--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Welcome to The Sunday Story. I'm Aisha Rascoe.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Build it stronger, build it safer, build it back fast. Welcome back to The Sunday Story and part two of our series on how badly we as a nation do at rebuilding after a big storm knocks us down.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Laura Sullivan and the crew at Frontline have been following along as North Carolina struggles to bounce back after Helene. In Houston, they learned you can't always engineer your way out of danger. Now they're looking for answers in another storm-prone area, New York and New Jersey's seacoast, to see how they've done in the years since Superstorm Sandy.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: The idea there? Get out of the way of the water. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy sent more than 12 feet of water over communities along the coast of New York and New Jersey. It was one of the worst flooding events in New York's history.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Recently, we headed back to some of the neighborhoods we first visited in the aftermath of Sandy. And even though 13 years had passed since the storm, it almost felt like they were trapped in time midway through recovery.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Here on Staten Island's seacoast, the community used to be tight-knit, with families living in little bungalows. Now it feels desolate.
--:-- James Sinagra: After the storm, some residents used recovery money to elevate their homes really high. Others took a buyout from the federal government. Their homes were leveled. And some did nothing. Their houses sit right as they were the night of the storm.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: It's kind of sad. Resident James Sinagra calls it the jack-o'-lantern effect. Imagine the teeth, jagged and irregularly spaced.
--:-- James Sinagra: I mean, they should either make it into wetlands, like you can see down the road there, that's all wetlands. Or they should at least give more of an incentive for a community to be built back up like these houses are built up.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: It was hard to find people who thought the recovery had turned out well, even people who decided not to rebuild at all, like Joe Tyrone. He's a local realtor known for organizing one of the nation's first large-scale home buyout programs in Staten Island's Oakwood Beach neighborhood.
--:-- Joe Tyrone: All they talked about when we were mucking out the houses, how much they loved the neighborhood. So I said, there's no way they're going to want to leave.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: But the reality is, first there was Isaac. That was bad. And then Irene came, put him back on their heels. And when Sandy came, that was a knockout punch. They were like, that's it. People died on the street. And they all knew each other.
--:-- Joe Tyrone: He took me out to see the old neighborhood. This is where my house was. See that ridge right there? That was my backyard right here. And the other side of that was another house.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Along with the federal government, the state spent more than $200 million buying out more than 500 homes on Staten Island, intending to turn the area back over to nature.
--:-- Joe Tyrone: As we drive around, it seems in some ways it worked. Where hundreds of homes once stood, there are long stretches of empty lots punctuated by a few isolated homes.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: But these holdouts, they mean the roads and the power lines have to stay. And as Tyrone pulls around the corner, he points to several empty lots with a chain-link fence around them.
--:-- Joe Tyrone: There have been rumors. Why does this have a fence? Well, this is the exact area that the Staten Island Soccer League purchased from the state for some nominal amount. And they're going to build their soccer fields here.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: So they're really doing this? Oh, yeah, 100 percent they're doing it.
--:-- Joe Tyrone: This youth soccer league, which has more than 4,000 players, bought six acres of buyout land from the state. They plan to build a soccer complex with bleachers. There's talk of a clubhouse. And everyone's going to need somewhere to park.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Is this what you thought was going to happen? when you sold your property? No, no.
--:-- Joe Tyrone: When I sold my property, I thought it was just going to be like a big marsh and that I wouldn't even be able to get to my property. That's the vision then-Governor Andrew Cuomo had promised. Wetlands and oyster beds that would soak up stormwater like a sponge.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: We're now rebuilding oyster beds, wetlands and marshlands and grasslands. Why? Because they all had a purpose. They were all part of the balance.
--:-- Bridget Wiltshire: Oh, they lied to us. They said they're going to build a park. Then it was going to be wetlands. What do you think, if you're looking around here in 10, 20 years, what are you going to see?
--:-- Laura Sullivan: I think you're going to see very high-end homes down here. Really? Next to the water, yeah.
--:-- Vito Fisella: You have some of the best views around and underappreciated of the water. We should welcome people to build near the water when possible and bring life back as opposed to watching empty lots.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: So taxpayers spent a lot of money buying out these properties. Was it all for nothing? I don't know if it was all for nothing.
