Before Hurricane Sandy, Kathryn Fitzgerald lived with her young daughter, Megan, in a modest three-bedroom house in Long Beach, N.Y. But after the storm, their house was torn down.
Published: December 6, 2013
LONG BEACH, N.Y. — For Kathryn Fitzgerald and her young daughter, Megan, home was a modest three-bedroom house here, on a tightly packed segment of Delaware Avenue two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. That was the only home that Megan had ever known, until Hurricane Sandy hit and a rank mixture of floodwater and untreated sewage rose to chest-high in the lower level of the house.
Since then, they have lived in rental apartments and Megan, now 9, attended an unfamiliar school in another town for a while as her mother appealed for enough aid to rebuild the life they had.
When inspectors arrived at Ms. Fitzgerald’s house in November 2012, they pronounced her house “substantially damaged,” meaning that more than half of its value had been destroyed overnight. But her homeowner’s insurance policy did not cover flood damage. She had a federally subsidized flood insurance policy, but the company that wrote it offered her just $71,000. She appealed, arguing that her three-bedroom house had been worth more than double that, but her appeal was denied. She appealed again, and was again denied.
Lacking the wherewithal to start overhauling her house and believing that it was too vulnerable to another big storm, Ms. Fitzgerald paid $11,500 to have it torn down. Now she owns a sandlot surrounded by a fence bearing a sign that warns against trespassing.
“This has been a horrendously hard year for me,” she said. “If I don’t think of this in a way that is going to relieve the anger and upset, then I’ll just go back to crying every day.”
More than a year after one of the country’s largest-ever disaster recovery efforts began, Ms. Fitzgerald is among the more than 30,000 residents of New York and New Jersey who remain displaced by the storm, mired in a bureaucratic and financial limbo.
Imposing on relatives and draining their savings while pleading for assistance from a dizzying array of government agencies, they say they fear they will never get home.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had provided $1.4 billion in direct aid to victims of the storm and $7.9 billion in flood insurance payouts, and that the Small Business Administration had made $2.4 billion in low-interest loans to homeowners and businesses. What it did not announce was that less than half of the people who sought emergency money received any, as an analysis by The New York Times of FEMA data shows, or that in many cases flood insurance covered only a fraction of the losses. According to the analysis by The Times, in the areas in and around New York City that were hit hardest by the storm, almost half of the people who received assistance from FEMA got less than $5,000. Most of that money was intended to cover housing and other emergency costs immediately after the storm.
Hurricane Sandy was a storm like no other in the history of New York. It left more than 100 people dead and caused enormous structural damage that will take years to repair.
FEMA has received claims for nearly 16 million square feet of drywall, 56,000 furnaces and water heaters and enough paint to cover 43 million square feet.
But the most the agency gave in “individual assistance” to any single homeowner was about $36,000. The agency’s representatives instructed homeowners to file claims on their flood insurance policies, if they had one, and to apply for loans from the Small Business Administration, if they qualified. But as those first, small installments ran out, the frustration of negotiating with insurers added to the stress of being displaced.
“I think flood insurance underpayments is the single biggest reason for why the rebuilding hasn’t really taken off,” said Benjamin R. Rajotte, director of the Disaster Relief Clinic at the Touro Law Center in Central Islip, N.Y. “Frequently, people are coming in saying they received half or less of what it would take to rebuild their house, not even to raise them up but just to rebuild.” Officials at FEMA, which oversees the national flood insurance program, said that adjusters had incentive to cover all eligible losses, but that some policyholders might be disappointed at receiving money for what things were worth, rather than what it would cost to replace them. Those with complaints may appeal the decisions.
Many residents of the region were also surprised to have claims denied for damage to the foundations of their houses because the damage was deemed to have resulted from “earth movement,” not storm flooding.
Some of those displaced, like Rochelle Grubb of Far Rockaway, Queens, had no insurance at all against a flood.
