BUYOUTS and BEYOND: Politics, Planning, and the Future of Staten Island's East Shore After Superstorm Sandy

BUYOUTS AND BEYOND: Politics, Planning, and the Future of Staten Island’s East Shore After Superstorm Sandy By Alexander F. Brady B.A. Comparative Literature Princeton University, 2010 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER IN CITY PLANNING AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2015 ©2015 Alexander F. Brady. All Rights Reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author ____________________________________________________________________________________ Department of Urban Studies and Planning May 18, 2015 Certified by ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Professor Lawrence J. Vale Department of Urban Studies and Planning Thesis Supervisor Accepted by ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Professor Dennis Frenchman Chair, MCP Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning BUYOUTS AND BEYOND: Politics, Planning, and the Future of Staten Island’s East Shore After Superstorm Sandy By Alexander F. Brady B.A. Comparative Literature Princeton University, 2010 Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 18th, 2015 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master in City Planning ABSTRACT In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, two separate, federally funded programs began purchasing storm-damaged homes from voluntary sellers in the low-lying, working- class communities of Staten Island’s East Shore. New York State’s, offered in three specific, geographically bounded neighborhoods, requires that the land procured be preserved as open space. The City’s acquires any substantially damaged properties, with the goal of redeveloping them as more resilient housing. I began my research by asking why these parallel and sometimes competing programs had been established for the East Shore. What I uncovered was a deeply political, ad-hoc process resulting from a complex series of interactions between and among residents and their elected officials, each lobbying for their own priorities. While I explore this process in depth, I also pursue additional questions suggested by my findings. I was consistently told that each program’s primary goal was to meet residents’ immediate needs; thus, each was designed to respond to individuals or groups of homeowners, rather address the community as a whole. Yet when they were announced, each was also framed in terms of future land use: with the State’s to create “buffer” areas protecting inland neighborhoods, and the City’s providing an opportunity to rethink the East Shore’s small lots, narrow streets, and insufficient infrastructure, a legacy of its history as a community of summer bungalows. Now that the government has begun to acquire land, however, these future-oriented goals have encountered numerous challenges—from disagreements over the appropriate agency to own and maintain the open space, to a potential loss of one of the few areas of the city providing an affordable homeownership option. In this context, I examine the post-Sandy planning processes that did take place in New York and their relationship to the acquisition programs, in comparison to similar planning and acquisition processes in New Orleans, LA and Cedar Rapids, IA. Ultimately, and particularly in light of the slow process of disbursing federal aid, I ask whether an engaged, participatory planning process is really a barrier to meeting immediate needs, or whether a properly designed process can yield better outcomes for both the victims of disaster and the neighborhoods they leave behind. Thesis Advisor: Lawrence J. Vale Title: Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning BUYOUTS AND BEYOND: Politics, Planning, and the Future of Staten Island’s East Shore After Superstorm Sandy by Alexander Brady ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I’d like to thank all those who gave generously of their time to share their thoughts and experiences with me in my interviews; without them, this thesis would not exist. Thanks to my advisor, Larry Vale, for the care and insight he brought to his feedback, for helping to keep me on track, and for holding me to his high standards in both puns and alliteration. To my reader, Michael Marrella, for carving out the time for a 100- page thesis in the midst of a very busy schedule, his critical eye, the access he provided to me, and for hiring me last summer, which set me on this long and winding path. Thanks to my thesis group for letting me know when I had to stop sharing interesting facts and start telling them what I was going to write about, and to all the friends and family without the support of whom this effort surely would not have been possible. