“I don’t think I have to tell anyone in this room what it was like during Superstorm Sandy,” spoke Joy Sinderbrand, of NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority), to an audience of Red Hook Houses residents. The meeting, held in the P.S. 676 auditorium on June 6 from 6-8 pm, was attended by several members of NYCHA’s Recovery and Resilience Department, and, by people’s choice, moderated by the outspoken community advocate and president of Red Hook West Tenants Association, KAREN BLONDEL. Memories of the storm and its aftermath stirred amongst the audience, who ranged in age from their teens to their 70s and 80s. Many recalled months of living with no heat or hot water, no working elevators, and other disruptions caused by the storm surge that flooded the boilers and utilities infrastructure in the East and West Houses. “You all lived this, you all know what happens when a storm surge comes into Red Hook.”
“It was terrible,” said Awilda Lopez, seated on a lawn chair outside the West Houses on a recent Sunday morning. Lopez, who has lived in Red Hook since 1959, felt helpless in Hurricane Sandy’s wake. “We couldn’t do nothing, we just had to wait.”
But Sandy proved a catalyst for unprecedented action by the community. In the aftermath of the storm, a unified front of residents and community groups rallied to put pressure on NYCHA, to do something truly meaningful to help Red Hook not just recover, but also to prevent calamities like this from happening in the future. “This is what gave us the impetus to apply for the funding,” Sinderbrand continued, amid the clamor of kids getting out of afterschool activities in the echoey hallway.
The $3 billion in federal funding, secured by NYCHA in 2015, for Sandy-related repairs and prevention work, included a $550 million carve-out for floodplain improvements and repairs in Red Hook. Securing the funding was considered a historic victory in itself. These funds, which came through FEMA, represented the opportunity to create a silver lining in the aftermath of Sandy.
In 2016, the renovations began, following intense negotiations involving NYCHA administrators, community advocates, and the federal government. NYCHA, armed with a hefty budget, entrusted the renovations to a reputable architecture firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, known for their innovative designs and promising solutions to preempt future disasters.
But the construction progress, initially slated for completion by 2019, continues to inch along slowly. Only 20% of the “lily pads” (sections of elevated ground, with concrete tanks installed beneath for water collection) have been completed. “In 2016, I was told this would all be done by 2019,”
Sinderbrand lamented. “Clearly, that hasn’t happened.”
Several factors have contributed to the delays; standard construction setbacks (when do construction projects ever get done on time?), a resident-driven mandate to minimize disruption and avoid relocations, and the unexpected halt due to the 2020 pandemic, to name a few. Plus, the project was, and still is, very large in scope.
Despite delays, many of the key features of the project have been either completed or are very close to complete, including the utility pods that dot the campus, and the East and West power plants. Installing new roofing was a top priority after Sandy, and 100% of that work has been completed according to NYCHA. Many new benches and tables throughout the campus have been completed to date.
Still, some residents, like Lopez, see incompetence and negligence where NYCHA reps make excuses about the sheer scope and size of the project, and the pandemic. “They start, but they don’t finish,” said Lopez pointing to the various construction sites in view in every direction. “They go there,” she said, pointing to a fenced off lot with construction materials scattered about. “They go there, they go there. They don’t know when they’re going to finish. They put up so many fences, it feels like we are on Rikers Island.”
If you walk along the perimeter of Red Hook East and West, and through the campus along Centre Mall, indeed, everywhere you look, you see fences and “Danger” signs, installed to protect residents from the active—and inactive—construction sites all around them. There is also a noticeable lack of trees, a grievance that came up at the June meeting several times. “This has been a source of frustration,” Silberbrand said when pressed on NYCHA’s plan to replace the trees that were removed during the construction. “FEMA will pay for trees to be removed, but not for replanting.”
“Several factors have contributed to the delays; standard construction setbacks (when do construction projects ever get done on time?), a resident-driven mandate to minimize disruption and avoid relocations, and the unexpected halt due to the 2020 pandemic, to name a few. Plus, the project was, and still is, very large in scope.”
There are other signs of construction across the landscape of the Houses, that have nothing to do with the Sandy recovery – but that did not stop residents at last month’s meeting from raising them as urgent issues. One such issue is the presence of scaffoldings that line many of the Houses. The reason for the scaffoldings is Local Law 11, a law mandating that if a building facade is in bad enough condition, there must be scaffoldings built and kept until the repairs are done. But these repairs are never a high enough priority for NYCHA, so it is as if the scaffoldings are there indefinitely.
“Across NYCHA, we are looking to prioritize Local Law 11 in the funding we’re getting from the city and state,” Sinderbrand explained. “But in total, it’s a $40 billion capital need, and we tend to spend money on types of repairs that are immediate health and safety concerns. For example, if there is a gas outage, replacing gas would be a top priority, whereas with Local Law 11, because we can put the sheds up and protect people that way, if we don’t have the funding, we aren’t able to do the capital work there.” Blondel and several other residents pushed back on this, highlighting the public safety and health concerns connected to the scaffoldings. “When you removed the trees for the construction, the birds moved to the scaffolds, so they are pooping and peeing up the railing and we have elderly residents and kids touching the railings, and we know bird flu, avian flu, all that stuff is out there,” Blondel said. “Either you need to suspend Local Law 11 or do the work. You can’t just leave us like this forever.”
Other issues raised by residents at the June 6 meeting included sewage backflow resulting from new developments in Gowanus, concerns about new keycards that will be given out to residents when the new entry doors are installed, noise from the construction, and other concerns.
The dialogue continues, with the next community meeting scheduled for October. We’ll share more information when we have it, hope to see you there!
