.

This should prompt lawmakers to reform the program. If subsidized flood insurance is no
longer a given, we might also begin to see a slowdown in coastal and other
flood plain population growth.

We have
to try and build improved physical protection for
established coastal population centers. But the best way to ensure that the
next Sandy does less damage is simply to move some people out of harm’s way, or
at least make it more expensive to
stay there.

Otherwise, our tax money will go toward putting things back as
they were, essentially duplicating the vulnerability that existed before the
hurricane.

So far, there has been much discussion
about the possibility of building multi-billion dollar sea walls and barriers
that might be able to shield Manhattan and other vulnerable places from the
kind of storm surges that caused so much destruction during Sandy.

The Maeslant Surge Barrier in Rotterdam (NYT)

According to Michael Kimmelman of The
New York Times, there
is a rough consensus about how to protect New York City. Engineers are looking at
London, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Tokyo, where sea walls, levees and wetlands,
flood plains and floating city blocks have been conceived.

Building
similar projects to protect the New York region would require developing and
executing a supra-regional plan involving an alphabet soup of agencies and
public officials: Congress and the governors of New York, New
Jersey and Connecticut; the Corps of Engineers; FEMA; Homeland Security; the NYS
Public Service Commission (to compel companies like Con Ed and Verizon to
safeguard its equipment); Amtrak; the MTA; the city’s planning, transportation,
parks and environmental protection departments; and the Port Authority.  

Thames River Flood Barrier in London (NYT)

Money shouldn’t be the problem, considering the
hundreds of billions of dollars, and more lives, that a few more Sandy’s could
cost. So the problem is not technological or from a long-term cost-benefit
perspective, financial.

Rather, it
is a test for our inconvenient democracy.

The hardest part of what lies ahead won’t be deciding whether to construct huge
sea walls across the Verrazano Narrows and Hell Gate, or overhauling New York’s sewage and storm water system, which already spews toxic waste into its rivers whenever a couple of inches of rain fall.  

 

The real problem is that billions of
dollars may end up being spent to
protect businesses in Lower Manhattan while old, working-class communities like Breezy Point on
the waterfronts of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island most
likely won’t get the same protection. The accompanying pain, dislocation and inequity
will upend lives, undo communities and shake assumptions about city life. It will
be very hard to bear.

It’s no wonder presidents promise to
rebuild and stick taxpayers with the tab.

But, it’s
no good trying to put things back the way they were, because we shouldn’t go back
there. There are tough decisions ahead
about nature and numbers, population density, economics and geology.

So the
real question post-Sandy is: How can we accomplish what must be done, in time
and with fairness?