New York City considers buy outs of flood-prone homes in Queens

The city is considering buying homes from residents of a small flood-prone section of Flushing, potentially presenting homeowners with the tough choice of selling and relocating or putting their faith in a series of projects aimed at reducing the chronic risk from storms.

The voluntary buyout strategy, supported by local elected officials and debated by residents of the neighborhood, is one of several proposals from the Adams administration for protecting residents in and around Kissena Park. The acquisition program being developed would mark the first time the city offered to purchase inland properties, away from the coast, that are vulnerable to flooding from intense storms like Hurricane Ida.

The city could start offering to buy properties in the neighborhood and other at-risk sites, like the Hole in Brooklyn , as soon as 2026, according to a Department of Environmental Protection presentation to residents earlier this month.

“We don't want the city to be in this position of buying out properties that we could protect,” DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala told Gothamist. “But we really are thinking about getting the city into that field for the very first time.”

Many residents of the low-lying blocks near Kissena Park say they worry every time it rains since flood waters filled their basements, destroyed their possessions and killed three neighbors during Hurricane Ida in September 2021. They say they’re open to a buyout program, but are concerned about finding a comparable home as sale prices skyrocket and as high interest rates add to their uncertainty.

Linda Ni said she was in the basement of her house on Peck Avenue during Hurricane Ida and escaped to the first floor as the water reached her nose. She said she and her family have thought about selling.

“Every time it rains, we are very scared,” Ni told Gothamist outside the home she bought in 2005. “But finding a house is not too easy.”

A government buyout program would be voluntary, but it won’t be simple.

Some homeowners have lived on the blocks surrounded by Kissena Park for decades, and two-family houses are still selling for well over $1 million despite the persistent flooding, property records show. The neighborhood is also home to many immigrant families who rent more affordable basement apartments and also live on the first and second floors of the small houses that line the blocks.

Alvaro Cierra cleans restaurants and lives with his wife and children in a basement on 153rd Street, where he said water rose about 2 feet twice last year. He said they moved in two years ago and want to leave, but can’t find a better deal.

“The economy doesn’t let me have a comfortable apartment,” Cierra said. “Right here, it's a little bit [cheaper], but it's scary sometimes.”

Staying could be dangerous. The homes were built on marshy land and sit atop massive sewer mains that carry 20% of all Queens’ stormwater.

“The climate crisis is happening at the same time as we have an affordable housing crisis,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president of energy and environmental programs at the Regional Planning Association who studies buyouts and examples of “managed retreat.”

Freudenberg argues that successful buyout programs feature strong resident engagement, relocation plans and incentives.

“We're not operating in a vacuum here,” he said. “It’s a neighborhood with real people in it.”

Vineciya Vijayarajah, 20, said her family moved into their home on 153rd Street 17 years ago and would be open to a buyout from the city, “as long as we're getting market value and we’re relocated to another location.”

She said a number of her neighbors have moved away over the years and new owners rent out their homes to tenants. Others stay put because of the area's prime location, which is just a short bus ride from downtown Flushing. She questioned just how many people would be willing to sell to the city to make a buyout program successful.

“A lot of people don't move because we have easy access to transportation,” she said. “There’s a bus and then Main Street where everything is there.”

Vijayarajah, a psychology student, stood on the front steps of her house with her father and pointed about 7 feet up the side to show just how high the water rose during Hurricane Ida. Videos she took that day show the basement brimming with murky water, and another foot or so sloshing through the kitchen and living room of the first floor.

“We lost three cars and we lost the furniture, TV, sofa,” she said. “Stuff like passports, documents, certificates, diplomas, stuff that you can never get back, wedding photos.”

Their home has flooded three more times since then, Vijayarajah said.

“This area used to be a pond,” she said. “Why did they even create these properties and sell it to people?”

Maps of Queens from the 19th century that were compiled by ecology historian Eric Sanderson depict the area as wetlands, with the old Kissena Creek winding around the edge of where two-family homes now stand. The fertile area was once home to a large and lucrative plant nursery. Nearby streets named Oak, Poplar and Geranium hint at the past.

The roughly 90 properties bounded by Peck and 56th avenues and 151st Street and Kissena Boulevard still stand out on a map: They form a small rectangle inside a verdant park.

Developers built over wetlands and waterways well into the 20th century, with little consideration for the return of water, Sanderson said.

“There was certainly this idea for most of the 20th century, that we could just engineer our way out of whatever nature wanted to do,” said Sanderson, the vice president of urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden. “And I think climate change is challenging that idea.”

Today, city planners and environmental experts are studying how they can use natural waterways to protect residents.

The Department of Environmental Protection is discussing strategies like installing hulking sewer lines in the area — a likely decade-long undertaking — constructing underground storage tanks, and creating a new lake to serve as natural drainage for the Kissena Park area, a project known as a “blue belt.”

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said he has talked to homeowners who are up for selling their properties and moving after dealing with chronic anxiety when it rains. But, he cautioned, it’s not “an overnight process” and involves various agencies and lenders.

“Buyouts should be on the table,” Richards said. “This is a strategy we’re going to have to entertain in low-lying areas like Peck.”

Councilmember Sandra Ung and other local elected officials sent a letter to Mayor Eric Adams last May asking the city to launch a buyout program for residents of the Kissena Park neighborhood.

“We fear that some homeowners, especially those who live on Peck Avenue, will always experience chronic flooding, even with the recently announced projects in and around Kissena Park,” they wrote.

A year later, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection mentioned voluntary buyouts during a public presentation at a Flushing school.

Aggarwala, the agency commissioner, told Gothamist the city does not yet have a formal acquisition plan, or a dedicated pool of funding to purchase the risky properties. He said the state could assist through its Environmental Bond Act fund, approved by voters in 2022, that sets aside hundreds of millions of dollars for buyouts statewide. The state previously used federal funds to buy 500 homes near the coast of Staten Island’s Ocean Breeze section in the wake of Hurricane Sandy for about $200 million. Homeowners there received the pre-storm value of their properties, plus an additional 15% to help with relocating.

But pricey sales reveal just how much tighter the housing market is today than a decade ago.

Home values in the three-block section of Kissena Park hover above $1 million. One house on 153rd Street is under contract for $1.15 million. The owner, David Su, told Gothamist he wished he could have made more, like a neighbor who recently sold for $1.4 million.

“We're a housing-constrained city,” Aggarwala said. “Buying a home and turning it into something that's not a home has got to be one of the last resorts you can imagine.”

Still, he said, buyouts will be a crucial tool in places where that last resort may be the smartest solution to keep New Yorkers safe and avoid “astronomically expensive” projects that don’t guarantee 100% protection.

“From a citywide perspective, we don't want to raise the rates infinitely to protect every last home if it makes sense to have a couple of properties around the city bought out and ideally turned into infrastructure that can protect neighboring properties,” Aggarwala said.