--:-- Vito Fisella: I think in some cases it was justified. Sometimes the pendulum swings too far in one direction, and maybe it becomes time to reevaluate some of those decisions and see where it is safe that people can move back in.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: What if those people come back, but they end up under 18 feet of water and their homes are destroyed and more people die? Well, that's what I'm saying.
--:-- Vito Fisella: If we have the mechanisms to mitigate against that, then by all means. But if we're just going to live in fear forever, it's probably not the way I want to live, frankly.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Few people in these neighborhoods seem to be living in fear. Homes continue to sell at a brisk pace, and prices keep going up.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Many of these houses are elevated, but few are high enough to avoid the massive surge of water that hit parts of this area.
--:-- Brad Lander: 30 percent of New Yorkers now live in the floodplain.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: How long do you think it took for people to forget? A few weeks, honestly. Really?
--:-- Brad Lander: Yes. Is that what you thought was going to happen after Sandy? I mean, we have an affordability crisis and we're desperate for more housing. And we have a climate crisis that when it wallops you like it did in Sandy, those days you're really looking at it.
--:-- Craig Fugate: And then the sun comes out again and it kind of recedes from memory. and we are not as good as we need to be.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Do you think that New York is ready for the next storm? New York is not ready for the next storm.
--:-- Craig Fugate: The person who oversaw New York and New Jersey's recovery from Sandy was Craig Fugate. He ran FEMA as one of its longest-serving administrators.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: We put a lot of stuff right back where it was. I told him we had been driving around some of New York's hardest-hit areas. There are some neighborhoods that are rebuilt right next to a neighborhood where 70 of the people did take a buyout next to a neighborhood that hasn't changed at all and is hoping for a seawall.
--:-- Craig Fugate: I mean, what's the plan here? There is no plan.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: People like to think there's a plan, but understand the complexity of, one, I got to deal with property rights and property owners.
--:-- Craig Fugate: I also have to understand most of this is economically driven. Developers will come in there and start putting cash on the streets to buy out distressed property.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: But what was more frustrating, he said, is that often local officials preferred the developers' plans.
--:-- Sean LaTourette: It's tough. Change is hard. We're standing on top of a massive earthen levee as workers complete the final section of a new seawall in Port Monmouth, the kind many communities are hoping for.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: But they're expensive and take years. And LaTourette says coastal areas also need to protect themselves by elevating new homes five feet.
--:-- Sean LaTourette: But he's facing resistance. There are so many pressures that work against building resilience and projecting forward, imagining the world not just as it is today, but as it will be tomorrow in a decade from now and a decade from then.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: I asked him where that pressure was coming from. In some instances, leaders of local governments. Really?
--:-- Sean LaTourette: Mm-hmm. Because the leaders of local governments didn't want the homes to come up by faith? They were misinformed about what the rules did.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: By whom? By special interests who are worried about their bottom line. Special interests.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: When we come back, a look at the forces shaping North Carolina's recovery. Stay with us.
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--:-- Aisha Rascoe: We're back with a Sunday story. Laura Sullivan picks up the story in North Carolina.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: We returned to Swannanoa early this spring. It had been five months since Helene, and we headed straight to the trailer home park where Shalena Jordan's parents, Nola and Robert Ramsor, had lived, next to the river.
--:-- Nathan Pennington: The remains of their trailer and all the others were gone. A few piles of debris were ready for pickup, and recently, the property had been put on the market.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Don't miss this high-visibility land, the real estate flyer said, with abundant river frontage that, quote, can be rebuilt as a mobile home park.
--:-- Nathan Pennington: Nathan Pennington came to meet us. He's Buncombe County's planning director, and he spends his days thinking about flood rules and floodplains.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: He points across the way, up at those duplexes we'd heard about in episode one, that survived the storm.
--:-- Nathan Pennington: Contractors were almost finished with the cosmetic repairs. These duplexes are built to modern standards. They have flood vents, which prevented the structures from floating off their foundations.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Yes, they still took water, but they can go right back into emergency repair permitting.
