For retired transit worker Frank Mosczynzski, Ocean Breeze on Staten Island’s eastern shore was the perfect place to raise a family and grow old. He had called the area home since the age of two when his parents moved there from Brooklyn. His work commute to Manhattan was easy, and he returned home each night to the beach, a backyard and peaceful respite from the city’s din.
He never imagined he would sell it 2014 to the state to bulldoze.
Sandy made landfall in the tristate area on the evening of Oct. 29, 2012, and the 16-foot storm surge that hit Staten Island resulted in 24 deaths, more than any other borough.
Mosczynzski’s wife and two adult daughters evacuated in advance, but he stayed behind as a volunteer for the search and rescue team. Some neighbors stayed behind despite warnings — and had to be saved from on top of their roofs or pulled out of the water by boats with ropes.
He said he knew at around 7 p.m. on the night of the storm, when he saw his neighborhood turn into a lake, that he would not return home again.
Mosczynzski’s own home was filled with 8 feet of water after Hurricane Sandy — and uninhabitable as a result. His family of four adults had to find a place to live, and start paying rent while also trying to buy necessities like clothes.
“It just seemed like it was doom and gloom for us in our whole area,” Mosczynzski said. “The house was totally destroyed except one or two boxes from the attic of Christmas decorations and one box of family pictures.”
That was only the start of his long journey through the Staten Island buyout program. New York officials created this initiative for the sake of managed retreat, which is when the government steps in and purchases private property for the purpose of getting residents out of a flood-prone area.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, according to Jane Brogan, chief policy and research officer at the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery during the Staten Island buyout program from 2015 to January 2022. There were homeowners who couldn’t take the buyout because of title issues or imminent foreclosure.
But in total, more than 500 Staten Island residents sold their homes to the state at a total cost of $200 million. The buyout program also included more than 200 additional homes in Long Island. Ten years after Hurricane Sandy, the properties acquired in Ocean Breeze and neighboring areas look like a mixture of haphazardly mowed lawns and forests of phragmites. The streets once teeming with generations of the same families living side by side in rows of shotgun houses are now almost completely deserted. The newly rebuilt houses of the few who stayed peek out from the desolate landscape, dominated by noisy geese.
The program also set off broader discussions about whether it’s sustainable to keep living in coastal New York and New Jersey — or if nature is evicting us, how does the government support those who want to relocate?
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