There was almost a bucolic feel to the area: a breeze coming off the shoreline, shaking the naked branches of nearby trees and colliding with but a smattering of houses. Arriving, I understood why people wanted to live here in the first place, and why some still remained after rising waters changed everything.
Until eight years ago, this part of Staten Island belonged to a different dimension. Oakwood Beach traced its roots back to the 1920s, when vacationers established a seasonal development along the island’s southern shoreline. As New York City grew, so did demand for affordable houses; summer bungalows were winterized, and Oakwood Beach became a year-round community of more than 300 plots.
There was a reason why this land lacked any permanent settlement for so much of Staten Island’s long human history. Low-lying and woefully exposed to storm surges, Oakwood was accustomed to a cycle of floods and reconstructions. This life was precarious, but it was largely worth it, with affordable real estate prices, shoreline views, and a small-town feel.
Hurricane Sandy threw this calculus off its orbit. The violent storm, with wind speeds up to 185 km/h, battered the Caribbean and the East Coast of the United States. It killed 233 people and caused over $70 billion in damages. More than half of New York City’s 53 deaths were Staten Island residents, almost all of whom lived directly along the island’s Atlantic coast, in communities like Oakwood. In the months following the disaster, the city, state and federal governments poured billions to rebuild and raise the borough’s storm-battered homes. To Oakwood Beach – and to nearby Graham Beach and Ocean Breeze – the build-and-destroy cycle was no longer sustainable. It was time for something else.
The end result is that Graham Beach, Oakwood Beach, and Ocean Breeze are now largely uninhabited wetlands, part of a «managed retreat» from climate change. The New York State Rising Buyout program purchased residents’ plots at pre-storm real estate prices, demolished and cleared remaining structures, and handed the land back over to nature. These neighborhoods are a lesson in what may await us in coming years – less sprawling waterfront cities, with home demolition and wetland rehabilitation increasingly the norm. Cities will need wetlands «sponges» to bolster drainage systems, letting other areas remain dry as sea levels rise and as storms become more extreme and frequent.
But how these three pockets of Staten Island came into unbeing is a more telling story. It may seem like Graham Beach, Oakwood Beach, and Ocean Breeze were gone in an instant, just like that. In reality, the retreat was the product of a yearlong push for buyout eligibility and state recognition. It was a saga of community mobilization, maneuvering through an alphabet soup of (often corrupt and mismanaged) government initiatives. This may be unsurprising for many Americans, given the difficulty of mundane tasks like filing taxes or getting a driver’s license. But this was different, and the stakes were much higher.
Oakwood was the first to jump through hoops correctly, gaining buyout approval from New York State and the federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program; it bypassed local representatives that couldn’t be trusted to support the retreat, as a mass move-out came with lost tax revenue. Citizens driving the effort had to prove that virtually everyone in their neighborhood would move out if the program moved forward. That residents of these pockets of a traditionally-Republican borough enthusiastically signed onto the buyout speaks volumes: when political predispositions clash with the realities of climate change, ideology often looks very different on the other side.
Ocean Breeze and Graham Beach were next, but had to resort to symbolic acts to be heard. Frank Moszczynski of Ocean Breeze, for example, put up a tent on a busy intersection; he plastered it with cardboard signs that read, «Gov. Cuomo, Please Buy the Bowl», referring to the low-level area surrounding his destroyed home. Buy the bowl they did, expanding the buyout program to include over 500 homes in those three neighborhoods.
Crescent Beach, Great Kills, Midland Beach, New Dorp, South Beach, Totenville. Three communities won state buyout eligibility, but six failed. Some didn’t meet coastal risk criteria, ending up on the wrong side of the numbers game. They were just safe enough to stay put – at least for the time being. Others didn’t demonstrate enough community buy-in, or didn’t make enough noise. Either way, they were thrown back into the post-Sandy recovery system, which functioned more like a casino than social service infrastructure.
Take the NYC Build it Back program, a city-wide post-Sandy reconstruction initiative – an awkward but potent marriage of consultant-crony capitalism and state incompetence. An audit conducted by the City government reported that its Office of Housing Recovery Operations had doled out more than $6.8 million in payouts to consultants and subcontractors for shoddy and incomplete work, leading to delayed assistance to more than 20,000 applicants. The City Comptroller reported that Sandy survivors came to his public meetings with bags full of documents that they had to submit and resubmit as part of an outsourced Sisyphean exercise. At best, those six neighborhoods received delayed but effective state assistance. At worst, they fell through the cracks. Concluding forebodingly, the Comptroller remarked: «If there’s one lesson to be learned from Sandy, it’s that contracts are only as good as the people who manage them.»
As with other warnings that climate change gives us, it was a lesson taught, but not a lesson learned. The City government continued to hand over core state functions to consultants. Two years after Sandy, the New York City Department of Corrections hired McKinsey & Company, the consulting giant, to curb violence on Rikers Island, the City’s largest jail complex. The firm worked with jail officials to create misleadingly positive statistics that lauded McKinsey’s interventions; it walked away with $27.5 million, while violence and assaults had increased in the jail by 50%.
In 2020, I write this in the midst of a pandemic, the product of a profoundly ecological phenomenon, though more protracted and less visible than a hurricane. The Trump Administration seems to have delayed widespread diagnostic testing out of greed – two years after gutting the government’s capacity to respond to a pandemic – for which the American public is paying the price with their lives and jobs. At this juncture, the federal government is pouring over $2.5 trillion into getting us (and itself) out of this mess, spending money it claims it never had for climate change mitigation.
If Staten Island is our ecological future, let’s hope it’s not our political one too. One where some move out and relocate to higher land, but others are dubiously safer and left to brace the next wave; where consultants make a dime off disasters, and others are left to navigate a chimera of borderline-functioning recovery efforts. Our state’s response to our ecological future is dubiously palliative, and barely preventative. We’ll know the wave has come when it hits us.