--:-- Nathan Pennington: Did you see a difference between the houses that were built to modern standards and the ones that weren't during the storm? Absolutely.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: In fact, there was a manufactured home on the other side of the duplex there. There were structures down here. You see all those structures gone.
--:-- Nathan Pennington: Now that you know where the water is coming, are the rules going to change for what you can do here? No, no.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: We still have the same flood maps. We still have the same set of standards.
--:-- Nathan Pennington: I asked him why the community wouldn't want to adopt new standards, new rules to help protect whoever lives here next.
--:-- Congressman Chuck Edwards: Building to higher standards increases cost. So anytime you increase cost on just about anything, you're going to have folks that are not going to necessarily be for it.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: One of those folks is Congressman Chuck Edwards, who told us earlier property owners should make most of those decisions for themselves.
--:-- Congressman Chuck Edwards: There's a significant shortage of housing. And a good portion of the reason that we have such a lack of inventory today is that government has overimposed its will on what someone's house should look like and the standards by which it's built.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: He says this isn't just affecting housing along the rivers. Not everything that we're talking about here was even a result of the flood.
--:-- Congressman Chuck Edwards: We had so many landslides around the district that no one could possibly anticipate. Are we going to tell those folks that they can't rebuild because a landslide that was totally unknown, totally unpredictable happened? No, we're not going to tell them.
--:-- Rick Wooten: A landslide like this is what we call a debris flow. It's like a huge locomotive going down the mountain.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Water trickles down 400 feet of now barren rock. And in the valley below, family homes lay smashed.
--:-- Rick Wooten: Eleven people died in this landslide. There's been at least one debris flow event that we can see in the older deposits. You can see that in the rock?
--:-- Laura Sullivan: You can see that. That's a good indicator of where they could happen in the future.
--:-- Susan Fisher: I think that any one who was representing developers or home builders didn't want that bill.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Why? Because it's money. People are spending money to have houses built on top of ridges.
--:-- Susan Fisher: These developers and homebuilders across the nation, they're often powerfully organized.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: And I wanted to understand just what kind of influence they have here in North Carolina.
--:-- Representative Laura Budd: I would say they're a pretty spicy topic some days, yes.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Do people talk about the homebuilders around here?
--:-- Representative Laura Budd: Yeah. Bud said a lot of individual homebuilders want to make strong, safe homes.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: She even represents some of them in her law practice.
--:-- Representative Laura Budd: But at the statehouse, as an industry, she says the lobby pushes for less regulation.
--:-- Chris Millis: Yeah, so our heart and soul in regard to what our mission is, is to provide the American dream of homeownership to as many North Carolinians as possible.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: So we're keeping an eye out for all state-level regulations. I met up with him at the organization's Raleigh headquarters.
--:-- Chris Millis: And just making sure that the rules that are being put in place and the statutes that are being put in place is done so in a way that's protecting life and safety as it relates to building codes and the development industry.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: But it's done so in a way that's affordable.
--:-- Chris Millis: Millis told me the association has never opposed mapping in the mountains.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: And it believes statewide steep slope legislation is unnecessary and counterproductive. because they say many local communities already have such rules and that they can best establish regulations that reflect their community's needs.
--:-- Chris Millis: He said the Bill 488, which is now law, will enhance safety while preserving efficiency and that building code enforcement remains robust and fully intact in the state.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: He said the bill did not eliminate or diminish any existing inspection authority.
--:-- Representative Brody: In this email that is sent to you, the lawmaker lists the nine things that they're putting in the code, and he's asking you, let me know if I miss something.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: I mean, why is the lawmaker, who's the chairman of this committee, asking you what he's missing when he's changing the codes?
--:-- Chris Millis: Because we are experts in regard to the chapters that are applied to different aspects of residential construction.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: So we're providing input to lawmakers that are going to be going through a committee process to make sure that we're answering his question in regard to what detail needs to be addressed.
--:-- Representative Brody: I asked Representative Budd, Why is the legislature doing this? Money powers politics. It's expensive to run for office.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Even in North Carolina, my first race in 22 was over a million dollars.
