The Rockaways In New York City
I. Introduction
The Rockaway peninsula is part of Queens, New York City. The communities there, referred to as the Rockaways, border the water, with long stretches of picturesque beaches. The name "Rockaway" (phonetically spelled) means "place of sands" in the Munsee language of the Native American Lenape people, who once inhabited the area. After the Dutch West Indian Company bought the land, many of the indigenous groups were forced to move and were replaced by European settlers. In the 19th century, the area began to attract wealthy of New York City residents during the summers. Today though, the Rockaways are better known for gang wars and neighborhoods still not repaired three years after Hurricane Sandy, than for glorious beaches. …show more content…
This paper focuses specifically on the eastern half of the Rockaways, known as Far Rockaway, and the public housing story in that area. The Far Rockaways demonstrate that separating the poor and mentally ill from the core of a city creates a breeding ground for economic instability and violence; which when exacerbated by a natural disaster, takes on the characteristics of a conflict zone.
II. History
The Rockaways were first developed as a summer vacation spot for tourists and wealthy people from the other boroughs of New York City.
Surrounding the beautiful beaches were seaside hotels and the summer homes of wealthy businessmen. The area was pictured on postcards and was seen as a popular and fashionable place to visit. In 1880, the construction of the Long Island Railroad to the Rockaways allowed a year-round commuter population to grow. During the early 20th century, these train lines spawned a bustling residential community. The commuters effectively pushed out the vacationers. As well, with the early 1900s came the invention of the automobile and an increased willingness to travel further for vacation spots, such as Jones Beach, Fire Island, and the Hamptons. With the wealthier New Yorkers heading further east, the beaches of the Rockaways became the enclave of people who depended on public transportation. As wealthy vacationers abandoned the Rockaways, the hotels and fancy restaurants were shuttered, replaced by cheaper entertainment …show more content…
alternatives.
In the 1930s, Robert Moses, New York City’s parks commissioner, set out to refashion the Rockaways. He saw the Rockaways as lending “themselves to summer exploitation, to honky-tonk catchpenny amusement resorts, shacks built without reference to health, sanitation, safety and decent living.” He wanted to transform the historically summer spot into a year-round residential community. Moses was known to be fanatical about building highways throughout the greater New York metropolis, and one of his major construction projects was the Shore Front Parkway, a thoroughfare that would connect Staten Island with the Hamptons. The grand vision for this project was never realized, but Moses did succeed in building one piece in 1939, a four-lane highway that ran the length of the Rockaways. This project cut directly through neighborhoods, actually splitting some homes in half. The affected people were given vouchers to live in public housing units. This approach to urban renewal was a common phenomenon in the United States at this time, but Moses’s tactics were more drastic than most developers. He used his power to pass projects that completely destroyed communities. Today, this still unfinished highway is locally referred to as the "road from nowhere to nowhere," because it does not have any connection to any other area or highway. This saying has more meaning than just referring to the highway, as it aptly describes the lives of residents of this community in general. Cut off physically from the rest of the city, the area has been mostly bypassed by the economic opportunity of New York’s core.
Accelerated by Robert Moses and his highway project, the area deteriorated in the 1930s. Moses called his vision for the Rockaways the “Rockaway Improvement Plan.” This “improvement” plan used eminent domain to seize some homes, while other homeowners were encouraged to leave through blockbusting tactics. The Rockaways’ distance from the rest of the city made it a place for city officials to park impoverished or troubled families and individuals, allowing the city government to effectively ignore their existence. While at the time only a small fraction of the population of Queens lived in the Rockaways, it would soon contain more than half of the borough’s public housing. The stated plan was to fill the new projects with people from varying incomes, through a screening process, but the developments instead became a dumping ground for the city’s poor. The area also became host to the city’s deinstitutionalized mental patients, as well as nursing homes for the low-income elderly. There was very little retail and no industrial development, and so few opportunities for employment for the residents. The combined building of public housing and increased mental patient population in the area drove the wealthier residents to leave; taking with them many of the jobs and commerce that had previously existed. The area became increasingly separated from the urban core, and the marginalized population fell deeper into poverty. This poverty was out of sight of the rest of the New York City population.
