Part 2: As North Carolina struggles to build back after Hurricane Helene, NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan travels to New York and New Jersey years after Superstorm Sandy to find how recovery efforts fell short. And we learn special interests are shaping how we put communities back together.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What happened in New York and New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy?
And even though 13 years had passed since the storm, it almost felt like they were trapped in time, midway through a recovery. Here on Staten Island's seacoast, the community used to be tight-knit, with families living in little bungalows. Now it feels desolate. After the storm, some residents used recovery money to elevate their homes really high. Others took a buyout from the federal government.
Their homes were leveled. And some did nothing. Their houses sit right as they were the night of the storm. It's kind of sad. Resident James Sinagra calls it the jack-o'-lantern effect. Imagine the teeth, jagged and irregularly spaced.
I mean, they should either make it into wetlands, like you can see down the road there, that's all wetlands, or they should at least give more of an incentive for a community to be built back up like these houses are built up.
It was hard to find people who thought the recovery had turned out well, even people who decided not to rebuild at all, like Joe Tyrone. He's a local realtor known for organizing one of the nation's first large-scale home buyout programs in Staten Island's Oakwood Beach neighborhood.
all they talked about when we were mucking out the houses, how much they loved the neighborhood. So I said, there's no way they're going to want to leave. But the reality is, first there was Isaac. That was bad. And then Irene came, put him back on their heels. And when Sandy came, that was a knockout punch. They were like, that's it. People died on the street. And they all knew each other.
He took me out to see the old neighborhood.
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Chapter 2: Why do some communities feel trapped in time after a disaster?
This is where my house was. See that ridge right there? That was my backyard right here. And the other side of that was another house.
Chapter 3: What is the 'jack-o'-lantern effect' in disaster recovery?
Along with the federal government, the state spent more than $200 million buying out more than 500 homes on Staten Island, intending to turn the area back over to nature. As we drive around, it seems in some ways it worked. Where hundreds of homes once stood, there are long stretches of empty lots punctuated by a few isolated homes. But these holdouts?
They mean the roads and the power lines have to stay. And as Tyrone pulls around the corner, he points to several empty lots with a chain-link fence around them. There have been rumors. So why does this have a fence?
Well, this is the exact area that the Staten Island Soccer League purchased from the state for some nominal amount. And they're going to build their soccer fields here.
So they're really doing this?
Oh, yeah, 100 percent they're doing it.
This youth soccer league, which has more than 4,000 players, bought six acres of buyout land from the state. They plan to build a soccer complex with bleachers. There's talk of a clubhouse. And everyone's going to need somewhere to park. Is this what you thought was going to happen when you sold your property?
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Chapter 4: How did the recovery efforts impact Staten Island residents?
No, no. When I sold my property, I thought it was just going to be like a big marsh and that I wouldn't even be able to get to my property.
That's the vision then-Governor Andrew Cuomo had promised. Wetlands and oyster beds that would soak up stormwater like a sponge.
We're now rebuilding oyster beds, wetlands and marshlands and grasslands. Why? Because they all had a purpose. They were all part of the balance.
Bridget Wiltshire lives across the street from one of the proposed soccer fields.
Oh, they lied to us. They said they're going to build a park, then it was going to be wetlands.
What do you think, if you're looking around here in 10, 20 years, what are you going to see?
I think you're going to see very high-end homes down here.
Really?
Next to the water, yeah.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of special interests in rebuilding communities?
There is no plan. People like to think there's a plan, but understand the complexity of, one, I've got to deal with property rights and property owners. I also have to understand most of this is economically driven. Developers will come in there and start putting cash on the streets to buy out distressed property.
Fugate said FEMA and other federal agencies had to compete with those developers when they would create programs to elevate homes or buy homeowners out. But what was more frustrating, he said, is that often local officials preferred the developers' plans. just south of Staten Island around the Raritan Bay on the Jersey Shore. I met up with Sean LaTourette.
He's the state commissioner of environmental protection and in charge of getting people to build differently. I asked him how it was going.
Oh, it's tough. Change is hard.
We're standing on top of a massive earthen levee as workers complete the final section of a new seawall in Port Monmouth, the kind many communities are hoping for. But they're expensive and take years. And LaTourette says coastal areas also need to protect themselves by elevating new homes five feet. But he's facing resistance.
There are so many pressures that work against building resilience and projecting forward, imagining the world not just as it is today, but as it will be tomorrow and a decade from now and a decade from then.
I asked him where that pressure was coming from. In some instances, leaders of local governments. Really? Because the leaders of local governments didn't want the homes to come up by feet?
They were misinformed about what the rules did. By whom? By special interests who are worried about their bottom line.
Special interests. We were starting to hear a lot more about special interests back in North Carolina. In particular, the development industry and home builders, who it turns out hold a lot of sway.
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