Brit Worgan has developed a simple but effective floodproofing system for the basement level of her South Slope duplex: First, elevate everything. “We have everything raised up as much as we can on cinder blocks and pallets,” she says. “Nothing pretty.” There are also strategically placed flood bags, stuffed with crystalized superabsorbent polymer, stashed around the bathroom and the front door to catch the water that usually pours in during storms. She has water sensors on at all times and dry-wet shop vacs ready to go. After three consecutive years of flooding, she also knows to clear out the drains on the block with a rake whenever it starts raining. “It’s definitely scary,” Worgan, who shares the apartment with her wife and young children, says of her new normal of routine flooding. “But it feels less scary when it happens now.”
It wasn’t always like this. Their first four years in the apartment were dry. But a relatively minor storm in the fall of 2021 sent water, leaves, and twigs geysering out of the toilet. Then Hurricane Ida hit, filling the apartment with several inches of rain and debris. Worgan, a photographer, lost equipment, rugs, clothing, and furniture. “Things that were replaceable, but that took us a while to recover from financially,” she says. Their renter’s insurance didn’t cover natural disasters — only flooding from building malfunctions, such as burst pipes — and the FEMA flood relief they received came to just $250. Still, she can’t imagine moving. Their 1,100-square-foot apartment is stabilized, and their current rent is $3,200. They want to stay in their school district, but everything in the neighborhood in their price range seems to carry the same flood risk: “I’m constantly looking at real estate in our area, but whenever I see stuff in our budget it’s a garden-level apartment or a basement duplex like ours.”
As inland flooding has become a regular occurrence in New York, many brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods, from South Slope to Carroll Gardens, are now dealing with the reality of perennially flooded basements. And people in basement apartments like Worgan’s — apartments that are also often some of the few affordable options, especially for families, in the now-pricey neighborhoods where they’re located — have had to decide whether staying in their homes is worth the stress of semi-annual deluges. Floods can be deadly for people living in basement units, but for those in spaces with less severe issues, the question of staying or going is a little less clear. (Especially in a housing market as tight and expensive as Park Slope.) How much is too much to tolerate? Leave the apartment or leave the city? As one condo owner in a Windsor Terrace duplex told me, “If it wasn’t for the flooding, we’d probably stay here forever.” Of course, he acknowledged, they might end up staying forever anyway, as he’s not sure they can really sell.
“It’s always the basements now,” says Mohammad Islam, a contractor who works in Park Slope and other brownstone-Brooklyn neighborhoods. Twenty years ago, he says, all his calls were about leaky roofs. “With the severe downpours we’ve been having, the sewer system can’t handle it.” Two things happened: more intense rains, which now routinely overwhelm the city’s sewer system, and a tighter housing market, especially in areas with brownstones, which has created a situation in which no one wants to let useable — or rentable — real estate go to waste, even if it’s soggy and subterranean. The median rent for a two-bedroom in Park Slope is $4,200 a month. Three bedrooms go for nearly $6,000. (And then there’s the competition to consider: the rental bidding wars that flared up in the wake of COVID are still going strong.) “In the ’70s and ’80s, no one cared about their basements; they used them as a storage area,” Islam says. “But in the ’90s, people started taking a different approach, making use of every square inch of the house and putting wine cellars and children’s play areas down there.”
One renter I spoke with fell in love with a duplex by the border of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook, which is known for flooding, though her apartment was nowhere near the water. She had come to see an apartment upstairs, but when the broker took her downstairs for keys, she was riveted. A glass back wall filled the double-decker space with light and opened out onto a sunken backyard. It was big, bright, open, and flood-prone. “We lived there for four years. It was an incredible apartment,” she says. “It was such a mood boost when you came home, but it came with this brutal caveat.” During rainstorms, the sunken backyard filled up like a swimming pool. “It got to the point where whenever it rained, we would rush home.”
They were the first people to live in the renovated apartment, she adds, and the owner simply hadn’t been aware that design choices like a sunken yard and big glass doors, though stunning, would cause issues. She and her husband mostly managed to avoid serious flooding over the years using Shop-Vacs and other diversion strategies, although once water came pouring through the sidewall from the neighbor’s flooding apartment. There was nothing they could do about that. They eventually moved to a fifth-floor apartment in Bushwick.
Flooding can be hard to fix. Sometimes the cause is the way a backyard is graded or bad drainage. Sometimes it’s the water table coming up. Sometimes it’s a surge coming through the wall of the neighboring building. Sometimes it’s the overwhelmed sewer system backflowing into basement toilets and sinks. One owner told me he’s installed better backyard drainage and plumbing valves to prevent backflow, which has helped significantly. He has also thought about installing a pump, though he isn’t sure where to pump the water. If it goes out into the backyard, it would just flood back in. If he were to pump it out front, into the street, he’d just be adding to the already overwhelmed sewer system. It’s even harder for basement tenants, who must rely on their landlords to investigate and pay for flood-prevention measures, to determine if their flooding issues are intractable or could possibly be if not eliminated, then mitigated.
Even if you can’t fix it, you can at least flag it. Two bills recently passed requiring owners and sellers in New York State to disclose flooding to tenants and buyers. Robert Carroll, the assemblymember who sponsored them, says it’s simply best practice to warn people moving into homes about flooding, especially since heavy rainfalls are now impacting areas no one expected to have issues. (Before the bill passed, buyers could waive the disclosure in exchange for $500.) “Unless you’re on the waterfront, a lot of people would never think it’s an issue. But with these events where we get three, four, seven inches of rain in a few hours, it happens. This will allow people to better prepare their homes and take precautions.” And while most people recounted happy dry years in their homes before more recent issues, one Park Slope renter told me she found it strange that her landlord kept pressing them to get rental insurance. After the first rainstorm, she knew why. They ended up having to toss all the Ikea furniture they’d put down there — particleboard, they discovered, cannot withstand flooding — but managed to save the Peloton.
Far from eliminating basement apartments, New York is pushing to legalize more, a move that’s become somewhat controversial in the wake of basement-apartment deaths. But, the thinking goes, the realities of the housing market mean that people will live in basements whether they’re legal or not. And some, at least, can be made safer with multiple means of egress and other precautions. The city is also taking measures to improve storm sewers and mitigate flooding, but it’s only getting wetter, with precipitation expected to increase 10 percent by the 2030s, and the Department of Environmental Protection has said that eliminating residential flooding isn’t realistic. “There’s basically no scenario I can imagine in which we can tell every New Yorker, ‘We’re going to protect your home from all types of flooding,’” the commissioner told the City Council last month. “I just don’t think that’s a realistic future for us to aspire to.”
So people are learning to live with our soggy present. Worgan’s neighbor Stephen Gross, who runs a printing studio out of the lower level of his duplex and estimates he’s lost thousands of dollars worth of packing materials in recent floods, has seen a number of different plumbers coming through the building over the last few years to investigate fixes. It’s not clear to him if the fix is too complicated or too expensive (one homeowner told me he spent $24,000 installing a backflow valve to prevent water coming up the drains), but the most recent plan they’ve proposed involves running an extra outflow pipe for the entire building through his space. (He’s not crazy about the plan, especially as he’s not even sure it would work.) He moved in 20 years ago, and the difficulty of finding another large live-work space has kept him there, despite the flooding, though over these last few years, he doesn’t see subterranean space the way he used to. “In New York, every bit of real estate counts,” he says. “But having a basement apartment is definitely a different thing now.”
