New York City could lose up to 19,300 homes in the next 15 years due to flooding from high tides and storms — more than the toll of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy — estimates a forthcoming report by the Regional Plan Association. 

Another 24,300 units within the five boroughs could be substantially damaged by 2040 in a major storm that has a 1% chance of happening in any given year. The region encoming Westchester and Long Island could lose tens of thousands more units of housing by then.

The grim projections convey how climate change could exacerbate New York’s already dire housing crisis, with reverberations well beyond the most urban areas.

RPA’s research, shared in advance with THE CITY, comes as Los Angeles County experiences a climate change-fueled shock that has exacerbated its housing crisis, thanks to fires that destroyed over 16,000 homes, schools, houses of worship, businesses and other buildings — displacing thousands of Californians and leading to a sudden surge in rents. 

The fires and their aftermath present a cautionary tale for New York, where the threat to houses and apartments is inundation from floods, which are poised to become more frequent and severe from climate change.

“It’s our version of what’s happening now in L.A.,” said Eric Sanderson, vice president for urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Restoration Ecology. “They have the fire, we have flooding.”

The New York region has already gotten a taste of destruction from coastal flooding and its impact beyond municipal borders. Sandy destroyed or damaged about 100,000 homes on Long Island, and damaged nearly 70,000 units of housing in New York City, with about 20% made uninhabitable. Future destruction from storms and flooding is projected to be worse.

“We’re going to experience both a gradual ramping up and a couple of shocks,” said Moses Gates, vice president for housing and neighborhood planning at RPA. “We’re going to have Sandy-type events that are going to leave a lot of homes uninhabitable all at once, and we’re going to see a lot of people without other options trying to find housing.”

Liz Koslov, an urban planning and sustainability professor at UCLA who is writing a book about Staten Island residents who didn’t want to move back to their ravaged neighborhoods post-Sandy, said destruction of housing can make worse “forms of precariousness that are ongoing.” (Koslov had to evacuate from the fires with her family.)

“Homelessness and housing insecurity are really normalized as part of the cities we live in, and the forces that produced those experiences are sped up and visible right now,” she said, adding that public investment to people in their everyday lives and in the event of disasters could mean mass displacement doesn’t have to be an inevitability.

Empty Lots Endure

The Queens neighborhoods of the Rockaways and Broad Channel contain the most housing at risk in the five boroughs, according to RPA’s research, followed by waterfront neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn — including Howard Beach, Hamilton Beach, South Ozone Park, Bergen Beach, Canarsie and Flatlands. Many of those neighborhoods already regular flooding from high tides, made higher by sea level rise. 

Sea levels around New York City have already risen about a foot since 1900, a higher rate than the global average, and they’re projected to rise more: between one and two feet by the 2050s, according to the New York City on Climate Change. Higher seas mean worse storm surges and more frequent flooding during high tides.

Higher seas also fuel more powerful — and devastating — coastal storms.

After Hurricane Sandy, many homes were rebuilt — demolished.

Housing loss from storms and flooding is already clear in parts of Edgemere, Queens, a neighborhood sandwiched between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean on the Rockaway Peninsula. Fences line the perimeter of numerous empty lots, overgrown with brown grasses, where dilapidated houses used to stand. Some homeowners took offers for buyouts from the city after Sandy. 

A few homes still remain boarded up and abandoned.

“The houses that you do see that way, that was pretty much the conditions that a lot of them were left in,” said Nykole Slay, a renter who lives on a block in the neighborhood with several empty lots and a few vacant homes.

Slay, 47, said the high tide flooding doesn’t bother her, and that the peaceful environment and unparalleled sunrises make the risks worth it. Full-on destruction of her home would be the only thing to get her to consider moving, she said: “That’s what it’d have to be, because I love my house.”

Basement Apartments at Risk

remnants of Hurricane Ida in 2021. 

Ida caused $7.5 billion in damage across the state and affected about over 100 families remained homeless for more than a year as they struggled to find permanent housing they could afford.

Over 4,000 basement apartments, typically home to lower-income renters, could be vulnerable to major flooding, according to a study by the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

Heading off the housing-market shocks of such calamities would require building a lot more residences in and around New York City, said Marcel Negret, the RPA’s director of land use​​. He pointed to previous RPA research that found a lack of adequate housing growth could hike housing prices 25% and cause an additional 260,000 families to have excessively high rent burdens. 

“All those metrics that are cited there would be made worse by exacerbated impacts from climate,” he said.