The Real Scandal of New York City's Sandy Recovery
We know New York isn’t good at building train stations or tunnels. Last week, we learned New York can’t even build . . . houses.
“In most disaster programs — including after New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina — the government gives people money to rebuild. But New York thought it had a better idea.”
Surprise: The city’s plan to help people rebuild after Hurricane Sandy is way over budget — and eating into money for libraries, school-bathroom repairs and potholes.
You can blame Bloomberg for part of this debacle.
After the flood hit four years ago, Mayor Mike pledged a “simple and understandable” way for families to rebuild their homes.
In most disaster programs — including after New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina — the government gives people money to rebuild. But New York thought it had a better idea.
For the 20,000 people who signed up for “Build it Back,” the city would build hurricane-proof houses, hiring contractors to elevate homes while the families lived somewhere else (with the government paying the rent, under a recently expanded program).
The idea was that the city could control costs better than homeowners. The city had assembly-line efficiency, plus experience dealing with contractors.
And anyway, the $700 million this program would cost was federal money — not city money.
Even when it was just federal money, it wasn’t a good idea.
It’s bad luck, sure, to buy a house on the coast and then learn it’s vulnerable to flooding. That’s what happened to one Broad Channel resident, who told The Wall Street Journal he paid $365,000 in 2008 for his homee, which the city is paying $600,000 to elevate.
But two-thirds of New Yorkers don’t own a home at all. Many others had the misfortune to be born in a violent neighborhood, or to a homeless mother.
The government should help people in crisis — giving them temporary shelter after a disaster, just as we give shelter to people who are homeless. But having taxpayers spend up to $1 million per private house — as the city is doing for the 50 most difficult Sandy-damaged cases — brings dependence on government to a new level.
Philosophy aside, Gotham can’t do this work right. During a 2013 debate, then-candidate Bill de Blasio castigated Bloomberg for screwing up Build it Back. Already, homeowners were complaining about slow service.
But, after three years of de Blasio, the cost has ballooned to $2.2 billion. Since half the people the city was supposed to “help” dropped out, that’s an average of $220,000 a house.
Why the overruns?
As project director Amy Peterson told the City Council last week, it’s the usual: New York is terrible at building anything. “Our costs in New York city are three times, generally, higher than the average of the 20 highest cities,” she said.
That’s in part because New York can never decide if it’s building things or remaking society. Peterson catalogued how requirements that unions hire a certain number of minorities, women, underprivileged people and people from flood-hit neighborhoods have cost time and money, because there are only so many people who can do this work.
Peterson also mentioned “complex site conditions” at homes “adjacent to major volumes of water.”
In addition to elevating homes, the city will remediate lead paint and asbestos in people’s old houses, and install stairlifts for the handicapped as well as sprinklers and second exits.
No worries: De Blasio is launching a “draft action plan” and a “full public comment period” ahead of a “very detailed process” to finish the job, Peterson promised.
And if you don’t want to wait, the city will pay you up to $150,000 to buy a house somewhere else.
In the meantime, the city still will help displaced people with rent and storage, paying, as Peterson said, “above the fair market.”
This will cost city taxpayers. New York doesn’t print money, and the feds have capped their contribution at $1.7 billion.
So the extra half-billion comes out of city money needed to build better bathrooms in schools, replace air conditioning in libraries or fill in potholes.
We can’t build better schools and libraries for everyone when we’re helping a few people with their waterfront properties — especially when we can’t even help them competently.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post