As a result, home insurance companies were not selling insurance against floods. The City also had not designated that area as prone to floods. So a lot of them were surprised when all of a sudden, a couple of months after purchasing the homes, when it rained, water just started pouring into the basement and damaging their appliances. Homeowners were not told they were buying a home that was prone to floods. When homeowners purchased their homes in that neighborhood - and given the flooding has been happening for 100 years - were they told that the area was prone to flooding? Amit Shivprasad struggled with flooding for half of his life - other neighborhoods will face the same fight in the upcoming generation. Flooding has affected the block’s architecture. But when we went to request the physical records to see what alterations were made, we only got one folder instead of all five. Amit’s neighbor’s home was altered five times, visible in DOB records online. In this case, it has been going on for nearly a century and that’s really important to note.ĭespite frequent flooding in the neighborhood, homes continued to be built. It’s always been mentioned that climate change is worsening. This block in Hollis has experienced floods since 1926, and we found photographic evidence of 100 years of flooding. This undermines the American Dream in a way. For instance, some spent $300K to rebuild, but only received $25K from FEMA, leading them to borrow from the Small Business Administration, requiring repayment. The city and FEMA do not provide sufficient funds to cover losses, impacting homeowners who invest their life savings. High housing costs have led more people to these unsafe apartments, risking property loss.Ī major takeaway I think has also been the lack of assistance from the government. The biggest takeaway is flood-prone areas are typically found in immigrant neighborhoods. What would you say are five major points or takeaways from the article? People from Guyana, India, there are also some Hispanic people and a lot of BIPOC people as well. What type of immigrants are mostly in that area? We focused on Hollis to highlight the ongoing problem in this immigrant-dense Queens neighborhood, serving as a cautionary tale of what could happen as climate change worsens. The community’s struggle with floods has resulted in home alterations or vacancies. In Hollis, homeowners spent thousands on home alterations and cleaning the catch basins, cleaning the manholes on the street, altering their homes by lifting the porch so that the water wouldn’t go in. How have residents in that area managed the flooding for so many years? The abundance of stories and inadequate response from the City led us to continue exploring the issue. Despite the City’s knowledge, mitigation efforts fell short. Homeowners and residents shared stories of annual floods, including during Ida, which left some homeless. Initially focused on basement apartments, we shifted our attention to Amit’s block in Queens after investigating 311 calls during a rainstorm that happened that month. When the project first began, did you guys know it was going to turn out this way? How did it morph over time? It’s been nerve wracking considering the amount of information we collected, the people we met, and the amount of content we filtered out. However, I’d say it really came together over four months because we had many breaks in between as I worked on other projects. So it’s been coming together over the course of a year. Rommel Ojeda: We met Amit, the main subject in the story, originally in June of 2022, but we started pre-reporting in April of that year looking into the climate change challenges that NYC is facing now, while also researching the neighborhoods deeply impacted.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |