Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
AnnMarie Willis and her husband, Bob, have decided to rebuild in Breezy Point, Queens. More Photos »
As moldy drywall thudded to the curb in a depressing drumbeat throughout Breezy Point, Queens, Thomas Ryan’s reciprocating saw stood out like a growling declaration of impatience.
His neighbors were still ripping out debris. But Mr. Ryan, a retired bricklayer who built his house by hand 30 years ago only to lose most of it to Hurricane Sandy, was already hard at work rebuilding. He knew that officials from the city, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Breezy Point cooperative were still negotiating over new building standards, revisions that could force him to tear apart the windows and doors he was installing to add expensive new safeguards against another onslaught from the ocean. But he would not, he could not, sit around.
“How long can I wait?” Mr. Ryan said. “I’ve got to get back here and live.”
The big thinkers have emerged in force since Hurricane Sandy. Environmentalists and academics call for a retreat from rising tides and vulnerable seashores. FEMA pores over flood photos, redefining the areas of highest risk. And city engineers and lawyers revisit building and zoning codes. All hope to ensure that whatever rises from the debris can survive future assaults by extreme weather.
But for all the policy debates, the actual decisions that will shape these communities are already being made by individual homeowners across New York and New Jersey, providing reason to be skeptical that any cohesive, unified vision of a rebuilt coastline will eventually emerge. Unable to wait for updated guidelines, let alone far-reaching plans — or unable to afford the new costs they may entail — many families and business owners are already acting in ways that will determine whether those more ambitious goals can be met.
Their responses range from faithful reconstruction to fatalistic retreat — and embody the essential tension of post-disaster recovery: rebuilding quickly, or rebuilding right.
Consensus vs. Speed
In New York City, property owners seeking to rebound from the storm will have to feel their way through a wilderness of new flood maps, revamped building codes and land-use ordinances, along with a host of other measures addressing the specific needs of storm-battered communities — all of which have yet to be hammered out and adopted.
“We are not going to abandon the waterfront,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a speech this month. “We are not going to leave the Rockaways or Coney Island or Staten Island’s South Shore. But we can’t just rebuild what was there and hope for the best. We have to build smarter and stronger and more sustainably.”
Accomplishing that in those neighborhoods and in other areas of devastation throughout the region will be complicated by the need for homeowners who are rebuilding to cooperate. Michael Byrne, the coordinating officer for FEMA in New York, said that the nation’s disaster-recovery playbook urged deliberate consensus-building over speedy top-down decisions, but that individuals were free to move faster if they wanted.
“We never stop anybody from doing things,” Mr. Byrne said. “It really comes down to: would you rather have a quick decision without buy-in, or give it the time and run the risk that there’s going to be people who go ahead and rebuild?”
Generally speaking, a resident whose cost of repairs amounts to more than 50 percent of a home’s valuation will have to bring his or her structure up to current building codes, often at significant additional expense. Those whose losses were less severe will be allowed to make repairs without performing major enhancements.
But one of the more frustrating aspects of the recovery from any natural disaster is that, with planning, regulation, finance and construction all occurring in the same compressed and chaotic time frame, property owners often say they do not know what they will or will not be allowed to do. And the panoply of disaster-aid programs often leads to unwise decisions: money to replace a flooded furnace where it was, for example, is often easier and quicker to secure than money to elevate it out of harm’s way.
Moreover, in some of the places hit hardest, property owners already worry that the government could declare their areas off-limits, and use eminent domain to force them out. Others could be required by the government or by the federal flood insurance program to take new protective measures, like raising structures, that they will not be able to afford, or that could force them to tear down what they had rebuilt too hastily.
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