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By Ari Lippi

Abstract

On October 29, 2012, a cyclone and a tropical storm fused under an inauspicious full moon off the Atlantic Northwest of the US to create Hurricane Sandy. It beelined toward the New York City metropolitan area at high tide and became the most destructive and costly hurricane in the City’s history; costing NYC $19 billion in in damages, 43 deaths and the absence of electricity and heat for around two million people. While the impacts were widespread, the neighborhoods of Coney Island and the Rockaways experienced widely disparate impacts which magnified the underlying social vulnerabilities among low-income racialized and ethicized populations. This paper positions Hurricane Sandy as a locus of interrogation to question how discriminatory policies excised low-income and socially vulnerable populations to the environmentally vulnerable lands of Coney Island and the Rockaways at the time of Sandy, and what injustices preceded the event and were engendered as a result. To answer these questions, this paper will examine the sequence of displacement and place-making over time that created channels for populations with existing social vulnerabilities to be thrust into environmentally risky coastal areas in New York City. Ultimately, the process, which I name coastal corralling, created the conditions for the little-discussed post-storm disaster and environmental injustices in Coney Island and the Rockaways, producing chronic issues that continue to persist over a decade after the storm.

I. Introduction: Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold

On October 29, 2012, a cyclone and a tropical storm off the Atlantic coast fused under an inauspicious full moon to create Hurricane (Superstorm) Sandy. The storm beelined towards the New York City (NYC) [1] metropolitan area at high tide and became the most destructive and expensive hurricane in the City’s history; costing NYC $19 billion in damages , 43 lives, and the immediate loss of electricity and heat for approximately two million people (Lander 2021; NYC.gov, n.d.). Days later, while the City reeled, a powerful nor’easter snowstorm hit, throwing NYC back into disorder (Samenow 2012). This resulted in disaster, creating a crisis of food, water, heat, transportation, and medicine for weeks.

While the impacts were citywide, they were not equally experienced, and the storm unveiled deep-seated environmental injustices predicated on various historical factors. Sandy, particularly, emphasized the presence of geographically clustered public housing projects in the shoreline neighborhoods of Coney Island and the Rockaways, which mainly serve low-income, [2] racialized and ethnicized [3] communities (Harris 1993; Faber 2015). Though these communities experienced some of Sandy’s most devastating impacts, they nevertheless received inadequate emergency aid and remain overlooked in the “social autopsy” of the hurricane (Klinenberg 2002). This neglect reflects a broader trend among researchers: Despite agreeing that the most vulnerable communities experience the worst impacts of extreme weather events, they do not often ask how these unequal outcomes occur. However, extreme weather events and their following disasters must be understood within a larger historical context that identifies the mechanisms that produced disastrous outcomes, and understands how vulnerability is constructed and embedded throughout.

This paper positions Hurricane Sandy as a locus of interrogation to question how discriminatory policies excised low-income and socially vulnerable populations to the environmentally vulnerable lands of Coney Island and the Rockaways at the time of Sandy, and what injustices preceded the event and were engendered as a result. To answer these questions, this paper will examine the sequence of displacement and place-making over time that created channels for populations with existing social vulnerabilities to be thrust into environmentally risky coastal areas in New York City. Ultimately, the process, which I name coastal corralling, created the conditions for the little-discussed post-storm disaster and environmental injustices in Coney Island and the Rockaways, producing chronic issues that continue to persist over a decade after the storm. 

The paper proceeds as follows: The following section reviews the literature around social and environmental vulnerability, as well as environmental shocks and disasters. It focuses on themes of vulnerability and disasters being social constructs and assesses the importance of viewing them as unnatural phenomena when considering an extreme weather event such as Sandy. The third section outlines quantitative and qualitative methods used. The fourth section defines and contextualizes urban renewal as a key tool of coastal corralling in Coney Island and the Rockaways, analyzing its use over time in four phases. The fifth section expands on three of these phases between approximately 1900-2012. The sixth section covers Hurricane Sandy’s impacts on the residents of public housing buildings controlled by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) in Coney Island and the Rockaways. It discusses how coastal corralling affected the scale and scope of the disaster. The seventh section discusses the continuation of coastal corralling emerging through NY’s “City of Yes” (CoY) plan, which intends to add thousands of new affordable housing units to the same areas in Coney Island and the Rockaways that were most exposed to the hurricane. Finally, the paper concludes by underscoring the importance of seeing CoY as a coastal corralling effort and providing policy recommendations for future extreme weather events. 

II. Literature Review: Vulnerability and Disasters

Socioeconomic vulnerability is not a probability of entropic fate, but a long-form product, manufactured by a matrix of power deeply embedded and codified within the Western-dominated model of governance (cf. Lippi 2025; City of New York 2024; Census.gov, n.d.). [4] This matrix simultaneously generates and enforces hierarchy, oppression, and marginalization – ever widening inequality gaps and differentiating exposure of risk. When unpredictable environmental events such as hurricanes occur, the process of manufacturing vulnerability leading up to the event must be examined to understand its impacts and how it may become amplified and transmuted as a result. 

Despite this, in some studies covering discrete environmental events, scholars tend to parachute into that moment, to describe the scene of vulnerability in a time frozen and temporally isolated or take stock of a single issue within vulnerable populations. Such practices take disasters outside of their legal and historical frameworks, untether them from causal factors, and evade accountability processes. By tracing the production of vulnerabilities through space and time, from a locus of interrogation, environmental justice scholarship may begin to draw stronger links between the perpetual and the perennial. In so doing, it can fold understandings of extreme weather events into broader discussions on disrupting patterns of slow violence and environmental injustice in tangible ways.  