The three largest housing projects in Far Rockaway, Arverne, Hammel Houses and Edgemere, all were built during the mid 20th century. Arverne opened in 1951 with 418 units, Hammel houses opened in 1955 with 712 units, and Edgemere Houses opened in 1961 with 1,365 units. The projects became some of the poorest areas of New York City over the last half-century. During the last decade, these housing projects have fallen victim to increased violence and crime, rezoning to make way for the growth of wealthier neighborhoods, and immense destruction by the natural disaster of hurricane Sandy.
III. The story of Public Housing
The Arverne, Hammel and Edgemere public housing facilities continued to expand and sink deeper into poverty during the late 20th century. Today, twenty-three percent of the public housing in Queens is concentrated in the Eastern end of the Rockaways. Families in this area earn on average less than $25,000, less than half that of the average income in the rest of New York City. There is a large divergence in income levels between the population of Queens as a whole and that of the Eastern Rockaway population. Within Queens, four percent of the population is living on public assistance; in Eastern Rockaway, thirteen percent of the residents live on public assistance. Furthermore, forty-six percent of the population in Far Rockaway lives on less than $24,000 per year, compared to twenty percent in Queens as a whole. With the poverty threshold at $27,941 in the New York metropolis for a family of four, as of 2012, this means that more than half of the population in Far Rockaway is living under the poverty line. Realistically though, $28,000 per year is still not enough to live comfortably in New York. Residents of Eastern Rockaway living just above the poverty line are still affected by a lack of health care, educational opportunities, and sanitary living conditions.
Minority and immigrant populations dominate Far Rockaway. The fifty-one percent black population has been characterized in the media as dominated by gang violence and social upheaval. Thirty-four percent of people over twenty-five in Far Rockaway do not graduate from high school, and thirteen percent do not even start high school. With little hope for their futures, the youth of the Far Rockaway projects turn to gang membership for empowerment. Some individuals pledge themselves to gangs as young as eight years old. Edgemere, in particular, is considered New York’s most crime-ridden housing complex. The housing complex has longstanding rivalries with both Hammel Houses and Arverne. The anger of the youth community and their feeling of hopelessness has led to violence against one another. The media plays up this violence with reports of shootings and the discovery of dead bodies. They portray this violence as the problem in Far Rockaway, ignoring the deeply rooted history of economic disempowerment and the deliberate separation of the area from the urban core.
IV. The new Far Rockaways
When the public housing was built, the goal (while not officially stated) was to separate the poor and mentally unstable from the rest of the city, with no provision made for a potential rebirth of popularity for this beachfront property. Over the last decade, these large public housing complexes, concentrated on the beachfront property, have attracted the attention of developers who see a potential goldmine. Two developers, Benjamin Companies and Beechwood Homes, began building new apartment complexes directly adjacent to the housing projects in the early 2000s. They put out advertisements showing ostentatiously decorated apartments with amazing ocean views. The promotional material also featured “a warm-and-fuzzy short film featuring families frolicking on the beach.” It does not mention the surrounding low-income area of public housing projects.
In support of the project to revitalize Far Rockaway, the city has been pushing rezoning legislation. In April 2008, a comprehensive rezoning of 280 blocks in Far Rockaway took place. The current zoning laws in the area cater to large multiple dwelling places because of the hotels that had once existed in the area. These zoning laws also allow for the densely populated housing projects that now dominate the area. The rezoning is an attempt to establish more one to two family homes to replace the big complexes that exist now. The city is also are updating commercial overlays throughout the peninsula to allow more retail and commercial sites along primary streets. The problem with this rezoning is that it creates less room for residents and higher prices for housing, meaning that current residents of the public housing units would not be able to afford to live in the new developments. The residents of the area have mixed feelings about the rezoning. During a community meeting one resident, community member Owen Wells, favored the plan, saying, “This type of development would bring in new residents, and allows us to hopefully recapture the public waterfront.” Those against the project said that they were worried about the displacement of current residents and unwanted traffic to the area.
