Beyond hammers & nails
Sandy’s lingering effects inspire volunteers
When Hurricane Sandy hit the city i n October 2012, Barb Bittner-Jones watched the disaster unfold from more than 200 miles away in Washington. A veteran relief volunteer, BittnerJones has 20 years’ experience helping cities rebuild, including New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She quickly made her way up the East Coast to see how she could help.
“I actually came up three times in November and December [2012] to throw my weight behind whomever I could work with,” she says. “The aftermath of a storm like Sandy and Katrina is decades not months in terms of getting people back into their homes that are healthy and safe and livable.”
With her kids in college and her husband at home, Bittner-Jones moved to New York and began working as a volunteer for the local affiliate of Rebuilding Together, a national nonprofit that focuses on making free critical house repairs for low-income homeowners and revitalizing the neighborhoods in which they live.
Rebuilding Together had already been active i n New York City for 13 years prior to Sandy. Primarily its mission is helping people, especially the elderly, disabled and veterans, keep their houses up to health and safety codes, even when they can’t pay for or perform the repairs themselves.
In the past two years, however, Rebuilding Together NYC’s focus has shifted almost entirely to Sandy recovery efforts, concentrating its resources on the coastal areas of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. Kimberly George, executive director of Rebuilding Together, says that though the storm surge receded almost 20 months ago, there is still much to be done to get New Yorkers back home.
“We’ve done a lot in Red Hook, in Coney Island, Gerritsen Beach, Canarsie and Rockaway have been the bulk of our projects,” George says. “If you look at a map, it’s like a horseshoe, and, unfortunately, the neighborhoods that were hardest hit, a lot of them, not all of them but a lot of them, also happened to be the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where the residents have the least resources to rebuild their homes and their communities.”
Most of the properties Rebuilding Together takes on require a gut renovation, with storm damage exacerbated by preexisting conditions not covered by the specialized funds they’ve received specifically for Sandy recovery efforts.
“Where we could get our sponsorship for $10,000 and make a huge difference in a home pre-Sandy, now, with these homes, that money is not going very far, and all of a sudden, you could put $100,000 into a home,” George says. “It’s become more challenging finding the funds to do the amount of repair that the homes need. So we’re running into that now, and trying to figure out what we can do and what we can’t do and finding unrestricted funding that will allow us to address the whole home, in a holistic way.”
Despite the recovery red tape, last year Rebuilding Together was able to rehab 80 houses. It engages upwards of 1,000 volunteers a year, most of whom have no or little experience in home construction. They help out during the volu nteer days t he nonprofit organizes in April and October making cosmetic repairs, like painting or planting landscapes. Long-term volunteers like Bittner-Jones are called house captains and tasked with taking a single home and seeing its renovations through to completion.
Right now, Bittner-Jones and a team of skilled volunteers (trained construction workers who volunteer their time) are finishing repairs on a house in Canarsie, a home that needed new floors, walls and a ramp built to make it more handicap accessible for its owner.
“My background is i n coaching and counseling,” she says, “so the part that I love is being able to sit with people. Hear their stories. I’ve even looked through pictures with them, and they’ve told me about, for lack of a better word, who they used to be before this happened. It’s unnerving for th them to have their house uprooted.”
While the idea of living in a constructi tion zone is understandably unnerving, B Bittner-Jones says the transformation that ta takes place on a Rebuilding Together site is a about more than just hammers and nails.
“It’s really the way that this organizati tion goes about it,” she says. “It’s really a v very relational, caring, holistic rebuilding. T There’s so much psychological damage th that occurs when a natural disaster like th this hits. It’s not just putting on a door.”
jgalloway@nydailynews.com