Environmental justice scholarship finds that “significant racial and socioeconomic disparities persist in the distribution of…hazardous waste…” and environmental risk; and that environmental racism causes “delays [in] cleanup actions and fails to develop pollution prevention and precaution processes as the overarching and dominant strategy” (Bullard et al. 2008; Bullard 1993). However, Pulido (2000) describes much of early environmental justice scholarship as highlighting vulnerabilities linked to immediate events: “reduc[ing] them to hostile discriminatory acts,” rather than connecting vulnerabilities to broader regimes used to generate and enforce discrimination. Momentum has since built around Amartya Sen’s canonic argument that environmentally triggered disasters arise from the deprivation or failure of market-based entitlements and endowments (ex. food, labor, and property) bestowed in a legal system. He concludes that this leads to poverty, hunger, and eventually disastrous events like famines, concluding that all famine is the manifestation of entitlement failures. Ranganathan (2022) brings further support to this argument, by explaining that the Western property regime capitalizes on these failures as it distributes, secures, and defends entitlements to land and property for predetermined groups, and employs spatial strategies of segregation by “separating risky from non-risky, colored from whites, undeserving from deserving, [and] unfamiliar from familiar[,]” ultimately leading to environmental destruction and tragedy. 

Merging conversations of longer-term, cascading events with acute ones, Neil Smith (2006) famously amplified Sen’s argument by claiming that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster.” This echoes other literature in the field that separates environmental hazards/episodic environmental stressors (i.e. water, land, air) from their resulting disasters for vulnerable human populations, which are enabled by political and economic factors. Dorothea Hilhorst and Greg Bankoff (2022) summarize this succinctly, stating that “asking why disasters happen is a political question; but understanding how they occur is a social and historical one.” Calling disasters “‘natural”’ would be a fatalist resignation that engenders a normalization of discrimination through “poor urban planning, socioeconomic inequalities, non-existent or poorly regulated policies, and lack of proactive adaptation and mitigation, to evade [government] responsibilities” (Hilhorst and Bankoff 2022). Understanding the social construction of vulnerability and disaster as a result of “place-based social and political-economic circumstances” prompts questions to further investigate the machinations that cause disaster within a particular moment (Hilhorst and Bankoff 2022). Horowitz (2014) points out that these causal machinations do not exist on their own. If there are levers (or a series of levers) that orchestrate a disaster, someone had to build that lever, and further yet, someone’s hand is on the handle. In other words, “vulnerability does not fall from the sky” (Horowitz 2014). 

Scholars such as Faber (2015) and Herreros-Cantis et al. (2020) have undertaken studies in the wake of Sandy and presented evidence that suggests a strong correlation between socioeconomic vulnerability and environmental risk due to “complex histories of urban development on New York City’s coastline.” Coastal corralling is part of that story. This paper seeks to fill gaps in literature on extreme weather events by presenting the concept of coastal corralling. In threading together points in time where policy enabled vulnerability to be created based on discrimination, the spatiality of environmental injustice becomes clear. To this end, coastal corralling helps make the damaging impacts of different policies more identifiable, enables the potential disruption of vicious cycles and creates opportunities to design solutions that are more sustainable, safe, and equitable. This research also seeks to fill a wider gap in environmental justice literature on Coney Island and the Rockaways, especially related to Sandy.  

III. Methods 

This paper offers a critical lens to Hurricane Sandy and environmentally triggered disaster events that substantially contributes to narrative building around vulnerability, environmental justice, urban development in New York City, and Superstorm Sandy. It combines Ribot’s (2014) vulnerability analysis lens and elements of process tracing, as defined by David Collier (2011). In line with this I  hypothesize that coastal corralling as a broader concept led to unequal impacts on vulnerable populations during Sandy; establish a timeline of events preceding and following Hurricane Sandy; construct a causal model of spatial formations in New York City; and substantiate my theory through qualitative and quantitative evidence. I frame these methods with Ribot’s vulnerability analysis lens, using Sandy as a center-point to trace hypothesized causal factors outward through space and time (Ribot 1995). 

For qualitative data, I analyzed primary sources from approximately 1930 – 1990.  News articles were identified through the New York Times TimeMachine and ProQuest News & Newspapers. Other archival sources were accessed through digitized archive databases like the New York Public Library Online Archive, the Cornell University Online Archive, the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R), and collections of archived documents on JSTOR and HathiTrust. Individual personal testimonies and interviews were drawn from the Coney Island History Project: Oral History Archive. Additional primary sources included reports, codified laws, legal case documents, and NYC municipal records. 

Quantitative data supplements my argument through visualizations of coastal corralling. I used ArcGIS Pro to create maps of Sandy flooded areas by census tract, for which I retrieved data from NYC Open Data, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the ArcGIS Online community. Finally, I cross-referenced census blocks containing NYCHA buildings in Coney Island and the Rockaways with in-depth census tract data from the US Census Bureau.

IV. Context & Framing: Urban Renewal & Coastal Corralling 

Pernicious urban planning procedures are a powerful tool in the production of vulnerability, which is exemplified in the United States by urban renewal programs in NYC and nation-wide. Urban renewal is an umbrella term for legally backed redevelopment projects, which aim to rejuvenate decaying urban areas by demolishing blight—synonymous with slums and ghettos—and building new developments to stimulate economic growth (Meyer 1973). However, since its inception, urban renewal projects have enforced discriminatory housing practices and are a major component of coastal corralling in Coney Island and the Rockaways. 

