NY - Property over people? New York City’s $52bn plan to save itself from the sea

Retired FDNY firefighter Patrick Kilgallen remembers the night well. In late October 2012, the approach of Hurricane Sandy up the US Eastern Seaboard coincided with a spring tide, propelling a surge of storm water that crashed into New York City and its surrounds, causing more than $70bn (£56bn) in damages, mostly from flooding.

When water from the ocean and bayside came coursing up the street, Kilgallen was with his family at home, one block in from the wooden boardwalk, at Rockaway Beach – a barrier island off Queens that faces the Atlantic Ocean and has become known as the “Irish Riviera” for its large population of Irish-American families, including many New York City firefighters and police officers.

“We tried to barricade the windows with sandbags but it kept coming up,” he says. “The basement door blew out with the pressure of the water. So, I shut the power off, and went up the first, or, ground floor. Then, as the water came up, we went to the second.”

The water turned out to be just the beginning of the carnage that ensued after neighbouring homes caught fire. A whole section of Breezy Point, including 200 homes, was flooded and then burned down.

Since that day, a billion-dollar, federally funded programme has been enacted to fortify nine miles of the Rockaway peninsula’s Atlantic-facing beach. The boardwalk was rebuilt in concrete and now doubles as flood protection; quarry stone groins were put in to break the waves; and – allowing for nesting of small, plump piping plover, a federally protected species – sand dunes were dug out and underpinned with a stone-filled trench and concrete wall going down 16 feet.

All this may not be enough: the barrier island of Rockaway Beach is just three blocks wide but nine miles long, and the side facing in toward the bay has not been so lavished with attention. Should Sandy’s convergence of atmospheric and lunar forces ever be repeated – as Hurricane Lee was threatening to do last week before veering off – a storm surge could come from the other direction, hitting the public housing, popular summer beaches of Fort Tilden and Jacob Riis, and the Irish-American co-operative of homes and cottages at Breezy Point on the western tip.

At each spot, earth-moving and climate reinforcements are taking place – all part of vast efforts to protect New York’s five boroughs against the rising ocean, with a single goal: to ensure another Sandy never happens. On Staten Island, the homes of hundreds of property owners have been brought out, and some homes are being elevated on stilts. New York’s subway system is still being repaired and upgraded.

Meanwhile, a city programme to build a barrier wall along the east side of Manhattan led to a dispute over storm protection designs for the historic East River Park, pitting community activists against political representatives whose areas encompassed public housing.

There is a growing backlash against “climate gentrification” – an effect caused when uninsured or under-insured homeowners lose their properties to a climate disaster, and the sites are sold and rebuilt for new, wealthier homeowners.

Indeed, Sandy grew so large in the 48 hours before landfall – with tropical storm-force winds spreading across 870 miles – that it was re-designated to a “superstorm”. But that change permitted some insurers to only pay out for wind damage, not flooding, contributing to financial losses from storm damage that could not be recovered and forced less wealthy homeowners to sell up.

At Rockaway Beach, the effects are impossible to miss. A luxury hotel has opened in a traditionally working class neighbourhood, and a section of Belle Harbor now has the highest median home price – $2.5m – in the entire borough of Queens. But Rockaway beachgoers are not sure they want the area to be Manhattan’s “favourite urban wellness escape”, as Forbes put it.

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