The only thing that held developers up from gentrifying the area was the huge concentration of public housing.
But with help of the Hope IV, some were able to start construction projects. The Hope IV act provides grants to public housing authorities to
“transform obsolete public housing sites into attractive, economically viable communities and to improve the lives of public housing residents through community and support service programs.”
What is not anticipated by this act is the issue of what they define as “obsolete public housing.” This language is similar to that of the slum renewal language that was used to destroy communities considered to be slum areas during the urban renewal programs of the 1950s. Meanwhile, Section 3 of Hope IV guarantees that
“employment and other economic opportunity created by Federal financial assistance for housing and community development programs should, if possible, be directed towards low and very low income persons, particularly those who are recipients of government assistance for
housing.”
By including the “if possible” clause, however, this act allows construction companies to avoid hiring locals if they have a “good” reason. Resident Ronnie Curin said, “They're building all this housing and they don't have one job for anyone in the projects.'' Furthermore, jobs like these are very short-term and do not create economic stability within a community long-term. This act tries to attract support from local residents by offering the potential for short-term jobs, while possibly displacing them in the future.
The new apartment complexes replaced part of the Arverne housing projects. These residents were then squeezed into other projects in the area. The Benjamin-Beechwood development stretches for 117 acres, bordering the Edgemere Houses and the Hammel Houses. While the developers promised to benefit the rest of the Far Rockaway by bringing jobs, shopping and recreational facilities, so far their development has created a self-contained city, separated from the existing housing projects. One resident argues that the development ignores “the surrounding community and its ills: unemployment, gangs, guns, drugs and troubled schools.”
Under the Hope IV Act, the Edgemere Houses were supposed to undergo construction in the early 2000s to improve the living conditions for current residents. The project was at a standstill for over ten years. I interviewed community activist Philip Muhammad, who described to me how the huge housing complex was left partially under construction till 2012 (when hurricane Sandy hit). These units were left with openings to the outdoors on some walls, while other walls were left crumbling from old age and mold. The idle units exposed dangerous chemicals such as asbestos and housed rats and cockroaches. Outside these units, Muhammad described how there were small smoke stacks that blew smoke directly into people’s homes. The partial construction imposed dangerous and unhealthy conditions on the region. He also described how the construction company would hire a few residents from the community while importing the bulk of the labor from somewhere else. As he would look across the street at the new Arverne housing, he did not understand “why that housing took only a year to build while the construction on the Edgemere housing was left to rot away.”
These unhealthy living conditions have led to an outbreak of serious illnesses in the area. Diseases such as cancer, heart disease, prenatal issues, asthma and mental illness are some of the highest in the city in Far Rockaway, all which could be at least partially attributed to horrible living conditions. With one-fourth of the adult population uninsured and the region’s hospitals ranked among the worst in New York City, health care is hard to come by. In addition, the vulnerable residents of these housing projects have become defenseless in the event of a natural disaster.
V. Hurricane Sandy
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeastern coast of the United States, becoming the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. This hurricane swept through the Northeast, creating destruction everywhere it went. While a vast relief effort was initiated by city, state and federal agencies, the affected areas were so widespread that many peripheral communities were not reached, especially in the poor outskirts of the city. The Far Rockaway region was an example of an abandoned area that was geographically and economically isolated during the storm. A week after the storm, after light was restored to all of Manhattan, the Far Rockaways still had not received a single bit of aid. The 20-story towers of public housing in the Far Rockaways were dark and flooded, and they became dangerous and unsanitary. Because of looting and gang violence in the aftermath of the hurricane, people were afraid to leave their homes. They created “jerrt-rigged refrigerators, hanging food in bags from their windows.”
With the drastic conditions worsening, Occupy Sandy (run by the same group as Occupy Wall Street) showed up to give out food and supplies to hard-hit areas that were overlooked by the city government and agencies, such as the Far Rockaways. They also gathered information about sick patients that was later helpful when Doctors without Borders showed up on the scene, the first time in the organization’s 40-year history that they worked on American soil. They set up emergency clinics within the housing units, using mostly a volunteer staff of doctors, nurses and other health professionals, and were able to get around to most of the housing units to attend to the residents. While many residents were scared to open their doors for fear of robbery, the doctors were responsible for saving many lives in the area.
