Hot, Wet, and Nasty (But Not in a Good Way): Superstorm Sandy and the New York of Tomorrow
Seth Pinsky is head of the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency and president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. If the work of Klaus and his fellow scientists on the NPCC is to find expression in policy and action, it can only be done through such an avatar of the body politic. Seth speaks fast with a high-pitched, clipped insistence perfectly modulated for ending conversations with “I’ll take that under advisement,” or a similar deadly business school idiom. Getting stonewalled by Seth would be like making impact with a polite but unyielding mattress.
On the NPCC’s part in the initiative, he is positive but a little distant: “The New York City Panel on Climate Change has been a very valuable resource for us to call upon.” He strikes one of Bloomberg’s keynotes: “As horrible as the storm was, this is an opportunity for the city, an opportunity for us to think not just about the short term but about the medium and the long term.”
Seth deftly presents an aural trailer for Bloomberg’s forthcoming resiliency plan, clearly a legacy object of the departing mayor; the operative adjectives are “multifaceted” and “multilayered.” Mayor Bloomberg has little faith in “silver bullets,” such as a harbor-wide flood barrier. Nor will he abandon the coastline in an organized retreat. Literally hundreds of initiatives will be presented, framed “within the confines of achievability.” Seth continues, “This is going to be one of the most comprehensive resiliency plans a city has ever put together, certainly for an American city, but I would hazard a guess that it’s probably the most comprehensive resiliency plan that’s been put together by any city in the world.”
With all the glossiness of Seth’s personal presentation, honed, as it would appear, in a million press briefings, it would be easy to be cynical and overlook how impressive it is to hear him talk on this subject. Here is a senior figure in a largely conservative city administration explaining that man-made climate change is a problem decades in the making that will trouble the city for much longer than that. If you ignore the pol-speak, with its peppy can-do sentiments of New York bouncing off the ropes and back into the ring, Seth is doing what is verboten in US politics: he’s saying the future is going to be hard. With the nation’s lawmakers either mute or in a willed state of denial, it’s very good news to hear this bad news.
“This isn’t about fighting the last war,” he says. “We’re not simply trying to protect New York City from the next Hurricane Sandy. The chances are the next extreme weather event will not be exactly like Hurricane Sandy, and in fact it may not be a hurricane at all.”
There’s an endearing alacrity and enthusiasm to the way Seth credits the mayor personally for each of the initiative’s strengths. He even attributes his boss with something his most ardent supporters might find a stretch: an ear for the voice of ordinary New Yorkers.
“There have been unprecedented levels of outreach throughout the special initiative process, and again that is something that came directly from the mayor himself,” says Seth. “We need to make sure that as we’re rebuilding the city we get input from as many people and as many communities as possible.”
Dios de la Profecia de Far Rockaway is the kind of church the earliest Christians would have recognized. Modest is the word, because in this part of town, a house of God is just that: a house. In this case, it’s a shabby residence on Cornaga Avenue. Here the Lord has left no greater sign of his presence than a few slender items of literature, secreted discreetly before the big guy absented himself for more numinous locations. Turning gentrifying conventions on their head, Far Rockaway makes homes into churches.
It is March, and a group of concerned citizens has gathered here to prepare for the coming “charette,” an informal meeting with Bloomberg’s representatives. The charettes are the centerpiece of the outreach plan in Seth Pinsky’s special initiative. The Far Rockaway charette is an opportunity, so he would have it, for the residents of one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, and one of the areas hardest hit by Sandy, to make their concerns known.
Josmar Trullijo, a resident of six years, opens the discussion with an account of the recent West Rockaway charette. The mayor’s subordinate did not impress him:
“The guy literally said, ‘A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.’ That’s how he began.” Aquiline and handsome, Josmar has a face that would be best drawn with a calligraphy pen. The T-shirt straining at his biceps bears the words “WORK TRAIN FIGHT,” and it looks like there’s only one item left undone on the checklist. Josmar segues into a summary of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, explaining how he expects the Bloomberg administration to use the kind of exploit-’em-while-they’re-down tactics described in that book. While the residents are still reeling from the storm, the mayor will push forward with long-held plans to develop the peninsula for the benefit of his elite clients. Condos will sprout from eviscerated projects; gentrification will eat away at the established community.
“They’re going to start now, but do this over time,” he says, “like when you boil a frog in water. If the water’s boiling, the frog jumps out. But start cold and turn the temperature up slow, and the frog stays put and dies. We should be uncompromising at all times.”
“The more you engage with it, the more you legitimize it,” adds Greg, who attended the same charette.
The conversation turns to the matter of demands. At the top of the list is the desire to see any plan for the Rockaways before the city approves it. Although no one chooses to dissent, it is pretty clear that several people
think the city’s planners packed away the drawing board weeks ago. There are also suggestions of a more mundane order. One person recommends that utility lines be laid underground, safe from falling trees. There is a call to prioritize sea defenses and practical infrastructure over boardwalks and prettification, the prospect of which the city representatives dangled in front of locals at the West Rockaway charette. The more community-minded attendees at the church want paid employment for the volunteers who came forward after the storm, some of whom continue to work toward recovery on the peninsula. There is a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of a radio station that could coordinate assistance locally during a crisis.
Running like a thread through all these ideas is the demand for transparency and democracy in the creation of the resiliency plan. They want to see what is put down on paper before it materializes on their beaches and street corners. But what would they be able to do were they invited to scrutinize the plans? How could any group of non-specialists know how to protect the peninsula from the depredations of a hotter, wetter, all around less agreeable climate? There is some halfhearted talk of finding an ombudsman, an impartial and scrupulous expert in climate change and urban planning, to work on their behalf. But the important thing for the moment is to push back.
