Connect with us

New York

In 15 Years, 80,000 Homes in the New York Area May Be Lost to Flooding

Published

on

In 15 Years, 80,000 Homes in the New York Area May Be Lost to Flooding

More than 80,000 homes on Staten Island and in southeast Queens and the suburbs east of New York City could be lost to floods over the next 15 years, according to a new report that serves as a warning of how climate change could make the housing crisis even worse.

The report, released Monday by the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit civic organization, said that swaths of land in every borough were likely to become impossible to develop, helping push the area’s housing shortage to a staggering 1.2 million homes.

“You’re going to need to build more housing to just replace what is lost in your own municipality,” said Moses Gates, the association’s vice president for housing and neighborhood planning and an author of the report.

The report is the latest to underscore how the dual threats of climate change and a lack of housing are looming over coastal cities around the world.

New York City and its suburbs have not built enough homes to meet demand over the past few decades, helping to drive up rents and home prices. At the same time, the metropolitan area is struggling to adapt to increased flooding and other extreme weather caused by global warming.

Advertisement

“The sooner we decide as a city to invest in resilience measures to help neighborhoods adapt — whether it’s to fortify or to move — the faster we avert leaving an even bigger crisis for the next generation,” said Amy Chester, the managing director of Rebuild by Design, a nonprofit that works to make infrastructure better able to withstand storms and climate change.

The report did not single out specific neighborhoods as at risk for flooding. But of the 82,000 homes that could be lost by 2040, more than half were projected to be on Long Island, with some Atlantic Ocean-facing towns like Babylon and Islip bearing the brunt.

Cities along the Long Island Sound on both the island and in Westchester County would also be vulnerable. In New York City, waterfront neighborhoods in southern Queens and Brooklyn, like the Rockaways and Canarsie, would see the most losses.

Some new developments on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, where about 125,000 people live, are focused on trying to protect against flooding while also providing dense, affordable housing.

Also in the Rockaways, a new system of engineered berms, which look like sand dunes but have stone and steel walls at their cores, will help protect the ocean side of the peninsula. But little progress has been made on the bay side, which floods regularly.

Advertisement

Throughout the city, other mitigation measures are underway or already complete, including flood walls and floodgates on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and nature-based solutions, like bluebelts, which connect storm sewers to lakes and ponds.

After Superstorm Sandy inundated much of Staten Island’s eastern shore in 2012, the state bought more than 500 damaged homes, clearing most of them to return the land to a natural state in a practice known as managed retreat. But a costly, ambitious plan to protect the entire city from coastal storms has yet to be approved by the federal government and is at least 20 years away from completion.

The threats of global warming mean that local officials need to “rethink what a conventional home looks like,” said Max Besbris, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in housing and climate change.

“That means denser housing, more energy-efficient housing, and that probably means giving up on that suburban ideal of a stand-alone home with a white picket fence,” he said.

The report from the Regional Plan Association analyzed the amount of housing the area needed today and in the future to make sure there were enough homes available for people to easily move into. The report said the region needed 362,000 additional homes today, in part to relieve overcrowding and permanently house the shelter population, among other factors.

Advertisement

In 15 years, that number will more than triple to 1.2 million, when accounting for population growth, flood loss and general housing deterioration. Cities and towns should cluster growth in the parts of the region that have a relatively lower risk of flooding and are near public transit and commercial hubs, the report said.

Warren Schreiber, the president of the Queens Civic Congress, a group of civic associations from across the borough, said he agreed that people needed to be made safe from flood risks. But he said that any new development should focus on affordable housing, which raised the question of how much that development would cost.

“Who’s going to pay for this?” he said. “Is it going to be on the backs of middle-income working-class families?”

The report also used a tool called the National Zoning Atlas, which maps local restrictions on development to see where the zoning codes might allow for more homes to be built. The report found that 580,000 homes — less than half of what is needed — could be added under today’s zoning codes (though other factors, like funding or building codes, might also prevent homes from being built).

That housing gap showed the need for nearly every city, town and village to change their zoning codes to allow for more homes to be built, said Mr. Gates, one of the report’s authors.

Advertisement

New York officials have tried to adapt zoning codes for easier building in recent years, with mixed success.

Gov. Kathy Hochul tried to push every city and town in the state to make way for more housing two years ago. But local leaders in the city’s suburbs, especially on Long Island and in Westchester County, resisted her efforts.

The administration of Mayor Eric Adams successfully pushed a plan known as “City of Yes” that could allow for some 80,000 additional homes to be built over the next decade. That plan, which the City Council approved in December, would reduce the city’s housing needs by only 11 percent, the report found.

New York

They Witness Deaths on the Tracks and Then Struggle to Get Help

Published

on

They Witness Deaths on the Tracks and Then Struggle to Get Help

‘Part of the job’

Edwin Guity was at the controls of a southbound D train last December, rolling through the Bronx, when suddenly someone was on the tracks in front of him.