Ms. Grubb, 41, a special-needs teacher at Public School 256 in Queens, had allowed her flood insurance to lapse before her house on Beach 101st Street was inundated by the fast-rising water.
In early December, she said she had been tutoring and her husband, Timothy, had been working overtime to come up with the $270,000 they estimated it would cost them to rebuild.
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They said they expected it would be more than a year before they could return to their house, but they do have flood insurance now. Ms. Grubb said she had to buy it to qualify for a $135,000 loan she received from the Small Business Administration.
“It’s 101 Street but we all called it One Hundred and Fun Street,” she said, referring to her close-knit neighbors. “Now when we see each other, we’d just hug and cry. And we’re like, when, when, when?”
‘Too Much Red Tape’
FEMA officials say that their primary goal is to provide emergency aid in the days and weeks after a disaster strikes — the first splash of what is known in Washington as the cascade of federal assistance.
The process of obtaining full compensation for losses is designed to involve several steps and to frustrate efforts to take unfair advantage, as some were accused of doing after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, government officials say. Standing beside Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in Manhattan in late October, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that more care was being taken to minimize fraud. “We’re not just sending checks willy-nilly,” he said. The biggest chunks of federal aid for residents come not from FEMA but from HUD, which received $16 billion from Congress to dole out in grants to state and local agencies. That money was part of a total federal allocation of about $60 billion in recovery money.
So far, New York City and the States of New York and New Jersey have received more than $10.2 billion of that money. But they have handed out only a small fraction of it.
By the anniversary of the storm on Oct. 29, New Jersey had spent about $230 million of its grants, but New York City and New York State had made very few payments through their rebuilding programs, known as Build it Back in the city and New York Rising on Long Island. Robert Smith, 64, a retired New York Police Department detective, said he had nearly given up hope on receiving enough money to rebuild the cottage he shared with his wife in the Broad Channel section of Queens. “FEMA has been totally insensitive to what I consider our basic needs,” said Mr. Smith, who has been living with his wife in their cabin upstate.
As for the Build It Back program, he said he had talked to dozens of homeowners in Broad Channel and none had received any money from that program. “It’s close to 15 months later and the only thing we’re getting is a bureaucracy and promises,” Mr. Smith said. “I want nothing more than to go back to live in Queens, or buy me out.”
Caswell F. Holloway IV, the deputy mayor overseeing Build It Back, said city officials waited until HUD had made its second allocation to the program before telling applicants how much they might receive.
The state’s New York Rising program kicked into high gear this October, sending out 4,200 letters that promised $450 million to homeowners and families on Long Island. A second mass-mailing, in November, promised payments to an additional 350 recipients.
In late October, the announcement of the latest portion of federal money spurred Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York to declare that “the aid spigot is now open, money will be flowing.” He conceded that “in Year 1, we all agree, the aid flowed too slowly” and said that there was “too much red tape.”
Only a few of those payments have been made so far, but state officials said on Friday that they had asked HUD to allow them to send more than $650 million directly to 6,666 homeowners before the end of the year.
Garrett J. Kaiser, a heavy equipment operator who lives with his wife and two children in Patchogue on Long Island, became one of the first beneficiaries of the state’s program this week.
Mr. Kaiser, 37, and his family lived for months in a camping trailer in their next-door neighbors’ driveway after the nearby bay rose up and filled their single-level house with two feet of water.
After the storm, he set about tearing out the soaked Sheetrock almost immediately, then had the structure raised seven feet. He personally rebuilt much of it, dipping into his family’s savings before he started receiving installments of insurance proceeds that totaled $115,000. In late October, he was one of the first applicants to the New York Rising program to sign the final paperwork to close a deal.
The promised payment of $38,000 would cover all of the expenses that FEMA and flood insurance did not, he said last month. He added that he had heard of people receiving promises of as much as $250,000 from New York Rising and that everyone he knew who had applied to the program was satisfied.
