Rebuilding Together NYC helps low-income New Yorkers with repairs and renovations
By RALPH GARDNER JR.
June 6, 2016 6:14 p.m. ET
When superstorm Sandy struck in 2012, residents of the Canarsie section of Brooklyn who didn’t live near the ocean thought they might be spared. They were wrong.
“Most people don’t think of Canarsie when they think of Hurricane Sandy,” said Kimberly George, the executive director of Rebuilding Together NYC, a nonprofit helping low-income New Yorkers rebuild. “They think of the coastal regions.”
Ms. George added, “In each neighborhood the damage was very different. In Canarsie, it wasn’t necessarily ocean water. The sewers backed up.”
Last week Rebuilding Together NYC was working on the basement of a row house on Avenue N that had doubled as a family room until the storm destroyed it.
Were a storm of that destructiveness to strike again, Terry Scott, the group’s director of construction, pointed out, the vinyl floor that he and his crew were installing would be spared.
“The flooring is 100% rot proof,” he said. “If it happens again, God forbid, we could pull the floor out,” dry it off, “and go right back into place.”
But the biggest problem, Ms. George said, was the one-two punch of a natural disaster plus poverty.
“We have a very long waiting list because the need is so great for people who are low income,” she said.
She was referring not just to the 10 Sandy-related projects Rebuilding Together NYC is working on in Canarsie, but the almost 200 projects they completed around the city in 2015.
“These are homes that have been in families for generations,” she explained. “But all these years of making choices over education, and food, and paying the mortgage, certain repairs get ignored. It builds up. And then if you get hit by a natural disaster, the need is huge.”
At the first home I visited, Rebuilding Together NYC’s staff and volunteers were putting up walls and painting, in additional to laying down the vinyl flooring. They also restored the bathroom and laundry room.
The progress briefly slowed after a nest of kittens was discovered in a pile of debris in the backyard.
“Once the volunteers saw that all bets were off,” said Mr. Scott. “They wanted to take a kitten home.”
A few blocks from the Avenue N residence, Rebuilding Together NYC was working on the home of Grace and Lloyd Thomas.
That project involved not just remedying Sandy damage in the basement, but also providing “accessibility modification” for Ms. Thomas, who is confined to a wheelchair. One of the organization’s services is also building features such as wheelchair ramps and mechanized stairs lifts so people can stay in their homes.
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Just those two improvements, Ms. George estimated, will cost the organization $21,500. The basement renovations and exterior concrete repairs were an additional $19,500.
But the renovations will have a great effect on the Thomas family. Grace “is very active in her church,” explained their daughter Colleen Thomas, who was visiting with her son Caleb on his 5th birthday.
“I miss church a lot,” Grace acknowledged.
“She’s been confined for a year,” her daughter said. “They come over and sing and pray. Her church family has been really awesome as well.”
Ms. Thomas sleeps on a cot on their home’s first floor. Once the lift is installed, she’ll be able to spend the night with her husband on the second floor. The couple, who met during high school in their native Trinidad, has been married 46 years.
However, that doesn’t mean they don’t still see a lot of each other. The home’s large flat screen TV is in the living room and Mr. Thomas is a major sports fan.
In fact, Mr. Thomas seemed rather taciturn until the subject of the New York Yankees came up. He launched into conversation, discussing the prospects of various teams and the pros and cons of particular sportscasters on WFAN sports radio.
“He doesn’t call in,” Grace Thomas. “But he has an opinion all the time.”
One of the happy byproducts of Rebuilding Together NYC’s efforts is that she won’t have to watch wall-to-wall sports anymore, unless she wants to.
“I plan to go to church next Thursday because I have the ramp,” she said.