Money limitations lead many to rebuild in place after Sandy
As communities tallied up Sandy’s toll last year, environmentalists and emergency planners were pointing to the storm as an unprecedented opportunity in New York and New Jersey to rebuild a more storm resilient coastline.
But change is difficult and the easiest path for homeowners in storm damaged areas is just to pick up the pieces and build in place.
One reason is that if a home is damaged and not destroyed, it is often less costly to just repair it, said James Kendra, director of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.
“Things are being built a little bit higher, but not that much higher,” said Rutgers University professor Kenneth G. Miller. “Probably over the next decade or two, that’s fine, but in the long term, sea level is rising” regardless of storms.
Threats to coastal communities laid bare by Sandy will only get worse, Miller said last week, especially in areas where communities insist on returning to their original positions, at or near their original heights.
“If you’re building up only 2 feet, you’re probably not building high enough,” Miller said.
“The best estimate we have for the year 2050 is that sea levels will be 1.3 feet higher, and 3.1 feet by the year 2100,” Miller said, referring to forecasts for global warming-driven climate change.
“One way of looking at it – for our best projections, by the year 2100, a storm that by then will be coming along every five years will have the flooding patterns of a current, 100-year storm”
Kendra and other members of his Disaster Research Center team went to New York after Sandy to see the impact of the storm first hand.
They met one woman who had no insurance to cover her losses and she was systematically working to rebuild by herself, he said.
“Basically, everything that happened had been predicted for a long time,” Kendra said, noting things need to change. “It really does involve rethinking how we interact with the environment.”
A big factor driving the build-in-place phenomenon post Sandy is money.
For many people in New Jersey and New York – like the woman Kendra’s team met – it was just too costly to do anything other than rebuilding or repairing in place. The same scenario would likely occur here in Delaware.
And then there is the cost in tax revenue for governments.
Most communities rely on property tax revenues as their primary source of revenue. Without the houses, without the businesses, without beaches and boardwalks and tourism, that stream of money dries up.
The Jersey Shore “accounts for $30 billion a year in revenue generation, according to the state Tourism Bureau,” said Stewart Farrell, who directs the Coastal Research Center at Stockton College. If rebuilding costs $600 million over 25 years, that’s not a very big number annually. It’s the same idea of spending $250,000 on a house and $5,000 every five years to paint it.”
The build-in-place phenomenon is just as true in Delaware Bay communities like Fortescue and Gandys Beach as it is along the Atlantic coast.
With 80 percent of properties tax exempt in Cumberland County’s Downe Township – thanks to state, federal and private conservation holdings – the properties that remain are even more important for the county’s fiscal health, said Downe Township Mayor Robert Campbell.
Fortescue and Gandys Beach bring in 75-percent of the property tax revenue in his township, said Campbell. Both were badly damaged during Sandy.
“That’s all we have left,” he said, speaking of the tourism and revenues the two communities bring to the township.
Campbell is so opposed to anyone in the township’s bay communities opting in to a program New Jersey has to buy out homeowners in several conservation areas – among them the Delaware Bayshore – that he pledges to challenge any contracts with the program in court.
In New York, the commitment to stand fast is strong. But opinions on approach differs.
State Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has shown interest in European-type defenses, including massive tide gates and bulkheads to shield New York Harbor from big surges.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is suggesting a different path.
In an introduction to a 400-page report released in June, Bloomberg shared a “vision of a stronger, more resilient city, many vulnerable neighborhoods will sit behind an array of coastal defenses.” Waves will be blunted by offshore breakwaters, and stopped or diffused by floodwalls, wetlands, tidegates and other strategies. Homes near the water will be raised and public infrastructure toughened.
“Of course, if this plan is implemented, New York City will not be ‘climate change-proof – an impossible goal,’” Bloomberg conceded. “But it will be far safer and more resilient than it is today.”
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