From overall strategy, they move on to tactics. At this point, a dapper gentleman in early middle age, referred to with affectionate formality as Mr. Smith, comes into his own. Clearly a veteran in matters of organized disruption, Mr. Smith instructs his comrades on how to infiltrate the charette and how to coordinate their protest once inside.
Out of context, it is hard to understand the confrontational stance that comes so naturally to the meeting on Cornaga Avenue. Bloomberg is gearing up to spend billions on a citywide rebuilding program and, bending his titanic and turtle-like head to grassroots level, waits to listen. What’s the problem? Shea, a woman who looks to be in her early sixties, tells a story that hints at an explanation. In her apartment block, the municipal authorities cut the electricity two days before Sandy’s arrival. Some of her neighbors were of limited mobility and, once the elevators stopped working, were trapped without assistance. Robust in appearance but asthmatic and far from spry, Shea took it upon herself to fetch them supplies. When other help arrived, the volunteers of Occupy Sandy were prominent. Sometimes they were the only boots on the ground. They ventured into areas with people overlooked by FEMA and the Red Cross.
“Occupy had people who spoke Spanish,” says Josmar, “and they could get access to immigrant communities where most people were illegal residents and were afraid to seek help. A Christian non-profit from Texas couldn’t do that.”
Everyone at Cornaga Avenue has had some positive experience with the Occupy movement, whether as an organizer, volunteer, recipient of its assistance, or merely a witness to its work. The meeting itself is a weekly event that came into being because of Yotam Marom, a veteran of both Zuccotti Park and Occupy’s later incarnation as an aid agency. A dry, self-effacing twentysomething typically sporting a keffiyeh, Yotam came to the Rockaways shortly after the storm and applied his talents to orienting volunteers. “These were white middle-class folks looking for a way to do something good,” he says, “and we were absorbing seriously hundreds of people a day. They were coming through our doors and going out into the most-hard-hit areas, which were predominantly populated by lower-class people of color, and the volunteers were without any sort of experience. We gave them a basic grounding. Making sure they didn’t act like idiots, basically.”
In Far Rockaway, Yotam met local people who, after a while, wanted to talk about climate change and political organizing: “These were mainly young, entirely people of color, low-income, but I mean really low-income—like scrapping metal—people who had been on the streets before the hurricane but all of a sudden were running huge distribution sites as part of Occupy.” In answer to that need, Yotam continued to work in Far Rockaway in his capacity as grassroots activist in an organization he founded called Wildfire.
Other than the fact that Occupy raised $1.3 million in charitable donations, it is hard to quantify what it achieved. That is nothing unusual when it comes to disaster relief. But the anecdotal and eyewitness evidence is impressive. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Occupy volunteers were as commonplace and visible throughout New York as Citibikes are today. The organization was the obvious, often the only, conduit available for citizens seeking to channel their energies into helping the victims. By any estimation, the number of people who stepped in to assist under the Occupy banner runs to tens of thousands. The Occupy collection-points throughout the five boroughs thrummed with activity day and night. Even the Red Cross would defer to Occupy when it came to the distribution of supplies. But relations with the mayor’s office were not such a happy story. Occupy and Bloomberg had history. He was the villain of the piece during the heady days of Zuccotti Park, belittling the protest at the time as “fun and cathartic,” and stepping in to defend the bankers. “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” he said at the time. “It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”
Going further back in time, you could cite the establishment of the Far Rockaway housing projects as another factor in the locals’ suspicion of the mayor. The peninsula contains half of Queens’ public housing, but less than 6 percent of the borough’s population. The reason for that rests with New York’s master builder Robert Moses. His ambitions for urban redevelopment required the relocation of large numbers of black people, who were moved from Manhattan neighborhoods to Far Rockaway, far from jobs and established schools. Far Rockaway is a part of the city that has long felt distrustful of City Hall.
When the charette rolls around the following week, Josmar can’t attend. The younger of his two sons has had an asthma attack. Much later, he explains that, at this point, he is already looking to move out of the Rockaways. He suspects Sandy won’t be the last occasion the peninsula is inundated in his lifetime, let alone the lives of his children. Outside the meeting, locals advertise the event by handing out fliers bearing the banner “Charette or Charade?” The atmosphere inside is one of bubbling antagonism. A speaker from the SIRR opens with that unreassuring and misguided line “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” this time misattributed to President Obama. A recurring complaint among attendees is how poorly advertised the event was. The assumption is clearly that the charette was deliberately kept under the radar to keep attendance low. When Virginia Deere takes the mic, this is the first subject she raises. A Rockaway resident, Virginia looks every inch the activist in her black woolen cap and matching combats. She is a dab hand at rousing a disgruntled crowd. She asks for green initiatives and wants to hear more about sustainable energy. “Fossil fuels have to go,” she says, garnering applause.
“Climate change is the reason we are here today.”
Watching her as she speaks, a man from City Hall is in a state of seemingly terminal disdain, his arms and forehead knitted as tightly as Virginia’s cap. There is a shade of Ryan Gosling about this walking thundercloud. In the video of the meeting that the Wildfire group watches a few days later, this angry young man looms behind every speaker, his pink shirtsleeves rolled and arms folded, pouting himself into an early grave. Aside from the delightful spectacle of this unnamed sourpuss, the charette has been an unhappy experience.