--:-- Representative Brody: They give tens of thousands of dollars to those candidates that they think will advance their interest in the legislature.
--:-- Chris Millis: The homebuilders were Brody's top donor in the last campaign cycle, according to state finance records.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: The group spread half a million more dollars around to other state and local officials.
--:-- Representative Brody: Brody did not respond to NPR's request for comment, but the homebuilders did give us an interview.
--:-- Chris Millis: Yeah, so our heart and soul in regard to what our mission is, is to provide the American dream of homeownership to as many North Carolinians as possible.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: So we're keeping an eye out for all state-level regulations. I met up with him at the organization's Raleigh headquarters.
--:-- Chris Millis: And just making sure that the rules that are being put in place and the statutes that are being put in place is done so in a way that's protecting life and safety as it relates to building codes and the development industry.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: But it's done so in a way that's affordable.
--:-- Ron Jones: It's bulls**t. Plain and simple.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: When they say affordability, and I've heard this line ever since I first went to a meeting in 1989, what they're meaning is profitability.
--:-- Ron Jones: Affordability to them means being able to close sales, hand the keys, and walk away.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Jones says three times a year he would sit in board meetings at fancy hotels around the country, listening to his colleagues reject rules that would make homes safer, last longer, or be better able to withstand the storm.
--:-- Ron Jones: Listen, I saw the association fight for a decade, fall on its sword and twist it over a $200 exhaust fan requirement.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: They spent thousands of dollars and staff hours, you know, just grinding on this issue of a requirement for an exhaust fan.
--:-- Ron Jones: He says he and other board members would accompany the lobbying team to Capitol Hill.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: And they would tell lawmakers that elevating a home in a floodplain was unnecessary, that building codes did not need to be updated frequently.
--:-- Ron Jones: And remember those outdated FEMA flood maps that prevent the federal government from enforcing resilient building more widely?
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Jones says the National Association lobbied on those too, because they can drive up the cost of insurance.
--:-- Ron Jones: They don't want those maps updated, because all of a sudden a lot of areas that were previously developed are off limits, or the rates, because of the higher proven risk, go up substantially.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Jones says he left the group in 2019, when he felt his opinions were failing to make any difference.
--:-- Ron Jones: He says he wanted to build safe engineering marvels, marvels, the best of what humans are capable of building.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: And he says that was not what the association was interested in.
--:-- Ron Jones: What was its main goal? Advocacy.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Look, trade associations exist for one reason, and that is to help facilitate the profit-making ability of their members.
--:-- Ron Jones: And it really doesn't owe an apology for that. What it owes an apology for is for pretending they're something that they're not.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: They pretend that they're an advocate for the American homebuyer, And it's all for show because what it's really about is figuring out how you can warehouse the American homebuyer for the least amount of cost and the most amount of profit.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: In a statement to NPR, officials from the National Home Builders said the group, quote, advocates for common sense and cost-effective codes that make homes safer and more energy efficient.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: They said unnecessary regulations, quote, provide limited protection from natural hazards, while driving up the cost of housing for hardworking families at a time when the nation is already suffering through a housing affordability crisis.
--:-- Ron Jones: The group said new homes built to modern codes are, quote, already energy efficient, safe and resilient, and that communities need to focus on improving older homes and infrastructure, which are less resilient.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Back in North Carolina, for those who died in Helene, it's too late for building codes, programs, and grants anyhow.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: And it's too late for buyouts or infrastructure projects.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: For weeks after the storm, Shalena Jordan walked the banks of the Swannanoa River, searching for her parents, Nola and Robert Ramsor, hoping for some kind of a clue.
--:-- Shalena Jordan: I had to look. Like, it was silly to think that I could do that on my own, but I had to look.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Finally, six weeks after the storm, the state medical examiner's office called to tell her both her parents were dead.
--:-- Shalena Jordan: They had been found a mile apart down the river.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Laura, thank you so much for your reporting.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: Thanks so much for having me, Aisha.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Robert Little. Kwasi Lee mastered the episode.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Liana Semstrom.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.
--:-- Laura Sullivan: I'm Aisha Rascoe.
--:-- Aisha Rascoe: Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
