My delusions of homeownership in Rockaway began, in earnest, with a 100-year-old Victorian. I had seen the “For Sale” sign zip-tied to its chain-link fence while on a walk with my dog one afternoon. The fig tree out front was fruiting, and the house was a block and a half from the ocean. It was my Under the Tuscan Sun dream, except in better shape and in Queens. A few weeks later, a broker was walking me through the home’s three stories of original parquet floors and stained-glass detailing, using words like entertainer’s kitchen and motivated seller. In the dusty basement, she continued to narrate my future life in the house. “For ongoing maintenance, you should expect to replace your boiler every 20 years or so,” she said. I smiled and nodded like I already knew that. “The good thing about this neighborhood is that none of the boilers are more than 12 years old, thanks to Sandy.”
The destruction of the superstorm, a rush of development, and growing interest among newly remote New York City office workers had transformed what was once a fairly insular working-class community into a rapidly gentrifying enclave of relatively cheap, updated housing stock. With, apparently, a lot of new boilers. In the two years I’d lived in the neighborhood, I’d seen old duplexes converted into shiny new Airbnbs and modernist mid-rises advertising ocean views and “sponsor unit specials.” On Zillow, I sifted through a collage of matching stainless-steel appliances, neon-colored Adirondack chairs, and glass-walled balconies. Most were builder grade and already beginning to look dated, but not all of them. A meticulously renovated bungalow owned by some art-world macher that I toured after the Victorian had a chef’s kitchen, exposed beams, and a Pantone color-of-the-year paint job. It also had a top-of-the-line sump pump tucked discreetly among the spalike features of the primary bathroom. I struggled to imagine a room so pristine filling with murky floodwater.
It’s not like I hadn’t thought about climate change before. On my morning walks, I’d dodged heavy machinery crawling across the beach to reinforce the sand dunes with concrete and steel. I had shared and dutifully contributed to fundraisers to help restore a flooded home or local business. But considering these things while staring down the barrel of a 30-year mortgage was different. 2050, a benchmark year for climate scientists, all at once seemed suffocatingly close. Was I really ready to buy a house at the end of the world as we know it?
Superstorm Sandy was just that — a superstorm, a freak occurrence, the kind of bad fortune that skips a generation, then roars back with a vengeance. Waves careened over the boardwalk and houses were reduced to rubble. And though rising, warming oceans are leading to stronger and more frequent hurricanes, the real existential threat to the Rockaways — and the thing that kept me up at night while restlessly calculating expenses — is far more banal.
Today, roughly 95 percent of structures in Rockaway Beach sit in what is known as the 100-year floodplain. It’s a federal designation that means, despite the 100-year moniker, a property in this floodplain has a one-in-four chance of flooding over the span of 30 years. (It also means you are required to have flood insurance in order to get a mortgage for that same time frame.) In Rockaway, those floods are primarily tidal floods — not raging storms but the combination of long-term sea-level rise and short-term ebb and flow of the waves as the moon orbits the earth, month after month, like clockwork. Buying a house in the neighborhood I loved, in other words, meant learning to live with the floods. But could I?
According to FEMA, just one inch of water in a home can cause more than $10,000 worth of damage; 12 inches, which is incidentally the projected sea-level rise for the East Coast by 2050, will set you back about $30,000. But those rising seas would hit more than just my bank account: Flooding can lead to widespread issues with infrastructure and city services. Could I still catch my bus if the roads flood? Will I have to cancel plans or work from home every time it rains? What about emergency services like fire trucks and ambulances? How long will my gym or grocery store be out of commission if it gets inundated?
I wasn’t alone in running these scenarios while house hunting. According to Zillow’s market research, more than 80 percent of home shoppers are considering things like floods, wildfires, extreme heat, and air quality when making their purchase decisions. Insurers, and subsequently homeowners, are already trickling out of states like hurricane-plagued Florida and wildfire-prone California. But choosing to leave a home is complex; few “climate migrants” are making decisions based on a single factor. Often, they have the necessary income to move to a more expensive, inland neighborhood, or they have family in another state. In the Rockaways, a handful of homeowners took buyouts to relocate after Sandy, but many have long-standing ties to the community, making the decision fraught. (“You know, I don’t want to go anywhere,” Aydon Gabourel, a longtime resident who runs the community nonprofit LaruBeya, told the Waterfront Alliance recently. “I want my children to have this house. I want them to have children in the house, to live in our house, but that’s probably not going to happen.”)
I tried to make sense of things by talking them out. One real-estate friend told me to look into FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, which is basically like rent stabilization for flood insurance and, if you’re lucky, can be transferred from the previous homeowner for even lower rates. Another local friend tried to reassure me with the free market: You can always sell. There will always be someone who wants to buy a beach house. To my neighbors, living in Rockaway meant more space for the money, even with flood-insurance premiums. The rental income in the summers was an added bonus. It’s not like they didn’t know or believe the climate-change projections, but, as one friend put it, “there’s nowhere else where you can wake up, swim with dolphins and whales, and then be in Manhattan an hour later.” The people I talked to were reassured by the way the neighborhood had rebuilt after Sandy. I wanted to let that feeling carry me, too: I loved Rockaway because it was a community that had come together before in the face of disaster and, surely, would stick together as the tides keep rising.
So, I put in an offer on the bungalow. It was smaller, newer, already outfitted with that sump pump. I wasn’t sure if I was making the best, or worst, decision of my life. While I awaited a response from the seller, I started planning a housewarming party to keep the visions of climate doom at bay. After much anxious consideration, I started to feel excited.
The feeling was short-lived. I was quickly outbid. Maybe it was spite, maybe it was the sort of clarity that comes from falling out of love, but it was only after I lost the bungalow that I was ready to look up its climate score from First Street, a company that offers climate-risk financial modeling for mortgage lenders, insurance companies, city governments, and even Zillow. By First Street’s calculations, the bungalow had a 10/10 flood risk rating: 50 percent chance of flooding in just one year; 99 percent chance in 15 years. It estimated that over the span of a 30-year mortgage, my flood insurance would have ballooned more than 400 percent. (And that’s not even taking into account inflation.) According to researchers at Columbia, which combined past disaster-recovery cost data with future flood projections, a $500,000 low-lying two-story home in Rockaway — not exactly the bungalow, but not far off — should expect to be flooded 12 to 15 times in the next 30 years, to the tune of $2 million in damages and untold logistical headaches.
The Victorian had a 7/10 First Street flood-risk rating. Better, but not by much. Reluctantly, I broadened my Zillow search parameters, unwilling to stake the largest investment of my life on some as-of-yet-unknown techno-solution that will keep the Atlantic Ocean from swallowing up our coastlines. (The experts are on my side here too: “The climate has changed and is changing faster than we know how to build big engineering projects,” Rohit T. Aggarwala, the city’s chief climate officer, told the New York Times last year.)
After a few months, I landed on an apartment in Bed-Stuy — no beach, but, crucially, no flood risk. I moved in October, though I still go to Rockaway most weekends, sometimes to surf, sometimes to see friends, sometimes just to split a blueberry muffin from my favorite coffee shop with my dog. On a recent Saturday, I miscalculated the overlap between the falling tide and the onset of an edible, so instead of surfing, I just walked down the boardwalk, pleasantly stoned. I wandered past a playground so new the paint is barely dry. It was golden hour and hard not to feel the tug of a neighborhood I loved so much. But just past the swing sets, I noticed the leaning, weather-worn sign memorializing Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge on October 29, 2012. At its highest, it reached nine feet, which is marked by a red line that towers well over my head. It was taller than the nearby jungle gym, too.