Prez killed storm-safety plan
THE TRUMP administration has quietly killed off rules proposed under Barack Obama’s presidency that would have required much tougher flood resiliency in thousands of new and rebuilt homes within flood zones, the Daily News has learned.
The termination of the proposed rule “was terrible,” said Dan Zarrilli, Mayor de Blasio’s chief resilience officer and the official in charge of leading the city’s postsuperstorm Sandy recovery.
As a result, Zarrilli predicted, the thousands of homeowners deluged by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma will be allowed to rebuild in the same spots where they were flooded without any added resiliency.
“Now they will just follow local regulations,” he said. “It just defaults to the lowest common denominator. The rebuilding is going to be built to lower standards because the feds aren’t looking at addressing the effects of climate change.”
Proposed after Sandy lashed New York and New Jersey in 2012, the Obama rule would have expanded the flood zones and required all newly constructed or “substantially improved” one- to four-family homes financed by federally backed mortgages to be elevated or flood-proofed.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development first proposed the rule in 2015, than began formally soliciting comments on it from interested parties last fall.
In December, the Mortgage Brokers Association and several housing developer groups asked Obama’s HUD to rescind the rule, claiming that uncertainties about the flood plain map made estimating costs of the required resiliency difficult.
Ali Ahmad, spokesman for the brokers group, wrote in an email to The News, “Instituting the new rule without the maps would have added an element of uncertainty into the lending decision, uncertainty that lenders would have been forced to price into their loans.”
Ahmad said that could make the cost of building new or rehabbing existing affordable housing “prohibitive.”
“At a time when this country is facing a shortage of affordable housing, increasing the cost of