In the early 20th century, peddlers of urban renewal and slum clearance projects presented them as a strategy to actualize a city’s “economic and social” potential, and “address the overcrowding, housing deterioration, and social ills entrenched in the urban ghetto” (McGrew 2018). Yet, in its quintessence, this was a state-sanctioned instrument of segregation to keep the legacy of antebellum values functional.  Fair housing scholar Teron McGrew (2018) posits that the urban renewal project in the US was so deliberately discriminatory in practice that that it could be described as “‘ethnic cleansing,’ since it was a conscious strategy to remove African Americans [and other marginalized populations] from neighborhoods coveted by white developers.” Here, urban renewal is a strategy of corralling, as it “relegated the residential options of African Americans to the urban ghetto, thereby limiting their potential for mobility.” By excising families and communities from hotspots of “blight” (Highsmith 2015), then foreclosing housing options and creating mobility traps, urban renewal projects pre-destined where low-income racialized and ethnicized communities would be able to live by thrusting them towards circumferential areas like the coastal communities of Coney Island and the Rockaways.

In this context, a definition of the federal urban renewal project can help better situate its statutory authorities and how they were implemented in NYC. Following the Second World War, the federal government instituted  a range of  legislative reforms. These included the Housing Act of 1949 as part of the Fair Deal. Nested in this Act was Title I (United States Code 1949), which authorized the Federal Housing Association to fund two-thirds of slum clearing urban renewal projects at the local level (Committee on Slum Clearance Plans 1951). Over time, the Housing Act became a forceful tool of discrimination and redlining by approving mortgages for white middle-income traditional families and denying them to anyone else. This immobilized low-income and communities of color through “place-stratification” and racialized residential segregation (Lang and Sohmer 2000; McGrew 2018).  Notably, Title I lacked a definition of, or threshold for, slum and blight declaration, effectively ceding this discretion to localities to apply as they saw fit. There were few challenges to their justifications (Ballon and Jackson 2007). Consequently, Title I developments led to what historian Samuel Zipp called New York City’s “informal version of residential Jim Crow” (Zipp 2013). 

V. Residential Coastal Corralling

Nearly a century of City planners and policymakers narrowed residential opportunities for low-income racialized and ethnicized groups from the city center, corralling them into areas of neglect and undesirability on the shore. This unfolded across roughly four phases: [5] 

• First, populations of racialized and ethicized groups were identified and displaced from the early 1900s – 1950s. 
• Second, circumferential and economically isolated coastal locations were defined as spaces to relocate these populations from the 1950s – 1970s. 
• Third, permanent public housing projects for low-income populations were established in the identified areas from the 1970s – 2000s. 
• Fourth, those housing projects are planned for expansion from 2020 to the present. 

Phase 1 Corralling: Slum Clearance in NYC (early 1900s – 1950s)

New York has utilized urban renewal and slum clearance tactics since the late 19th century, and NYC’s own Central Park was one of the landmark urban renewal projects in US history. Seized through  eminent domain in 1858 (U.S. Justice Department, n.d.), the park’s construction dispossessed thousands of property-owning [6] African Americans from the then-thriving Seneca village (McGrew 2018).  After the success of the Central Park project, NYC honed urban renewal planning towards slum clearing, with some officials claiming that “the slum clearance project is…an effective social weapon” (Halpern, Stanislaus, and Botein 1934) against the  “defects” and “evils” of slums” (G.L.P. 1932). 

To further this agenda, the NYC Slum Clearance Committee was established in 1933 and sought to “demolish slums and increase the tax revenues of the city” (Davies 1966). The Committee published studies that identified the locations and population density of African Americans, foreign born populations, low-income and welfare households, and crime and disease rates (Committee on Slum Clearance Plans 1934). Those with the highest metrics in these categories were assigned a high priority for slum clearance. This strategy strongly indicates premeditated methods to remove targeted populations and entrench institutionalized segregation. 

The first phase of coastal corralling, then, consisted of two parallel dynamics that converged by the 1950s. While NYC carried out urban renewal projects in and around Manhattan, land use in Coney Island and the Rockaways changed dramatically. Both beachfront areas remained scarcely populated until the early 20th century. Mainly, they served as escapist pleasure towns and “bungalow colonies” for wealthy Manhattanites during the summer months (DeSena 2012; Carter 2012). The oscillation of seasonal activity in these areas had an acute boom and bust effect that made the neighborhoods slow to develop. The Great Migration, and immigrant influxes from Ellis Island increased housing demand. However, anti-Black and anti-immigrant policies (such as Plessy vs. Furgeson and The Johnson-Reed Act) reinforced the dogma of de facto racism and xenophobia, excluding newcomers from housing opportunities in higher-valued and centralized areas. Thus, property owners in Coney Island and the Rockaways capitalized on affordable housing demand by renting bungalows during the offseason. Though the bungalows began populating with year-round residents, landlords neglected or abandoned their properties, especially as recreation activities abated with the Great Depression and the wartime economy. 

Phase 2 Corralling:  Welfare Dumping in Coney Island and the Rockaways (1950s – 1960s)

Though urban renewal had slowed during World War II, Title I revitalized and supercharged slum clearance projects in New York City. With federal subsidies, the Slum Clearance Committee succeeded in carrying out projects from their original planning schemes around Manhattan, displacing many in the process. Title I mandated there be relocation plans and designated temporary housing for those displaced, but the rate of slum removals far outpaced relocation efforts, creating a cascading housing shortage for low-income residents. However, City agents continued corralling people into the same designated relocation buildings in the City, knowing that they were near or at capacity. When those overflowed, rent prices plummeted in abutting buildings, and landlords divided their units into tiny, neglected, and barely livable spaces (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003). 

