A pilot program meant to get cash quickly to help homeowners after floods has not made a payout almost a year after it launched.
The program, run by the nonprofit groups Center for NYC Neighborhoods (CNYCN) and the Environmental Defense Fund, could provide up to $15,000 in cash assistance per household to eligible low- and moderate-income homeowners in the wake of stormwater flooding, as THE CITY reported last year.
The pilot program is designed to help homeowners who might not have flood insurance because of its expense — or because they don’t realize they might need it. Rather than put individuals on the hook to purchase insurance, CNYCN paid for a policy.
The pilot rolled out in four neighborhoods at high risk of rainfall-related floods. In those areas, a data analytics company determines whether a weather event like a heavy storm is severe enough to trigger a payout.
But no rainfall event — including the Sept. 29 deluge that soaked the city with 8.65 inches of rain at Kennedy Airport and floods throughout the boroughs — reached the level needed to trigger a payout.
“While we saw impact citywide, our select neighborhoods just did not experience significant flooding enough to trigger the policy,” said Theodora Makris, program manager at the center.
She declined to identify the four neighborhoods for fear of developing a “false expectation” that homeowners “might be entitled to something that might not come,” she said.
Neighborhoods like Brookville, Elmhurst and Astoria in Queens, as well as Bushwick and East Flatbush in Brooklyn are at risk of stormwater flooding based on the city’s map.
‘Locked Out of Insurance’
The program was partially designed to make up for lags in the payout timeline from private insurers or FEMA, and to provide a simpler process to make a claim. The effort also focused on the homeowners who were at risk of rainfall-related flooding who might not be aware or be required to have flood insurance, since the FEMA flood maps account only for flooding from coastal surge.
That means the maps leave out the risk of stormwater flooding from heavy rains, like those from Hurricane Ida in 2021. That storm dumped more than three inches of rain in Central Park in an hour and brought severe inland flooding around New York City, killing 13 New Yorkers.
“There’s a lot of conversation right now about how we can do insurance differently,” said Carolyn Kousky, EDF’s associate vice president for economics and policy. “So many people are just locked out of insurance and the people who need it the most are the ones who can’t get it or afford it.”
Research shows that lower-income households, predominantly in communities of color, tend to recover more slowly than others from severe weather. In part, that’s because they may not qualify for disaster loans and may not be able to afford flood insurance in the first place. The research team behind the pilot program found the average annual premium for flood insurance in New York City was over $1,400.
After a disaster, insurance payouts or governmental assistance can take weeks or months to arrive, leaving homeowners to make tough financial decisions to balance their needs.
The researchers running the pilot program predicted money that would come in quickly after a disaster, with flexible use, could prevent struggling households from falling into further financial insecurity. But they could not evaluate that notion since there was no payout.
Still, Kousky said the experiment, using a model that was the first of its kind nationwide, was one step towards innovating insurance to solve problems that are cropping up as insurance prices go up and increasingly, insurers decide certain places — such as California and Florida — are insurable.
The team has begun to consider the second year of the program and is contemplating a change to criteria that would determine a payout.
“There really haven’t been triggers for rainfall-related flood insurance before, and they’re really hard because rainfall-related flooding can be so incredibly localized,” Kousky said.