A disaster like Sandy exposes a fractured public health and emergency response system. It pulls back the curtain on stark inequalities and structural flaws in emergency response agencies. Not only is the response system inadequate, but governmental agencies are deficient in their ability to maintain public-health infrastructure in the poor areas.
VI. Since the Storm
Over the two and a half years since the hurricane, the Rockaways haven’t improved much. Beach protection has yet to be finished to prevent another disaster like the one created by Hurricane Sandy. Local activist John Cori said that the city government had promised to start “building rock jetties six months” after the storm. Two and a half years later these still have not been built. While the boardwalk in West Rockaway was rebuilt within the first year after the hurricane, it took almost two years to rebuild Far Rockaway’s boardwalk. No other safety measures have been put in place since the disaster. If another hurricane were to take place, the same devastation would occur once again.
VII. Conclusion
After decades of neglect and policies that allowed the city to hide its poorest and most vulnerable populations from the general public, this natural disaster exposed both the dilapidation and the prejudicial policies of the New York City. Today if one is to Google the Far Rockaways, images appear of piles of rubble, toppled homes, and mass homelessness. It is alarming that in a city that has seen nearly forty years of relatively steady economic gains, a region like this continues to suffer from ongoing mismanagement and neglect. It is alarming that when Doctors without Borders first worked on U.S. soil it was serving residents of a city in which a quarter of the population makes over $100,000 per year. The destruction created by Hurricane Sandy created unlivable conditions in which people were exposed to unsanitary environments, a lack of medical care, chaos, and violence. These conditions mirror that of a conflict zones, with the lack of a legal structure, usable infrastructure, social services, and a functioning formal economic sector. A country that prides itself on progress and social consciousness and a city famous for the ideal of the “American dream” in this instance failed to empower their most vulnerable population.
The Rockaway peninsula is part of Queens, New York City. The communities there, referred to as the Rockaways, border the water, with long stretches of picturesque beaches. The name "Rockaway" (phonetically spelled) means "place of sands" in the Munsee language of the Native American Lenape people, who once inhabited the area. After the Dutch West Indian Company bought the land, many of the indigenous groups were forced to move and were replaced by European settlers. In the 19th century, the area began to attract wealthy of New York City residents during the summers. Today though, the Rockaways are better known for gang wars and neighborhoods still not repaired three years after Hurricane Sandy, than for glorious beaches. …show more content…
This paper focuses specifically on the eastern half of the Rockaways, known as Far Rockaway, and the public housing story in that area. The Far Rockaways demonstrate that separating the poor and mentally ill from the core of a city creates a breeding ground for economic instability and violence; which when exacerbated by a natural disaster, takes on the characteristics of a conflict zone.
II. History
The Rockaways were first developed as a summer vacation spot for tourists and wealthy people from the other boroughs of New York City.
Surrounding the beautiful beaches were seaside hotels and the summer homes of wealthy businessmen. The area was pictured on postcards and was seen as a popular and fashionable place to visit. In 1880, the construction of the Long Island Railroad to the Rockaways allowed a year-round commuter population to grow. During the early 20th century, these train lines spawned a bustling residential community. The commuters effectively pushed out the vacationers. As well, with the early 1900s came the invention of the automobile and an increased willingness to travel further for vacation spots, such as Jones Beach, Fire Island, and the Hamptons. With the wealthier New Yorkers heading further east, the beaches of the Rockaways became the enclave of people who depended on public transportation. As wealthy vacationers abandoned the Rockaways, the hotels and fancy restaurants were shuttered, replaced by cheaper entertainment …show more content…
alternatives.