Resident numbers thus ballooned in low-income areas and the City was able to justify that those neighborhoods were blighted and eligible for slum clearance. This created an ouroboros where the City repetitively destroyed slums, displaced low-income families, and limited their housing options to already neglected and congested areas—creating new slums for future demolition. Indeed, some urban renewal critics worried that Title I loosened bureaucratic guardrails and gave the Slum Clearance Committee too much latitude to decide where affordable housing would be built after people were displaced (Walpin 1959). With each iteration, relocation areas and affordable housing options shrank, and people were pushed further outwards into peripheral coastal areas and to the abandoned resort towns in Coney Island and the Rockaways. 

Between 1946 and 1956 a conservative estimate suggests Title I displaced at least 320,000 people in NYC (Reach 1956). With little oversight of the relocation program, landlords in Coney Island and the Rockaways further split their properties into miniscule units for multiple families. Overcrowding in the former bungalows created additional challenges; they were not equipped for year-round living, lacked basic amenities like heat and running water, and had sustained damage from years of neglect and elemental damage. At the height of Title I clearance, a NYC official visiting Coney Island and the Rockaways during scheduled inspections remarked that authorities were “hounding these people out [to the shores] like cattle,” and that previously empty bungalows were filled with “shivering Black and Puerto Rican families” (Caro 1974). These areas became red and yellow-lined (University of Richmond, n.d.), trapping tenants in a renter status and leaving landlords little incentive to maintain their properties. Though the slum-like conditions in Coney Island and the Rockaways were manufactured by the City, they were deemed an “eyesore” by the same authorities that made them. 

At this stage, Coney Island and the Rockaways were defined as spaces to relocate populations unhoused by Title I projects elsewhere in NYC. Many displaced people got funneled into the national welfare system and corralled seaside in what some refer to as welfare dumping: “families on public assistance were steered into the resort community and were placed in housing that was not standard or even marginal…and almost all [welfare] clients moved out to the Rockaways were African American” (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003). The Commissioner of Welfare in NY, Raymond Hillard, ramped up efforts to deposit poor people, minorities, and released felons in the abandoned resorts because the conditions there were “acceptable” for them (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003).  These calculated efforts turned Coney Island and the Rockaways into “seaside slums” (2003). Isolated, these residents struggled to reach welfare offices inland, allowing the Department of Welfare to turn a blind eye to their mounting issues while continuing to corral people to the seaside slums. 

This dynamic changed once investment interests shifted to the shores. As the economy recovered, demand grew for development around Coney Island and the Rockaways. Consequently, large swaths of Coney Island and the Rockaways were identified as needing “major action” or “preventative renewal” (New York Public Library, n.d.a; New York Public Library, n.d.b), and slum removals were planned for the east side of Coney Island and the west side of the Rockaways to make way for private development.

Phase 3 Corralling: Public Housing and Place Making (1970s – 2000s)

Unlike other Title I projects, slum clearances in Coney Island and the Rockaways displaced residents that had nowhere to go. These groups were already at NYC’s geographical extreme – the coast was the final place they could be corralled. The displaced moved into vacant lots, squatted in abandoned areas, or squeezed themselves into the saturated bungalows. Ronald Stewart (n.d.), a former resident of the Coney Island bungalow colonies, recalled that one-bedroom apartments could be stacked with a whole family and a shared bathroom for everyone in the bungalow building. Yet this did not stop the Department of Welfare from dumping clients into the seaside slums, including what Hillard described as “Rockaway hellholes” (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003). 

The beachside conjures images of a coast glittered with luxurious properties, where residents enjoy ocean vistas. Indeed, in the Rockaways and Coney Island, mid-to-high income seaside residences became available due to slum clearance projects between approximately the 1950s-1960s. However, lurking beyond the veneer is a line separating wealth and poverty, invested and abandoned. The slum clearance plans in Coney Island and the Rockaways claimed that affordable housing would be built in addition to the private developments (Dunlap 1983), sparking major backlash from the growing white middle-class populations who landed there because of Title I. Many vehemently opposed the housing project due to fears over racial integration and felt that the projects would welcome more residents who could make the area “unattractive” and affect property values (Shipler 1968). By contrast, Black and fair housing advocates pushed restlessly for affordable housing opportunities in the area, having few options elsewhere due to decades of corralling (Shipler 1968). 

By the 1970s, the City had finished clearing the concentrated blighted areas of Coney Island and the Rockaways and replaced them with low-income, subsidized public housing run by the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA (New York Times 1966). In effect, NYCHA projects physically solidified these sections of Coney Island and the Rockaways as low-income predestined areas for people of color, and perpetuated segregation. Title I displacement, welfare dumping and coastal corralling were not subtle procedures. During his administration, Mayor Ed Koch publicly acknowledged that previous administrations had “use[d] Coney Island as a dumping ground, where they took whole projects and put welfare families in them” (Dunlap 1983). Overall, coastal corralling likely contributed to the significant demographic shifts on the coast, especially in the Rockaways, and by 1959, newspapers claimed that peninsula had changed from majority white vacationers to 95% people of color. (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003). 

In the past decade, over 90% of residents in NYCHA housing have been people of color (City of New York 2022), and almost half of meet the US Social Vulnerability Index, which “assesses socioeconomic variables that reduce residents’ ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies” (Hernández et al. 2018).  All residents are at or near the federal poverty level (Citizens Budget Commission of New York 2017), and many experience high rates of food insecurity and are often unable to meet basic needs (DiNapoli and Jain 2022). In Coney Island there are 13 NYCHA projects clustered on the west end of the peninsula (NYCHA, n.d.), with approximately 6,000 units. many of which are multi-person (DiNapoli and Jain 2024). While the City’s average income is approximately $75,000 (DiNapoli and Jain 2024), the average median household income for census tracts that have at least one NYCHA project in Coney Island is just $29,683. [10] Similarly, The New York Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) reported that the median household income ranged from $30,400 to $44,400 among the nearly 10,000 people living NYCHA projects in the Rockaways (DiNapoli and Bleiwas 2018). As such, the confluence of factors that led to coastal corralling set the stage for disaster when Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012.

