Floodwaters from Superstorm Sandy damaged over 69,000 residential units in New York City. Residents who lost power, heat, and hot water were left without these critical building services for weeks.¹ Many of the city’s postwar buildings are built on reclaimed marshland that once served to buffer the city from coastal storms, which has led to an increased risk of coastal flooding.²

Adaptation Strategies for Multifamily Housing

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy developed the Retrofit Solutions Workshop in partnership with the American Institute of Architects New York and Enterprise Community Partners to identify commonalities in multifamily housing developments affected by the storm.³ Experts in architecture, engineering, energy, and utilities developed adaptation and hazard mitigation strategies for three subsidized or affordable buildings within the 100-year flood zone. One of these is 334 East 8th Street in the East Village, a 30-unit affordable housing development operated by the Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association.

The Retrofit Solutions Workshop team faced a challenge with 334 East 8th Street’s pre-1900 “dumbbell-shaped” construction, a design intended to maximize units, light, and air. This shape, with a narrow center and wide facades facing the street and backyard, left little space for site flood resilience measures. The team initially explored dry flood-proofing, but realized that the buoyancy this measure created around the basement would damage or destroy the building.^4,5 The team instead decided to move core utilities out of the basement. The boiler moved to the roof, and the team converted the large electrical meter into multiple smaller meters on the first floor. The New York City disaster recovery block grant funded the retrofit, which cost around $1.2 million.⁴