In the 1930s, Robert Moses, New York City’s parks commissioner, set out to refashion the Rockaways. He saw the Rockaways as lending “themselves to summer exploitation, to honky-tonk catchpenny amusement resorts, shacks built without reference to health, sanitation, safety and decent living.” He wanted to transform the historically summer spot into a year-round residential community. Moses was known to be fanatical about building highways throughout the greater New York metropolis, and one of his major construction projects was the Shore Front Parkway, a thoroughfare that would connect Staten Island with the Hamptons. The grand vision for this project was never realized, but Moses did succeed in building one piece in 1939, a four-lane highway that ran the length of the Rockaways. This project cut directly through neighborhoods, actually splitting some homes in half. The affected people were given vouchers to live in public housing units. This approach to urban renewal was a common phenomenon in the United States at this time, but Moses’s tactics were more drastic than most developers. He used his power to pass projects that completely destroyed communities. Today, this still unfinished highway is locally referred to as the "road from nowhere to nowhere," because it does not have any connection to any other area or highway. This saying has more meaning than just referring to the highway, as it aptly describes the lives of residents of this community in general. Cut off physically from the rest of the city, the area has been mostly bypassed by the economic opportunity of New York’s core.
Accelerated by Robert Moses and his highway project, the area deteriorated in the 1930s. Moses called his vision for the Rockaways the “Rockaway Improvement Plan.” This “improvement” plan used eminent domain to seize some homes, while other homeowners were encouraged to leave through blockbusting tactics. The Rockaways’ distance from the rest of the city made it a place for city officials to park impoverished or troubled families and individuals, allowing the city government to effectively ignore their existence. While at the time only a small fraction of the population of Queens lived in the Rockaways, it would soon contain more than half of the borough’s public housing. The stated plan was to fill the new projects with people from varying incomes, through a screening process, but the developments instead became a dumping ground for the city’s poor. The area also became host to the city’s deinstitutionalized mental patients, as well as nursing homes for the low-income elderly. There was very little retail and no industrial development, and so few opportunities for employment for the residents. The combined building of public housing and increased mental patient population in the area drove the wealthier residents to leave; taking with them many of the jobs and commerce that had previously existed. The area became increasingly separated from the urban core, and the marginalized population fell deeper into poverty. This poverty was out of sight of the rest of the New York City population.
The three largest housing projects in Far Rockaway, Arverne, Hammel Houses and Edgemere, all were built during the mid 20th century. Arverne opened in 1951 with 418 units, Hammel houses opened in 1955 with 712 units, and Edgemere Houses opened in 1961 with 1,365 units. The projects became some of the poorest areas of New York City over the last half-century. During the last decade, these housing projects have fallen victim to increased violence and crime, rezoning to make way for the growth of wealthier neighborhoods, and immense destruction by the natural disaster of hurricane Sandy.
III. The story of Public Housing
The Arverne, Hammel and Edgemere public housing facilities continued to expand and sink deeper into poverty during the late 20th century. Today, twenty-three percent of the public housing in Queens is concentrated in the Eastern end of the Rockaways. Families in this area earn on average less than $25,000, less than half that of the average income in the rest of New York City. There is a large divergence in income levels between the population of Queens as a whole and that of the Eastern Rockaway population. Within Queens, four percent of the population is living on public assistance; in Eastern Rockaway, thirteen percent of the residents live on public assistance. Furthermore, forty-six percent of the population in Far Rockaway lives on less than $24,000 per year, compared to twenty percent in Queens as a whole. With the poverty threshold at $27,941 in the New York metropolis for a family of four, as of 2012, this means that more than half of the population in Far Rockaway is living under the poverty line. Realistically though, $28,000 per year is still not enough to live comfortably in New York. Residents of Eastern Rockaway living just above the poverty line are still affected by a lack of health care, educational opportunities, and sanitary living conditions.