Advertisement

He jammed on the emergency brake, but it was too late. The man had gone under the wheels.

Stumbling over words, Mr. Guity radioed the dispatcher and then did what the rules require of every train operator involved in such an incident. He got out of the cab and went looking for the person he had struck.

“I didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Guity said later. “But this is a part of the job.”

Advertisement

He found the man pinned beneath the third car. Paramedics pulled him out, but the man died at the hospital. After that, Mr. Guity wrestled with what to do next.

A 32-year-old who had once lived in a family shelter with his parents, he viewed the job as paying well and offering a rare chance at upward mobility. It also helped cover the costs of his family’s groceries and rent in the three-bedroom apartment they shared in Brooklyn.

Advertisement

But striking the man with the train had shaken him more than perhaps any other experience in his life, and the idea of returning to work left him feeling paralyzed.

Edwin Guity was prescribed exposure therapy after his train struck a man on the tracks.

Advertisement

Hundreds of train operators have found themselves in Mr. Guity’s position over the years.

And for just as long, there has been a path through the state workers’ compensation program to receiving substantive treatment to help them cope. But New York’s train operators say that their employer, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has done too little to make them aware of that option.

Advertisement

After Mr. Guity’s incident, no official told him of that type of assistance, he said. Instead, they gave him the option of going back to work right away.

But Mr. Guity was lucky. He had a friend who had been through the same experience and who coached him on getting help — first through a six-week program and then, with the assistance of a lawyer, through an experienced specialist.

The specialist prescribed a six-month exposure therapy program to gradually reintroduce Mr. Guity to the subway.

Advertisement

His first day back at the controls of a passenger train was on Thanksgiving. Once again, he was driving on the D line — the same route he had been traveling on the day of the fatal accident.

Advertisement
Advertisement

Mr. Guity helps care for his 93-year-old grandmother, Juanita Guity.

M.T.A. representatives insisted that New York train operators involved in strikes are made aware of all options for getting treatment, but they declined to answer specific questions about how the agency ensures that drivers get the help they need.

Advertisement

In an interview, the president of the M.T.A. division that runs the subway, Demetrius Crichlow, said all train operators are fully briefed on the resources available to them during their job orientation.

“I really have faith in our process,” Mr. Crichlow said.

Advertisement

Still, other transit systems — all of which are smaller than New York’s — appear to do a better job of ensuring that operators like Mr. Guity take advantage of the services available to them, according to records and interviews.

Advertisement

An Uptick in Subway Strikes

A Times analysis shows that the incidents were on the rise in New York City’s system even as they were falling in all other American transit systems.

Advertisement

Source: Federal Transit Administration.

Note: Transit agencies report “Major Safety and Security Events” to the F.T.A.’s National Transit Database. The Times’s counts include incidents categorized as rail collisions with persons, plus assaults, homicides and attempted suicides with event descriptions mentioning a train strike. For assaults, The Times used an artificial intelligence model to identify relevant descriptions and then manually reviewed the results.

Bianca Pallaro/The New York Times

Advertisement

San Francisco’s system provides 24-hour access to licensed therapists through a third-party provider.

Los Angeles proactively reaches out to its operators on a regular basis to remind them of workers’ compensation options and other resources.

Advertisement

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has made it a goal to increase engagement with its employee assistance program.

The M.T.A. says it offers some version of most of these services.

But in interviews with more than two dozen subway operators who have been involved in train strikes, only one said he was aware of all those resources, and state records suggest most drivers of trains that strike people are not taking full advantage of them.

Advertisement

“It’s the M.T.A.’s responsibility to assist the employee both mentally and physically after these horrific events occur,” the president of the union that represents New York City transit workers, John V. Chiarello, said in a statement, “but it is a constant struggle trying to get the M.T.A. to do the right thing.”

Continue Reading

New York

Video: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid

Published

on

Video: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid

new video loaded: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid

transcript

transcript

Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid

Nearly 200 protesters tried to block federal agents from leaving a parking garage in Lower Manhattan on Saturday. The confrontation appeared to prevent a possible ICE raid nearby, and led to violent clashes between the police and protesters.

[chanting] “ICE out of New York.”

Advertisement
Nearly 200 protesters tried to block federal agents from leaving a parking garage in Lower Manhattan on Saturday. The confrontation appeared to prevent a possible ICE raid nearby, and led to violent clashes between the police and protesters.

By Jorge Mitssunaga

November 30, 2025

Continue Reading

New York

Video: New York City’s Next Super Storm

Published

on

Video: New York City’s Next Super Storm

new video loaded: New York City’s Next Super Storm

What’s a worst-case scenario for hurricane flooding in New York City? Our reporter Hilary Howard, who covers the environment in the region, explores how bad it could get as climate change powers increasingly extreme rainfall and devastating storm surges.

By Hilary Howard, Gabriel Blanco, Stephanie Swart and K.K. Rebecca Lai

November 26, 2025

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending