NYCHA's Post-Sandy Repairs Won't Be Finished Until 2021: Report

NEW YORK, NY — Some 33 New York City Housing Authority complexes were among the thousands of buildings that Superstorm Sandy devastated in 2012. Five years later, NYCHA has started rebuilding at 27 of of them but won't be finished with all work until 2021, nearly a decade after the storm, according to a year-end report released Wednesday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency allocated $3 billion for NYCHA's sandy recovery in December 2015. By the end of last year the housing authority had awarded about $1.8 billion in contracts and spent about $730 million, the NYCHA report says.

The housing authority has broken ground on more than two dozen projects, including a $560 million overhaul at the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn. But contracts for some of the most expensive work, including the $400 million second phase of the Red Hook project, may not be awarded until March. NYCHA expects every project to be under construction by this summer.

The work ranges from replacing water-damaged doors to installing new backup power generators and boilers on top of the buildings to protect them from flooding. Only one project, a $6 million renovation at two buildings on the Lower East Side, has been completed so far, the report says.

NYCHA has called for upgrades to heating or hot water systems, such as new boilers, at 20 developments. But that Lower East Side complex is the only place where one has been installed, though most other heating projects are under construction.

Heating upgrades have become crucial as freezing winter temperatures have caused more than 80 percent of all NYCHA tenants to lose heat or hot water at some point since October. NYCHA has installed temporary boilers at some Sandy-slammed complexes that are awating new ones, but the original boilers are still functioning at others, said Joy Sinderbrand, the housing authority's vice president for Sandy recovery.

Rebuilding has taken so long partly because of bureaucracy. NYCHA couldn't finalize designs for much of the work until after FEMA authorized its grant money in December 2015, Sinderbrand said.

But the projects aren't as simple as just installing a new boiler or wiring, Sinderbrand said. The boilers, for example, are in many cases being lifted onto roofs, which is "a pretty complex engineering process," she said. NYCHA crews lifted a power generator onto a roof at the Astoria Houses in Queens Wednesday morning, the 30th such operation so far, Sinderbrand said.

"This is by far the most complex and forward-thinking residential retrofit and resilience program I think in the country, if not the world," Sinderbrand said. "There really hasn’t been another effort like this to retrofit 60-year-old brick buildings and make them flood-resilient in this way."

The most complex project is underway at the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, where thousands of tenants have wrestled with Sandy's impacts. For $560 million, NYCHA is replacing light fixtures, resurfacing sidewalks, installing new water heaters, upgrading some apartments, replacing roofs and more at the massive development comprising 32 buildings on 39 acres.

NYCHA has tried to ensure residents could stay in their homes amid all the work, Sinderbrand said. Housing authority officials have had thousands of phone calls and hundreds of meetings with tenants to get their input into the projects, she said.

(Lead image: NYCHA crews lift a power generator onto a roof at the Alfred E. Smith Houses in Manhattan. Photo from NYCHA via Twitter)