VI. Sandy’s Devastation & Public Housing

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the City was shaken from the destruction, which disrupted the lives of almost all New Yorkers. After emerging from the immediate shock, it became apparent that some of the worst damage appeared in the public housing neighborhoods on the shores. An estimated 121,000 public housing residents were affected, and around 77,000 people remained trapped in public housing buildings that lacked power, heat, hot water, food, transportation and access to medical care for days or even weeks – many of whom were on the shore (Knowlton and Rotkin-Ellman 2014). In discussing this trend, The New York Times concluded that this was the case because “New York started building housing projects on the waterfront because that’s where its poorest citizens happened to live” (Mahler 2012).  This is a troubling narrative that induces the violence of forgetting (Giroux 2014), and is the reason that exposing the process of urban renewal and coastal corralling is important to understanding the construction of vulnerability and remains a critical factor in understanding why injustices occurred during Sandy and to whom. 

Due to their geographical location and proximity to the open ocean, both Coney Island and the Rockaways took a particular beating. Both neighborhoods experienced a complete blackout, and flooding was so intense that a sea turtle even washed up into the Coney Island hospital (Otterman 2023). Herreros-Cantis et al. (2020) reported that 85.8% of the Rockaway population, and 99% of Coney Island’s population were impacted by flooding; compared to the city-wide average of 12.5%. Every single NYCHA project in these two neighborhoods was affected by the flooding, but emergency response and aid did not immediately arrive, and residents could not meet basic needs for weeks longer than the rest of the City. The scale of the need for aid among NYCHA residents was born out of the effects of coastal corralling, but the scope of response speaks to the enduring discrimination that produced coastal corralling and created a social disaster after a natural event. 

In the days following the storm, the first responders to coastal areas were not public authorities, but grassroots volunteers (Balandina 2012; Fink 2012b). In much of this area, the only urgent aid came from “ragtag bands of volunteers,”  many of whom emerged from the Occupy Wall Street movement, who mobilized people and resources (Lipton and Moss 2012; Maldonado 2022). However, volunteers “quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the task of [assisting] trapped residents” (Lipton and Moss 2012) — especially disabled and elderly people immobilized by non-operational elevators (Smith 2012). The disarray turned simple tasks like providing people with portable lighting or water into massive hurdles that took days, and for some, assistance came too late (Lipton and Moss 2012). 

Due to blocked or flooded roads, trucks from the mainland could not cross the bridges into Coney Island and the Rockaways to deliver relief supplies or bring in regular deliveries to restock shelves in grocery stores, bodegas, or retailers. Nor could people leave the neighborhoods because public transportation was out of service (Kaufman et al. 2012). Once people emerged from buildings and could cross the streets, supplies ran out quickly and people were forced to compete and scavenge for what little existed. There were many reports of break-ins at local businesses and pharmacies where people took desperately needed items like canned goods and baby diapers (cf. Rogers 2012; Pow 2012). 

When official food and aid arrived, it was not expedient and there was often a mismatch of supplies with needs, which were growing as every day passed. NYCHA residents waited for hours in queues to get food and other basic supplies. However, electric services were not fully restored for up to 100 days after the storm touched down and people lived in darkness, waiting for their electricity, heat, and water, while also dealing with damages to their buildings and apartments (Tan, n.d.). In one report, during a Thanksgiving food drive in Coney Island, NYCHA residents had to reject most of the food because they simply had no way to cook it (Houghtaling 2022). To alleviate some of these failings, the City authorized extra allotments of food stamp money to people already in the program, only to find out that people were unable to use them in time because they could not reach grocery stores or markets for a variety of reasons, including transportation outages that lasted months (Lipton and Moss 2012). 

Other indicators of the size and scope of coastal corralling come from unexpected sources – water boiler systems, and wastewater systems. Both are critical infrastructural elements that when disrupted can bring society to a halt. After Sandy, these systems were severely damaged, and it created crises that posed high health risks for NYCHA residents in Coney Island and the Rockaways. 

Boiling it down 

A common thread that can be drawn throughout the coastal corralling narrative is the cold temperatures that low-income people faced in Coney Island and the Rockaways. The thin-walled bungalow colonies were poorly equipped for cold New York winters, and even less so with coastal winds, which significantly increase the windchill. The NYC Department of Welfare (DOW) was aware of this when they dumped people there, intentionally ignoring their basic needs. The heavy brick NYCHA buildings that replaced bungalows provided better shelter, but residents are still vulnerable to below freezing temperatures. This became a severe issue after Sandy, and was addressed disastrously, creating frequent and ongoing emergencies ever since. 

Most NYCHA buildings in Coney Island and the Rockaways are only feet above sea level, and easily within the tide’s reach. With almost no built barriers to prevent seawater encroachment from Sandy (Muller and Behrendt 2012), the NYCHA buildings flooded, and water, sand, and sewage inundated the basements and bottom floors of the buildings, knocking out boilers, water pumps, electricity, gas, and other critical systems keeping the buildings running. Before this could be fixed, a nor’easter storm blew through the City, bringing the temperature down and amplifying the urgency of people’s needs. What the City did to address the heating issues is perhaps one of Sandy’s most enduring yet hidden legacies in NYCHA buildings.

NYCHA buildings generate their heat on boiler-dependent radiator systems. Thus, with no boiler, no electricity, and no water, many residents sat in the cold darkness for weeks (Taylor 2012). In an interview for a post-Sandy study, one public housing resident who lost heat said, “I still have flashbacks when the lights go out. I’ve never been so cold in my life” (Hernández et al. 2018). Others who had gas stoves that did not depend on electricity used them to get warm, but at the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, to which several people across the City tragically succumbed (Fink 2012a). Despite the severity of the cold, it has taken NYCHA over a decade to resolve the issue, exposing NYCHA residents to below-freezing temperatures year after year. 

