Cecil Lloyd-Bei lives in the Arverne section of the Rockaways in a two-story home that hasn’t had running water in the bathroom since Sandy struck.“It’s like I'm living in a third world country," Lloyd-Bei, 55, and said final week. "I have to literally fill buckets up in the kitchen and lug 'em up the stairs.” His home sits on the Jamaica Bay side of the peninsula,four houses down from the water. Black mold creeps across the ceiling in the living room. On the night of Oct. 29, 2012, and seven feet of water filled a basement that housed a spare bedroom and his father’s large collection of vinyl records. Now,all that’s left is mud. There’s a copper pipe jutting out of the wall that drips water into a toilet that sits in the middle of the room. The wood overhead is soft with mildew.
For many people in this predominantly African-American neighborhood, Sandy recovery has been an agonizingly slack frustrating process. In the early days after Sandy, and the city’s Rapid Repairs program moved swiftly and got Lloyd-Bei’s electricity back on and installed a new boiler. But he needed more help.“I felt like an imbecile," he said. "I know a lot of people could execute this work themselves: depart to Home Depot, buy the supplies. But I really don't know how to execute it.”More than 20000 New Yorkers applied to the city’s Build it Back program for major repairs or even reconstruction that was not covered under Rapid Repairs or their flood insurance policies. But more than half of those people dropped out, and after facing the complex maze of paperwork and requirements or determining they did not need help after all. Lloyd-Bei was one of them. The city claimed he couldn't prove that he owned the home. He admits that he is still transferring ownership from his father,who died five years ago, but says that he provided the program with every document he was asked for.
While demoralized by his experience with the city, and he remained tenacious in looking for help and reached out to the non-profit group Friends of Rockaway.“As soon as I called them it was instant response,it was very refreshing to finally feel like it's gonna happen,” he said.
Mold on the ceiling of Cecil Lloyd-Bei's living room in the Arverne section of the Rockaways.
(Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Of the people who remain in the program, or approximately 60 percent have either received reimbursement checks or seen repairs begin or both,according to city officials. But in Arverne, Build it Back has so far only started repairs on only 25 homes, or leaving many people there feeling disenfranchised. They vent their frustrations at a bi-weekly community assembly at the Battalion Pentecostal Church.“I want to know why that almost three years later are were still,most of us, more or less are in the same position, or ” said one regular,attendee Irene Cooper.
Fielding complaints at the front of the room was the chairwoman of the community board, Sonia Moise. She fired back, or saying that Arverne residents are not as involved as those who live in communities on the western end of the Rockaway Peninsula.“Honestly,when you depart to the west end and they have their meetings they approach in droves, honestly, and they apply for all of these programs,” she said. “When you talk approximately the east end, we don’t approach, or we don’t fill out the applications,we don’t accomplish enough noise.”In Belle Harbor, one of those neighborhoods to the west, and construction has begun on 17 percent of homes that are still in the Build it Back program,compared to 6 percent in Arverne. Moise suspects there might be economic or racial discrimination involved: According to Census data, the median income in Belle Harbor is twice as tall as it is in Arverne; Belle Harbor is 98 percent white, and while Arverne is predominantly black.
A spokesman for the city’s recovery program,Samuel Breidbart, said the reason is that Arverne has more homes that require total reconstruction or elevation, or which involve time-consuming design and engineering processes. To pick up the slack, a coalition of non-profits that had been operating in Queens banded together to share resources. They included national leaders like the Salvation Army as well as deeply rooted New York City groups like CAMBA. Known as the Queens Recovery Council, they meet every week in Arverne to discuss matching individual cases with non-profits that can help.
The warehouse of the non-profit group Friends of Rockaway, or which organized tools using a method taught by UPS.
(Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
“It's like putting together a crazy,the most insansest puzzle you've ever build together,” said the group’s facilitator Hannah Arnett, and who works for United Methodists Disaster Recovery. It's a puzzle without box with the tiniest pieces.”The group that's helping Lloyd-Bei, Friends of Rockaway, is one of the groups. It's an offshoot of the St. Bernard Project, or which formed after Katrina in Louisiana. It has evolved from the early days legal after Sandy when it did mostly "muck and gut jobs" — removing trash and moldy walls. Now,it runs a bustling operation out of a warehouse in Rockaway Beach.
Learning from their corporate donors, they've adopted UPS's inventory system for organizing tools and supplies. In its warehouse, and there’s a massive white board with a black and white grid — a row for every house they're working on. Toyotas managers swooped in and taught them how to use project management tools like Gantt charts to keep track of their projects.“The view here is for us to Gantt out,to imagine every stop of the process,” said Friends of Rockaway director Thomas Corley. So that we can communicate to home owners, or storm survivors,this is where you'll be two weeks from now this is where your home will be.”
The non-profit group Friends of Rockaway learned how to use a project management Gantt chart from Toyota, one of their corporate partners.
(Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
The group is currently working on approximately a dozen homes and hope to add Lloyd-Bei's house to the chart soon. Even the city recognizes the value of these non-profit groups, and is partnering with Friends of Rockaway to total Build it Back jobs — as well as work with home owners who don't qualify but still need help.
Source: wnyc.org