How much does it cost to rebuild a home damaged by Super Storm Sandy? It appears the costs could reach about $1 million a home in low-lying areas of Queens.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Tishman Construction, which is overseeing hundreds of homes for the federal Build It Back program, submitted bids to the city to elevate 53 homes damaged by Sandy in Queens. The bid? A fat $50 million.
The massive cost overruns in the federal Build It Back program have spurred the de Blasio administration into moving $500 million in federal funds that were earmarked for storm-protection program toward repairing and elevating homes damaged in Sandy.
“Our goal is to invest and create resilient neighborhoods, and we’ve identified additional needs to accomplish this goal,” Raul Contreras, a spokesman for de Blasio, told the Journal.
City officials will be asking Tishman to negotiate the costs with contractors. A source told the Journal that it likely won’t reduce the bid by more than 20 percent.
Part of the reason for the ballooning costs can be attributed to the location of the homes, where a complicated anchoring system is needed to build foundations underground, officials told the Journal. [WSJ] — James Kleimann