Within a month after the storm, the City worked with NYCHA and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to install temporary boilers for the NYCHA buildings as a stopgap measure (NYCHA 2012). But the temporary boilers were meant to be just that – temporary. One year after the storm, none of the heating systems in public buildings that received temporary boilers were repaired and temporary boilers were still the default (Jones 2013).  By New York State law, temporary boilers should not exist after 12 months (Clean Air Act 1970), and must be “built and operated for less than 30 days per calendar year” (New York Code 2012). In 2015, NYCHA received a $3 billion grant from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), part of which was meant to install new permanent boilers (NYCHA, n.d.).  However, the grant funding was not released until 2015, leaving a three-year gap in which the temporary boilers failed and broke down. Moreover, the grant did not come in a lump sum and NYCHA was only spending a few million dollars a year to fix an urgent $3 billion problem (NYCHA 2018). 

After receiving grant allocations in 2015, bureaucratic lethargy, a “confound[ing] lack of oversight,” contracting issues, and likely contract bribery schemes dragged out NYCHA repairs significantly (U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York 2024). Within a year, a raid of audits halted repair processes as the NYC Department of Investigation (DOI) investigated NYCHA executive, Raymond Ribeiro, who oversaw the FEMA grant, for potentially mishandling the funds (Smith 2015; Spivak 2019). This precipitated a “string of failures” around Sandy reconstruction attempts (Spivak 2019). Meanwhile, the City did not provide any supplementing assistance, and NYCHA residents were still cold. In a 2018 complaint against NYCHA, federal prosecutors investigated and found that across their projects, NYCHA had been undercalculating its reporting on residents without heat, revealing that the temperature in thousands of apartments regularly dropped below the legal minimum (which is 55 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter) (Ferré-Sadurni 2019; U.S. Justice Department 2024; New York City Attorney General’s Office, n.d.). If that wasn’t enough, in 2019, NYCHA representatives announced that they did not expect the FEMA-funded repairs to fully begin until at least 2022 – a full decade after Sandy destroyed the boiler systems (Spivak 2019).

In 2023, NYCHA released a progress report on the FEMA grant and released individual briefings on Coney Island and the Rockaways. This was the first time that NYCHA broke down the Sandy repairs, and while they acknowledged new boilers were needed, the reports were vague about the progress. The reports stated that the City had installed boilers within sites affected by the storm in Coney Island and in the Rockaways, but only some of them were operational (NYCHA Recovery and Resilience, n.d.). The reports also do not mention how many more need to be installed overall or per building. The reports only indicated that the NYCHA project repairs were still “under construction” (NYCHA, n.d.). Since decrepit or temporary boilers were never replaced, they are quite delicate and require urgent attention whenever there is a storm (NYCHA Now 2016). As a result, NYCHA residents suffer through sporadic to complete lack of heat in the winters every year (Houghtaling 2022). 

The emotional, physical, and physiological toll of the combined impacts of Sandy left scars on the residents most affected. One study found that those severely affected by Sandy flooding reported high rates of “mental health issues and were at an increased risk of depression, anxiety, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the years following the storm” (Schwartz et al. 2015). An additional stressor that coastal residents dealt with after Sandy was exposure to high rates of sewage, which also highlights the interlinking factors that created vulnerability through the process of coastal corralling. 

Sewage and its Understudied Health Impacts 

Clearing “blight” from NYC during urban renewal and coastal corralling also meant casting out any “unsanitary”  qualities and dumping them into lands where they could be managed at an extreme distance – including wastewater (Committee on Slum Clearance 1934). Five of New York’s 14 major wastewater treatment plants were built in the low-lying areas near Coney Island and the Rockaways (New York Times 2012). After decades of neglect, the aging wastewater systems fell into disrepair, which became a major issue during the Superstorm. The amount of human waste that residents of the Rockaways and Coney Island were exposed to from Sandy was called a “sewage Chernobyl” as roughly 11 billion tons of raw and partially treated sewage spewed into waterways (Andrews and Nestle 2021). The sewage that leaked from the New York and New Jersey systems was so extensive that a trail of it could be traced from Washington, DC to Connecticut, and collective overflows were estimated to have been enough to cover Central Park with a pile of sewage 41 feet high (Kenward, Raja, and Yawitz 2013; Daily Mail 2013). 

Most of the waste that leaked from NYC came from shoreline facilities. Being so close to the source of the leaking, NYCHA residents were particularly at risk. The wastewater operations by the Gravesend Pumping Station particularly affected the West End residents in Coney Island, polluting the more stagnant waters of Coney Island creek (Javed 2021), and the Rockaways residents were affected by the Rockaway sewer located in the estuary bordering the peninsula – all areas near NYCHA projects.  After the storm, sewage overflowed onto the land, streets and buildings (New York Times 2012). One Coney Island business owner reported that her store had been completely filled with sewage, and everything but the bricks of the building needed to be replaced (Javed 2021). Another Coney Island resident reported that his apartment was destroyed and, having no other option, he slept on cushions surrounded by raw sewage in the unit (Chance 2012). Residents also reported that the smell of sewage was overpowering, worsened with rainfall (Bykliner 2012), and kept leaking out of broken systems into people’s homes (Maldonado 2024). 