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 8 Methods and Sources 13 Chapter Two: A Hostile History 14 A Beach Within Reach 14 A Hostile History 19 Barriers to Barriers 24 Marshalling the Marshes 26 A Future Shaped by the Past 27 Chapter Three: The Superstorm 30 Sandy’s Surging Seas 30 Dealing with Disaster 33 Chapter Four: Parcels that Mother Nature Owns 38 Gaining the Governor 41 Reviewing Retreat 43 Chapter Five: A Safer, More Resilient, and Overall More Vibrant Place 48 Beginning to Build it Back 48 Blaming Bloomberg 52 Adjusting Acquisition 53 Questing for Clusters 58 The Affordable East Shore 61 Moving Forward 62 Chapter Six: Planning After Disaster 64 Planning New York 64 Learning from Others 70 Bringing New Orleans Back 72 Room for the Cedar River 78 Chapter Seven: Conclusion 84 What Now? 84 Why Plan? 89 Postscript 98 Notes 100 Works Cited 113 6 FIGURE LIST Figure 1.1: The East Shore of Staten Island 9 Figure 1.2: Post-Sandy Planning and Acquisition Processes 10 Figure 2.1: Staten Island Topography, East Shore Highlighted 15 Figure 2.2: Dutch Settlements 15 Figure 2.3: Bath House at South Beach 16 Figure 2.4: South Beach, 1917 16 Figure 2.5: Midland Beach Bungalows 17 Figure 2.6: Urbanization in Hurricane SLOSH Zones 17 Figure 2.7: Oakwood in a 1950 Storm 20 Figure 2.8: Rescues During 1992 Nor’easter 20 Figure 2.9: Oakwood After a 1930 Fire 21 Figure 2.10: East Shore Wildfire Incidence 21 Figure 2.11: Below-Grade Ocean Breeze Bungalows 22 Figure 2.12: Proposed Levee and Subsequent Townhouse Development 23 Figure 2.13: Staten Island Bluebelt Watersheds 26 Figure 3.1: Historic Surge Graph 31 Figure 3.2: Sandy Surge Map 31 Figure 3.3: New York Bight 31 Figure 3.4: Destroyed Bungalow 32 Figure 3.5: Sandy Inundation 32 Figure 3.6: Building Damage 32 Figure 4.1: New York State Coastal Risk Map 42 Figure 5.1: South Beach Levee Proposal 50 Figure 5.2: Bluestone Group Model Home Floorplan 50 Figure 5.3: Mayor Bloomberg and Patricia Dresch 51 Figure 5.4: Bungalow Elevation 54 Figure 5.5: Cedar Grove Study Area 55 Figure 5.6: Narrow, Ponded Streets in Cedar Grove 55 Figure 6.1: Map of SIRR initiatives for East and South Shores 65 Figure 6.2: Map of NYRCR initiatives for East and South Shores 67 Figure 6.3: Councilmen Oddo and Ignizio Visit New Orleans 70 Figure 6.4: New Orleans “Green Dot” Map 71 Figure 6.5: New Orleans Recovery Planning Timeline 72 Figure 6.6: NORA Dispositions 76 Figure 6.7: Cedar Rapids Inundation Map 78 Figure 6.8: Cedar Rapids Public Process 79 Figure 6.9: Cedar Rapids Recovery Alteratives 80 Figure 7.1: Coastal Home Values 92 Figure 7.2. South Beach Home Values 92 Figure 8.1: South Beach Redevelopment Rendering 99 7 CHAPTER ONE: Introduction “Once this area was a popular summer vacation spot… Today it is a stark landscape that looks as if the sea had risen up and swept most of it away.”1 These words were penned by Steven Weisman, a journalist for The New York Times, in April of 1971. He was writing of the Arverne neighborhood, a 50-block stretch of New York City on the ocean side of the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, previously home to 800 or 900 “old wooden bungalows.” Despite Arverne’s beachfront location, however, it wasn’t the Atlantic but the government that had cleared the homes, as part of an urban renewal plan designed to address the area’s substandard housing and infrastructure. In the days, months, and years that followed Superstorm Sandy’s arrival in New York City on October 29, 2012, much the same words could have been written about another corner of New York harbor, some fifteen miles away: the East Shore of Staten Island. The East Shore, an extremely low-lying portion of the Island bounded by Fort Wadsworth to the northeast and Great Kills to the southwest, also first came to prominence in the early twentieth century as a beach resort for vacationing New Yorkers. Thousands of summer bungalows were built in the area; later, many were converted to year-round homes. When the storm came, a devastating combination of the area’s topography, geography, and housing typology made its four neighborhoods—South Beach, Midland Beach, New Dorp Beach, and Oakwood Beach—the locus of some of the most extreme loss of life and property in the City. Though in this case it actually was the sea that started the job, however, the government would once again play a role in finishing it. In the aftermath of the storm, two parallel, federally funded programs began purchasing homes from East Shore residents who voluntarily chose to move on from the area. One, offered by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State of New York—the New York Rising Buyout Program—began acquiring properties within three specific, geographically bounded areas, with the proviso that the newly public land be forever preserved as open space.

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