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“Now I feel blessed that the storm hit because I have a wonderful new home,” said Mr. Kaiser, who has gone into business elevating other homes in flood-prone areas. “I’m staying forever.”
On Wednesday evening, Mr. Kaiser had not yet received any money from New York Rising. But after an inquiry from a reporter about the delay, Mr. Kaiser said the full $38,000 was deposited in his account on Thursday.
An Uneven Recovery
Conni Freestone and her boyfriend, David Fagan, have been sleeping on air mattresses in a rented bungalow they have shared with Ms. Freestone’s ailing, 63-year-old mother in Toms River, N.J.
They had been living in her mother’s home in nearby Point Pleasant when the hurricane drove water from a creek into the garage and main floor of the two-story house. The flood ruined most of the instruments used by Mr. Fagan’s band and the equipment Ms. Freestone used as a freelance photographer. But the flood insurance on the house did not cover those contents.
Ms. Freestone had been frustrated by the slow response of FEMA to their many appeals for help and found out only after pestering Gov. Chris Christie in public that the agency had estimated the damage to the house at less than $7,000. (An aide to Mr. Christie investigated and discovered the low estimate.)
That sum amounted to a fraction of the $83,000 a local contractor said the repairs would cost. The family had been paying for his work out of equity withdrawn from the house, which was their main asset.
Much of that work, including electrical wiring, proved shoddy, Ms. Freestone said, and the family was afraid to move back in. With mold climbing the new drywall, they decided to sue the first contractor and find another. But they had received just $55,000 from their insurance policies, so they kept asking for more help as the anniversary of the storm came and went.
“I felt like I was begging,” Ms. Freestone said of her frequent appeals to FEMA and state agencies. “When I did suck it up and begged, I got shot down. I’m used to being the volunteer, not the one asking for help.”
The disparities in recovery from Hurricane Sandy are on stark display in Long Beach, N.Y., on the block of modest homes where Ms. Fitzgerald and Megan lived next door to a couple, Anne Walsh and Penny Ryan. Their two-story houses, which stood side by side on lots of just 1,800 square feet, suffered similar damage when the floodwaters rose above their floorboards.
But Long Beach officials did not declare Ms. Walsh and Ms. Ryan’s house to be “substantially damaged.” And that determination has made all the difference.
Unlike Ms. Fitzgerald, they were cleared to fix up their home without having to elevate it off the ground. So now Ms. Walsh and Ms. Ryan return from work in New York City to a pin-neat living room with a gleaming floor made of Brazilian teak.
Within weeks after the waters receded, Ms. Walsh, a nurse, and Ms. Ryan, a public school principal, had dipped into their savings to pay a contractor to start tearing out and replace the ruined floors and walls. All told, they said, they had spent about $200,000 to restore their home — considerably more than they recouped through FEMA, flood insurance and a $26,000 grant from New York Rising.
“We went from having a comfortable lifestyle to being totally in debt,” said Ms. Ryan, 50.
Ms. Walsh said she thought it would take five years for the neighborhood they cherished to come fully back to life. Some houses still sit dark and boarded up, others are being raised several feet to avoid another flooding.
Ms. Fitzgerald had held out hope that the New York Rising program would come through with a grant big enough to bridge the wide gap between what she received from her insurance companies and what it would cost to build a house from scratch so close to New York City.
When she finally got her answer from New York Rising, Ms. Fitzgerald said she was “wrecked” by “bitter disappointment.”
The state had calculated that her house could be rebuilt for $160,000, so they subtracted the $84,000 they say she had received from other sources since the storm and awarded her $76,000. She said that she thought it would cost closer to $250,000 to rebuild.
And she has already spent some of her insurance proceeds to pay for demolition and plans and permits for a new house, leaving her with far less than what she needs to rebuild.
“I’m not looking for anything fabulous,” Ms. Fitzgerald said, choking back the frustration of not knowing if she and her daughter would ever get back to Delaware Avenue. “I love that block,” she said. “I want to build back.”
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