Sewage leaks from Sandy underscore the environmental racism of coastal corralling in an explicit way. When it came to sewage, a study found that Black residents were more likely to be in Sandy inundated areas, and there was a dramatic uptick of complaints about sewage in the flooded areas on NYC’s helpline from predominantly Black neighborhoods (Faber 2015) – which seem to overlap with NYCHA complexes, based on the data. Given that NYCHA-dense areas of Coney Island and the Rockaways are near wastewater and sewage treatment systems, this outcome points yet again to correlating factors of race and environmental risk along the shore (NYC Open Data, n.d.). 

Though the extent of the leaking was known, its health impacts for coastal residents are not (Shyr 2012). For months after the storm, a phenomenon occurred that got little attention, despite colloquial knowledge of the issue. Respiratory symptoms among storm survivors in the two neighborhoods cropped up everywhere and became known as the “Sandy cough,” the “Coney cough,” or the “Rockaway cough” (WNYC 2024). Some news sources pointed fingers at mold, of which there was a considerable amount after the flooding cleared (New York State Senate 2018). However, irritation from sewage was never considered (Centers for Disease Control 2014). Gases released from sewage can be dangerous and even lethal, but in lower concentrations, exposure produces lower respiratory irritation or infection. This correlates with some complaints of those with the “Sandy cough,” saying, “I've never felt a cough like that before…It's deeper down” (NJ Spotlight News). Ignoring this potential health concern obfuscates the reach of Sandy’s impact and emphasizes the dismissal of shoreline communities and the correlations between race and space in the case of Sandy. 

VII. Phase 4: City of Yes (2020 – present)

Coastal corralling is not a historical phenomenon, but an ongoing one. In June 2022, the Adams Administration announced the City of Yes (CoY) plan, proposing what is likely NYC’s largest restructuring since the days of Robert Moses (Lowenstein 2024). CoY aims to add over 80,000 residential units across the City to address the historically low residential vacancy rate , repurpose office spaces lost to telework from the pandemic, and deliver more affordable housing opportunities (Brown, McCarthy, and Crane 2024; New York City Government 2024a; New York City Government 2024b). While the housing shortage in NYC is substantial, CoY is a massive rezoning effort that threatens to reinvigorate urban renewal, open a new chapter of coastal corralling, and put vulnerable populations at increased environmental risk in a rapidly changing climate. 

The goal, Adams said, is to add “a little more housing to every neighborhood” (New York City Government 2024c). However, critics say that there are loose affordable unit requirements for developers, leaving “nothing [to] mandate and subsidize affordability levels or limit speculation and displacement” (New York City Government 2024c). Lack of mandates could mean that while the CoY pledges to build affordable housing, there’s no guarantee where it will be built and there are already fears among residents and Council Members that CoY could target low-income areas for gentrification and displace people of color (The Spirit 2024; Citymeetings.nyc 2024; Otdowntown.com 2024). What most strongly links CoY to historical coastal corralling is that while there is vagueness about affordable housing in the rest of the City, there are defined plans to add tens of thousands of affordable housing units around the NYCHA projects in Coney Island and the Rockaways (New York City Government 2025; Schilling 2024; Rockawaytimes.com 2025; Citizens Housing Planning Council 2024).

Some critics are calling out Adams for “slashing red tape” for developers, and “letting his real-estate friends have their cake and eat it too” (Angotti, Dubnow, and Salazar 2024). This echoes critiques made against the 1930s Slum Clearance Committee, whose opponents were similarly concerned that development plans got warped by political interests, leaving affordable housing in “second-rate” locations (Donnelly and Smith 2024). Though the exact rezoning under CoY is vague, it may reinforce exclusionary zoning in many parts of the City (Whittemore 2021), cementing a greater number of low-income communities in NYCHA-dense coastal areas. Despite contention, the City Council passed CoY in December 2024 (New York State Governor’s Office 2024). 

VII. Conclusions: The First Worst Hurricane  

Sandy was “unlike any storm recorded in history” and, in terms of physical damage and recovery cost (City of New York, n.d.a; n.d.b), it was likely NY’s worst hurricane. At the time, “Frankenstorm Sandy” was seen as an anomaly but presently seems less improbable in the context of known environmental factors. New York City is literally sinking due to sea-level rise from climate change effects, coastal erosion, and land sinkage caused by the megacity’s extraordinary weight (Bartels 2023; Isidro 2024; New York City Mayor’s Office 2022; Walsh 2012). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) predicts that the sea level may have risen 7 inches (with a predicted rate of 0.6 inches per year) since 2012 – accounting for 58% of the sea level rise since 1900 (NASA, n.d.; New York City Mayor’s Office 2022). Increased baseline water levels puts millions of people under threat from frequent flooding during moderate weather events and utter destruction during severe ones. 

Under these merging factors, in a worst-case scenario, Coney Island and the Rockaways could be swallowed by flooding by 2050 (Martichoux 2023). On Sandy’s 10th anniversary, Adams said that “Sandy wasn’t just a storm, it was a warning” (New York City 2022). Yet, plans to expand affordable housing around NYCHA-dense areas of Coney Island and the Rockaways under CoY indicate that the mayor is not heeding his own words. 

Recommendations

Vulnerability in Coney Island and the Rockaways in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy should not be viewed as a sequestered phenomenon, but an ongoing one. Through the lens of coastal corralling, it becomes clear why CoY could have disastrous consequences for affordable housing residents on the coast. However, since CoY is newly minted, there are still plans to be made and deals to be struck. Interventions are not only possible but necessary. The following recommendations could mitigate risk moving forward:  

1. Challenge the plan: 

   Eminent domain is still enshrined in NYS law and continues to be used in urban development schemes (Institute for Justice 2025). Some politicians have been explicit about intentions to use eminent domain as a tool for development under CoY (Stark-Miller 2025). One way to prevent potential displacement and coastal corralling efforts is attempting to restrict or legally challenge powers of eminent domain under CoY. 