Minority and immigrant populations dominate Far Rockaway. The fifty-one percent black population has been characterized in the media as dominated by gang violence and social upheaval. Thirty-four percent of people over twenty-five in Far Rockaway do not graduate from high school, and thirteen percent do not even start high school. With little hope for their futures, the youth of the Far Rockaway projects turn to gang membership for empowerment. Some individuals pledge themselves to gangs as young as eight years old. Edgemere, in particular, is considered New York’s most crime-ridden housing complex. The housing complex has longstanding rivalries with both Hammel Houses and Arverne. The anger of the youth community and their feeling of hopelessness has led to violence against one another. The media plays up this violence with reports of shootings and the discovery of dead bodies. They portray this violence as the problem in Far Rockaway, ignoring the deeply rooted history of economic disempowerment and the deliberate separation of the area from the urban core.
IV. The new Far Rockaways
When the public housing was built, the goal (while not officially stated) was to separate the poor and mentally unstable from the rest of the city, with no provision made for a potential rebirth of popularity for this beachfront property. Over the last decade, these large public housing complexes, concentrated on the beachfront property, have attracted the attention of developers who see a potential goldmine. Two developers, Benjamin Companies and Beechwood Homes, began building new apartment complexes directly adjacent to the housing projects in the early 2000s. They put out advertisements showing ostentatiously decorated apartments with amazing ocean views. The promotional material also featured “a warm-and-fuzzy short film featuring families frolicking on the beach.” It does not mention the surrounding low-income area of public housing projects.
In support of the project to revitalize Far Rockaway, the city has been pushing rezoning legislation. In April 2008, a comprehensive rezoning of 280 blocks in Far Rockaway took place. The current zoning laws in the area cater to large multiple dwelling places because of the hotels that had once existed in the area. These zoning laws also allow for the densely populated housing projects that now dominate the area. The rezoning is an attempt to establish more one to two family homes to replace the big complexes that exist now. The city is also are updating commercial overlays throughout the peninsula to allow more retail and commercial sites along primary streets. The problem with this rezoning is that it creates less room for residents and higher prices for housing, meaning that current residents of the public housing units would not be able to afford to live in the new developments. The residents of the area have mixed feelings about the rezoning. During a community meeting one resident, community member Owen Wells, favored the plan, saying, “This type of development would bring in new residents, and allows us to hopefully recapture the public waterfront.” Those against the project said that they were worried about the displacement of current residents and unwanted traffic to the area.
The only thing that held developers up from gentrifying the area was the huge concentration of public housing.
But with help of the Hope IV, some were able to start construction projects. The Hope IV act provides grants to public housing authorities to
“transform obsolete public housing sites into attractive, economically viable communities and to improve the lives of public housing residents through community and support service programs.”
What is not anticipated by this act is the issue of what they define as “obsolete public housing.” This language is similar to that of the slum renewal language that was used to destroy communities considered to be slum areas during the urban renewal programs of the 1950s. Meanwhile, Section 3 of Hope IV guarantees that
“employment and other economic opportunity created by Federal financial assistance for housing and community development programs should, if possible, be directed towards low and very low income persons, particularly those who are recipients of government assistance for
housing.”
By including the “if possible” clause, however, this act allows construction companies to avoid hiring locals if they have a “good” reason. Resident Ronnie Curin said, “They're building all this housing and they don't have one job for anyone in the projects.'' Furthermore, jobs like these are very short-term and do not create economic stability within a community long-term. This act tries to attract support from local residents by offering the potential for short-term jobs, while possibly displacing them in the future.
The new apartment complexes replaced part of the Arverne housing projects. These residents were then squeezed into other projects in the area. The Benjamin-Beechwood development stretches for 117 acres, bordering the Edgemere Houses and the Hammel Houses. While the developers promised to benefit the rest of the Far Rockaway by bringing jobs, shopping and recreational facilities, so far their development has created a self-contained city, separated from the existing housing projects. One resident argues that the development ignores “the surrounding community and its ills: unemployment, gangs, guns, drugs and troubled schools.”
