Paying to Rebuild, and Rebuild Again

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Posted by Osnat
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/nyregion/paying-to-rebuild-after-the-storm-now-and-in-the-future.html
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Michael Appleton for The New York Times

NO FLOOD INSURANCE Sergio Fonseca outside his home in Neponsit, Queens, which was damaged during Hurricane Sandy. By Friday, he learned that his entire insurance claim had been denied.

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Published: November 16, 2012 213 Comments

To walk toward Jacob Riis Park on the western end of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, through the beaches of Belle Harbor and Neponsit, is to wonder whether severe weather has its own particular taste, its own logic for exempting certain belongings from its animosity. While Hurricane Sandy buried some of the area’s large oceanfront houses in the sand or split them in two, smashing sport utility vehicles into living rooms, other structures suffered a more artful destruction. These might be called, for the purposes of a perverse disaster tourism, the doll houses — places where the facades were ripped off to reveal rooms with collapsed flooring from which still-made beds dangled and cable boxes hung in the air from their cords; a tableau of total obliteration save for a preserved Oriental vase or an intact fireplace mantel.

There is arguably no more evocative (or literal) portrait of suspended life in the post-hurricane world than these images provide. As of last week, power was still out in much of Belle Harbor and Neponsit, and waiting for return calls from insurance adjusters became its own consuming pastime. When would they come with their notepads and assessments, and how much nickel-and-diming would they really do?

The fear, of course, is that they would do a great deal of it. “They’ll cover you for this act of God, but not that act of God,” Jack Suben, who owns a ruined 70-year-old house in the Sea Gate section of Coney Island, in Brooklyn, told me. In true Dickensian fashion, his hotel expenses, as far as he had been told, would cease to be covered on Christmas Eve.

While there has been debate at state and municipal levels about what the city ought to do to bolster its infrastructure against the perils of rising sea levels, the bureaucratic chaos in beach communities precludes any meaningful consideration of how to rebuild for those most affected.

The federal government’s flood-insurance program fell $18 billion into debt after Hurricane Katrina, but what one quickly learns while knocking about in the Rockaways is that many people didn’t have flood insurance to begin with. This is perhaps the consequence of what has become a more democratized shoreline over the past several decades as the middle class has come to reside in seaside neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that used to be, in many cases, weekend enclaves for the wealthy. Living by the ocean will eventually exact its costs; flood insurance is expensive.

In the absence of such a security, people are left to rely on homeowners’ policies, which do little to encourage sound reconstruction. Insurers typically reimburse you to recreate precisely what you had, not what you might need in the name of greater resilience and protection against the high price of future damage.

On a bright and cold afternoon last week, I met Sergio Fonseca, a former engineer and math teacher, outside his modest brick house a little more than a block from the beach in Neponsit. As young Mormon volunteers from Pennsylvania were hauling his soaked possessions from his house (his 2004 tax returns were out on the lawn), he explained that he hoped to get some assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to replace a boiler and a stove, but that he wasn’t sure — given the constraints of his policy — that he’d be able to afford to fill in his basement and thus raise his house to a level where it would better withstand flooding.

Mr. Fonseca had no flood insurance, and by Friday he had learned that his carrier was denying his entire claim, arguing that none of the devastation was attributed to wind or rain. He estimated that his house had incurred about $100,000 in damage; three weeks ago, he’d started an electronics consulting business out of his now-mold-infested basement, the cleanup of which was costing him $11,000.

Beyond the miserly dictates of insurance companies, zoning and density further impede the evolution of a vision that looks to avoid the repetition of the destruction. Mike Rodriguez, a school-crossing guard and Vietnam War veteran whose home in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn was battered by the storm, had been trying to raise his house for years but was told over and over that zoning would not allow it, even though neighbors on major thoroughfares a few blocks away were permitted to build high above street level.

Anyone who has been to the waterfront in boroughs outside Manhattan realizes that it is not East Hampton or Maine. Given the current conditions, it would seem like folly to rebuild on the ocean in the Rockaways, but if one did so, logic would advise building farther back, away from the water. But in the Rockaways, there is no farther back; if you moved your house, you’d be reconstructing in your neighbor’s dining room.

What is at risk in some of these communities beyond conservation and safety is an unusual socioeconomic climate where well-to-do owners of expansive oceanfront homes live alongside police officers, firefighters, teachers and other civil servants. While some of those living directly on the ocean may retreat, others will rebuild without the same sort of worry over what will and won’t be compensated.

“The millionaires can stay,” speculated Mr. Fonseca, who is living in an airport hotel. Seven years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans didn’t get poorer; it got richer.