New York Area Could Lose 80,000 Homes to Flooding in 15 Years

There's a simple reason why New York City co-ops and condos remain so expensive and why rents are at all-time highs: the supply of housing units has historically failed to keep up with demand. Now a new force is getting ready to worsen the city's housing crisis.

Climate change.

More than 80,000 housing units in New York City and the southern shore of Long Island could be lost to floods over the next 15 years, according to a new report by the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit civic organization. And those staggering losses could double by 2070.

“You’re going to need to build more housing to just replace what is lost in your own municipality,” Moses Gates, the association’s vice president for housing and neighborhood planning and an author of the report, tells The New York Times.

The report did not single out specific neighborhoods as at risk for flooding. But of the 82,000 homes that could be lost by 2040, more than half were projected to be on Long Island, with some Atlantic Ocean-facing towns like Babylon and Islip bearing the brunt.

Cities along the Long Island Sound on both the island and in Westchester County would also be vulnerable. In New York City, waterfront neighborhoods in southern Queens and Brooklyn, such as the Rockaways and Canarsie, would see the most losses.

“The sooner we decide as a city to invest in resilience measures to help neighborhoods adapt — whether it’s to fortify or to move — the faster we avert leaving an even bigger crisis for the next generation,” says Amy Chester, the managing director of Rebuild by Design, a New York University-based nonprofit that works to make infrastructure better able to withstand storms and climate change.

Her hopes were dashed soon after the report was released when the Trump administration, in its all-out assault on federal spending, announced that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is cutting $325 million in grants that was to go to New York State, much of it destined for essential flood mitigation efforts in New York City.

“Cutting infrastructure funding for communities across New York is shortsighted and a massive risk to public safety,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement.

FEMA is canceling the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, calling it “wasteful and ineffective” and “more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.” BRIC has distributed $5 billion in grants nationally since it started in 2020, during Trump’s first term.

“These are so important," Chester, of Rebuild by Design, tells The New York Times. "Every single one of these programs are life and death.”

The Regional Plan Association's report says the New York City region needs 362,000 additional homes right now to relieve overcrowding and permanently house people living in shelters. In 15 years, that number will more than triple to 1.2 million, due to population growth, the deterioration of housing stock, and looming flood losses.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to deride climate change as a "hoax."