Under the Hope IV Act, the Edgemere Houses were supposed to undergo construction in the early 2000s to improve the living conditions for current residents. The project was at a standstill for over ten years. I interviewed community activist Philip Muhammad, who described to me how the huge housing complex was left partially under construction till 2012 (when hurricane Sandy hit). These units were left with openings to the outdoors on some walls, while other walls were left crumbling from old age and mold. The idle units exposed dangerous chemicals such as asbestos and housed rats and cockroaches. Outside these units, Muhammad described how there were small smoke stacks that blew smoke directly into people’s homes. The partial construction imposed dangerous and unhealthy conditions on the region. He also described how the construction company would hire a few residents from the community while importing the bulk of the labor from somewhere else. As he would look across the street at the new Arverne housing, he did not understand “why that housing took only a year to build while the construction on the Edgemere housing was left to rot away.”
These unhealthy living conditions have led to an outbreak of serious illnesses in the area. Diseases such as cancer, heart disease, prenatal issues, asthma and mental illness are some of the highest in the city in Far Rockaway, all which could be at least partially attributed to horrible living conditions. With one-fourth of the adult population uninsured and the region’s hospitals ranked among the worst in New York City, health care is hard to come by. In addition, the vulnerable residents of these housing projects have become defenseless in the event of a natural disaster.
V. Hurricane Sandy
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeastern coast of the United States, becoming the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. This hurricane swept through the Northeast, creating destruction everywhere it went. While a vast relief effort was initiated by city, state and federal agencies, the affected areas were so widespread that many peripheral communities were not reached, especially in the poor outskirts of the city. The Far Rockaway region was an example of an abandoned area that was geographically and economically isolated during the storm. A week after the storm, after light was restored to all of Manhattan, the Far Rockaways still had not received a single bit of aid. The 20-story towers of public housing in the Far Rockaways were dark and flooded, and they became dangerous and unsanitary. Because of looting and gang violence in the aftermath of the hurricane, people were afraid to leave their homes. They created “jerrt-rigged refrigerators, hanging food in bags from their windows.”
With the drastic conditions worsening, Occupy Sandy (run by the same group as Occupy Wall Street) showed up to give out food and supplies to hard-hit areas that were overlooked by the city government and agencies, such as the Far Rockaways. They also gathered information about sick patients that was later helpful when Doctors without Borders showed up on the scene, the first time in the organization’s 40-year history that they worked on American soil. They set up emergency clinics within the housing units, using mostly a volunteer staff of doctors, nurses and other health professionals, and were able to get around to most of the housing units to attend to the residents. While many residents were scared to open their doors for fear of robbery, the doctors were responsible for saving many lives in the area.
A disaster like Sandy exposes a fractured public health and emergency response system. It pulls back the curtain on stark inequalities and structural flaws in emergency response agencies. Not only is the response system inadequate, but governmental agencies are deficient in their ability to maintain public-health infrastructure in the poor areas.
VI. Since the Storm
Over the two and a half years since the hurricane, the Rockaways haven’t improved much. Beach protection has yet to be finished to prevent another disaster like the one created by Hurricane Sandy. Local activist John Cori said that the city government had promised to start “building rock jetties six months” after the storm. Two and a half years later these still have not been built. While the boardwalk in West Rockaway was rebuilt within the first year after the hurricane, it took almost two years to rebuild Far Rockaway’s boardwalk. No other safety measures have been put in place since the disaster. If another hurricane were to take place, the same devastation would occur once again.
VII. Conclusion
After decades of neglect and policies that allowed the city to hide its poorest and most vulnerable populations from the general public, this natural disaster exposed both the dilapidation and the prejudicial policies of the New York City. Today if one is to Google the Far Rockaways, images appear of piles of rubble, toppled homes, and mass homelessness. It is alarming that in a city that has seen nearly forty years of relatively steady economic gains, a region like this continues to suffer from ongoing mismanagement and neglect. It is alarming that when Doctors without Borders first worked on U.S. soil it was serving residents of a city in which a quarter of the population makes over $100,000 per year. The destruction created by Hurricane Sandy created unlivable conditions in which people were exposed to unsanitary environments, a lack of medical care, chaos, and violence. These conditions mirror that of a conflict zones, with the lack of a legal structure, usable infrastructure, social services, and a functioning formal economic sector. A country that prides itself on progress and social consciousness and a city famous for the ideal of the “American dream” in this instance failed to empower their most vulnerable population.