   Another way the plan can be redirected is by tackling its components that can be legally challenged. One major lawsuit has already been filed by New Yorkers claiming that the plan flouts NYS environmental law by not conducting proper studies on the potential environmental impacts of developments (McCarthy, Roberts, and Senzamici 2025). There may be more threads to pull as the plan comes into greater focus. 

   Adding amendments to the plan that create strict requirements or guidelines could also be beneficial. For example, equal distributions of affordable housing throughout CoY developments should be mandated to guarantee equal housing opportunities in all neighborhoods and avoid corralling people into expanding low-income areas. There should also be mechanisms to keep development plans transparent, and mandate community input and approval.  

2. Shift the narrative: 

   At this juncture, the best strategy for reducing risk would imply intervention in causal factors (Bankoff, Frerks, and Hilhorst). The first step to intervene is to acknowledge that coastal corralling makes a strong case for correlation and causality [11] as it relates to the development of affordable housing options in environmentally risky areas. Much of Sandy’s narrative has faded in public memory, and it is critical to reframe and discuss Sandy’s impact on the environmental injustices in the communities of Coney Island and the Rockaways that have been a century in the making. For the first time, in 2024, a City report identified 60-84% of census tracts in the Rockaways and Coney Island as environmental justice communities (New York City 2024). Acknowledging these disparities creates an opportunity to shed further light on the situation by putting environmental injustices in their spatial and temporal contexts. 

3. Imagine:

   Lastly, imagination in the face of complex challenges is essential to designing more sustainable futures, including investing in much needed infrastructure like wastewater systems, NYCHA boilers, and drainage systems. While CoY threatens to reinforce coastal corralling, it also offers immense potential to transform spatial realities in NYC. Can that power be captured and redirected toward a different path that serves rather than stratifies New Yorkers?

*Edited by Valerie Doze (Princeton University) and Gabriel Davis (Johns Hopkins University).

About the Author

Ari Lippi is a second-year graduate student pursuing their MA in Global Environmental Policy with a concentration in Environmental Law & Policy at the School of International Service at American University. Ari is a Fulbright alum whose research focuses on the spatiality of environmental justice, and human rights at the intersection of peace, justice, and inclusion.

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Dr. Malini Ranganathan, Dr. Ken Conca, and Dr. Jesse Ribot. I’m thankful for their mentorship, guidance, meaningful feedback and unwavering encouragement of my academic work and career. I am also thankful for their teachings, and excellent leadership and contributions in the environmental justice and peace-building fields which have greatly shaped my philosophy and research. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude towards my peer editors on JPIA for their dedication to working with me to hone this paper.

Positionality Statement

I am a graduate student at American University in Washington, DC. I grew up in the NYC metropolitan area, and I identify as white and lower middle class. I grew up in a former summer bungalow home north of NYC that was renovated and retrofitted with materials to be suitable for year-round living around the 1990s. The people who raised me grew up in NYC, and I lived there for several years myself. Though I have taken steps to mitigate my bias, the social, geospatial, and economic contexts that have shaped my identity influence my position as a researcher studying low-income racialized and ethnicized communities. I will never understand what it is like to live the realities of the people in this study, but it is my ardent hope to honor their experiences. All thoughts are my own, and I do not knowingly have any conflict of interests.

AI Statement 

AI was used to a minimal degree in this work. Chat GPT was used few times to draft sentence structure and alternative wording.

February 27, 2025
Ari Lippi

Notes

[1]  Herein, New York City may be abbreviated with NY, NYC, or the City. New York State will be abbreviated by NYS.

[2] This statement does not attempt to homogenize race, ethnicity and poverty, but aims to present race and ethnicity as a critical and ongoing factor in the creation of stark economic and social inequality which particularly affects low-income communities of color and disadvantaged communities.

[3] This refers to the dynamic social construct of race, ethnicity, and whiteness. For example, for the process of equating color to race and Blackness to slavery and dehumanization, see Harris, Cheryl I., “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787. This is further exemplified by process by which Italian American, and Irish American populations were once considered ethnic minorities but became white over time, and their proximity to whiteness distanced them from ethnic othering. 

[4] For instance, see: Ranganathan, Malini. “Caste, Racialization, and the Making of Environmental Unfreedoms in Urban India.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45, no. 2 (2022): 257–77. doi:10.1080/01419870.2021.1933121. ; and Bankoff, Greg, Georg Frerks, and an O’Reilly Media Company Safari. Mapping Vulnerability / Bankoff, Greg. 1st edition. Routledge, 2013. doi:10.4324/9781849771924. 

[5] Dates are approximate and relate to timelines specific to Coney Island and the Rockaways. There is some overlap between these phases. While similar events unfolded in other parts of the City, coastal corralling happened within a more specific timeframe in these neighborhoods.

[6] Though slavery was abolished nationally in 1865, New York State abolished slavery in 1827. See “Abolishing Slavery,” Museum of the City of New York, n.d. https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/abolishing-slavery.

[7] This image details some of the language from the “Immediate Act to Amend the NY State Housing Law” from 1934. This act preceded Title I by 15 years, but it demonstrates how NY had already reinforced racial inequalities through urban renewal by associating slums and poverty with malice.  

[8] This is a graphic representation and the author’s elaboration of events. Red dots are placed to approximate locations of slum clearance. This graphic does not contain measured values. 

[9] This is a graphic representation and the author’s elaboration of events. It does not contain measured values. 

[10] This was calculated by identifying the median household income for each census tract that had at least one NYCHA building on the US Census Bureau website. Census bureau data was available from the 2020 census. 

[11] This research aims to build a narrative around coastal corralling and connect correlating factors. Further hypothesis testing can be done in the future and can be replicated in other geographic areas. 

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