by

The federal government has given the Navy Yard a $1,687,000 grant to repair damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy, according to the Brooklyn Eagle. The Navy Yard Corporation will use the money to fix up docks and berths destroyed by the storm. Senators Kristen Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer announced the award, which came from FEMA, on Tuesday.

Schumer, Gillibrand Announce $1.687 Million Grant for Brooklyn Navy Yard [Eagle]
Navy Yard Coverage [Brownstoner]
Photo by mcmillianfurlow

by
1

The city and state are looking for a firm to study and design (but not build) an integrated flood protection system for Red Hook. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio sent out a press release yesterday announcing a request for proposals, and have already committed $100,000,000 in city and state funding to flood protection. The whole project, including construction, will cost an estimated $200,000,000 and protect 370 acres of land, including Red Hook Houses and “other key buildings and infrastructure in the 100-year floodplain.”

Long-term flood protection strategies may involve “a combination of partially deployable floodwalls and raised development, park retrofits and street raising, resilient building retrofits and redevelopment, and improvements to drainage and pumping facilities,” according to the press release. The Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency and the NYC Economic Development Corporation will head up the actual implementation of the project.  They’ll also design the final measures with help from the Red Hook NY Rising Community Reconstruction Planning Committee.

Above, Red Hook flooded during Hurricane Sandy. Curbed was the first to write about the announcement.

Photo via Twitter

by

The New York Times took a look at Canarsie as a place to live and discovered a close-knit, diverse community with affordable homes. One- and two-family homes range from $350,000 to $600,000. The prices are still off their 2007 highs, when a two-family cost $450,000 to $725,000, thanks to the twin blows of the mortgage crisis and Hurricane Sandy.

“The mortgage crisis is only getting worse in Canarsie, and it’s been exacerbated by Sandy,” Angella Davidson, who manages the foreclosure prevention program of the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services of East Flatbush, told the Times. “People who already were struggling to pay their mortgage are now falling further behind, because they’re using money that should be earmarked for their mortgage to replace boilers and Sheetrock. And Sandy has forced people who were not in foreclosure to face potential foreclosure.”

Many residents faced two to three feet of flooding in their basements, and much of the damage isn’t covered by insurance. And to make matters worse, 10 percent of small homes (one- to four-unit properties) were in foreclosure in Canarsie as of June, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

But Canarsie brokers feel like the market is beginning to pick up there, based on the number of sales.  “Canarsie has not recovered much from the mortgage crisis,” Jean-Paul Ho, broker-owner of Brooklyn Real Property, said, “but you can feel it in the volume of transactions. Nothing was selling last year, but now the activity is there.”

Living in: In Canarsie, a Coalition of the Tried-and-True [NY Times]
Photo by Paul Lowry

by

Image source: Heritage Radio

We caught wind of the short film, Beach 87th St./Surfing After Sandy from the NYDN. Filmed by Jesse and Lukas Huffman in documentary style, it features the surfing community and how they were affected by Hurricane Sandy. It was filmed about 34 days after the storm.

It starts with a retelling of what things were like on October 29, 2012 from the vantage point of J. Scott Klossner, Keone Singlehurst and Beth Perkins, bungalow dwellers on Beach 87th Street. They talked of friends’ and neighbors’ homes flooding, with some residents not knowing how to swim. Things floated, and some crashed and broke.

by

Image source: NY Times/Google/FEMA

The NY Times has a cool interactive map called A Survey of the Flooding in N.Y.C. After the Hurricane. The most major flooding that happened in Queens was in the Rockaways and Jamaica Bay/Broad Channel, but the map shows us all the other areas that flooded significantly – LaGuardia and JFK airports; down into Flushing Meadows Corona Park; all along Little Neck Bay and then into Alley Pond Park; the areas bordering Newtown Creek; and Hunters Point in LIC. In general, areas along the shoreline flooded, some more than others.