NYC NOW - Why NYC Is Flooding More and What You Can Do to Prepare

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

New York City's flooding problem is getting worse, and it's not hitting every neighborhood equally. Furhana Husani, director of programs and climate initiatives at the Waterfront Alliance, joins us to break down why some neighborhoods flood more than others, what tools exist to track flooding, and what you should actually do the next time a flash flood warning hits your phone. Photo: Anadolu/Anadolu via Getty Images Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC now. Weather patterns have been so extensive recently that it's hard to almost keep track of when these extreme weather events are happening. But the biggest concern that I have right now is actually preparing communities for a lot of this flooding. Have you picked up on this summer's weather pattern recently? One moment, it's hella hot for days. Then here comes the rain. A lot of it. On today's episode, we find out why New York City is flooding more and what you can do to prepare.

But before we get into that, here's what we're following. Cruise burned the midnight oil in Midtown Manhattan to stabilize a building under construction that appeared to be at risk of collapse. City officials say beams inside the building at 235 East 42nd Street buckled Tuesday, prompting an evacuation. Julian Smalls was in the area, just running errands on his off day. Then he saw people rushing out of buildings to evacuate. It's scary if the building's going to come down. I mean, I'm looking at it right now. That's scary right there.

And it's a tall building too. As of Wednesday morning, several nearby addresses were still under emergency evacuation orders. Officials are still investigating what caused the structural emergency. WMYC's housing reporter David Brand went to check out the building for himself. Hey, David. Hey, Janay. So what was the scene like when you went out there? Yeah, so I just got back from visiting the building today.

And a lot of the fear and chaos of yesterday has really subsided. You know, they had that frozen zone where they blocked off a number of streets surrounding the building. They've really shrunk that down. So now they just block off the stretch of 42nd and 43rd between second and third. Those are the streets immediately surrounding the building. And right now, it's mostly pressed there. You know, a lot of TV news, a lot of media that's on scene to see if anything changes. But much lower key than yesterday.

Okay. And this building is actually being converted from offices to apartments, right? What else can you tell us about it? Yeah, so this is the biggest office to housing conversion project in New York City. It calls for 1,600 new apartments. To do that, they are adding four additional stories to the top of a 33-story building. And then they have also what they call a bump out, widening the floors from floor 23 to floor 32 to add more density, more space for this new housing. This project is supposed to open in 2027 next year.

This might change that timeline a bit. But yeah, this is the biggest office to residential conversion project, a lot of excitement. And also it's expensive. The developers behind the project took out loans worth about $720 million. And I think at the time, a couple of years ago, that was the record high loan for one of these types of projects. And so, yeah, people have been watching this project closely the last several years, which is, you know, not only is it in this central location right around 42nd Street, it's also a major office to housing conversion project. So what are building officials telling you about what part of this conversion project has the structural problems? Well, they're focusing on that bump out, I mentioned, widening the floors from the 23rd to the 32nd.

This is this building. It's called the Pfizer building constructed in 1960. It's got that kind of familiar wedding cake structure where the base is wider. And then there are tiers that get narrower and narrower until the top stories. And so they're adding more square footage by bumping out those walls and making it wider at those top floors. the columns that buckled, the columns that nearly snapped in half are located directly below where that expansion is. And so they are saying it's probably associated with that and that there was just a lot of extra weight added to this project that likely caused those columns to nearly snap in half. I want to know what's next here for the Pfizer building.

I heard New York City's Buildings Commissioner warn of some tens of. days ahead. What has to happen? What's next? Well, Mayor Mammondani held a press conference earlier today, and he said that shoring measures are already underway. So city crews, brave city engineers, and I'm sure they're bringing in some private firms as well, are in the building right now, making sure floors 18 through 23 right around where the structural failure was are secure and reinforced. Later today, they're going to be doing floor 17 and 24. And the full plan is for these crews to go to every floor between the roof and the ninth floor to make sure they're reinforced and everything is safe. So that's like the immediate term. We're also still waiting to find out

what the specific cause here and maybe who's actually to blame. And that's what I'm also going to be looking ahead to because there's going to be a lot of finger pointing between the developer, the contractor, the engineer, maybe the architect. the workers who were on site, maybe something was overlooked or a corner cut. We don't know. But that's going to be coming up in the next few days as well. And I imagine a lot of litigation here. You mentioned that the building is supposed to be ready in 27 as far as the conversion project goes.

But now, you know, that will likely be set back. But is this structural failure going to be a setback for the city? and its plans to convert other office buildings into housing? That's something that I've been thinking about. And I had a story come out this morning on like, will this dampen the enthusiasm around office to residential conversions? Because I've been covering housing for about six years as my main beat. And I don't think anything generates as much excitement or interest in the housing space than these office to housing conversion projects.

You know, it kind of really picked up during the COVID pandemic. when a lot of older offices in particular cleared out and there was all this underused space. Meanwhile, we have this major housing shortage, so it just seemed like a perfect fit. These projects, though, they are complicated. It's taking old structures built to previous codes with weird floor plates that don't allow natural light into the center of the building. So architects and engineers will tell me it's like solving a puzzle, how to maybe carve out space in the middle of a building to add a courtyard so that light can come in so that you could have more bedrooms to meet code requirements when it comes to natural light in buildings. And so these are complicated. They're complex and they

take a long time. There's a lot of requirements when it comes to filing plans and getting inspections and making sure everything that currently exists there meets current codes even before you really begin the housing construction. But housing experts I talk to say, you know, these have really started to pick up. And so they don't expect that enthusiasm to subside or for this to really stop these projects from going forward elsewhere in the city. Before I let you go, David, while you were out there, did you see any people going into neighboring buildings that were evacuated on Tuesday? Yeah, I did. So I actually went, I went on a 44th street is where you can kind of go around what they're calling the frozen zone, around these closed streets. And there's a like a condo

complex there with this kind of drive driveway, circular driveway, and you can go in there and see through a space between buildings to really get a good look at where the problem was. And I saw people coming and going. There's a dormant outside. People seem to live there. Entering and exiting seem like no problems. Okay. What about vehicle traffic?

Yeah, no cars, no bikes, and not even any pedestrians on 42nd and 43rd between second and third. That's WNYC's David Brand. You can follow this story for updates on our news site, Gothamist. In other news, no free buses just yet for New Yorkers, but faster buses are on the way. New York City and the state have a plan to speed up buses along some of the slowest routes. It includes making 50 city corridors faster by adding new signals that give buses early or longer green lights at some intersections. That'll allow buses to cross the street before other vehicles.

The MTA will also help speed up buses by allowing backdoor boarding by the end of the year. City Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn says the Mumdani administration wants to make riding the bus a top option for getting around. Bus service shouldn't be treated as a second-rate option or a last resort to get around our city at the mercy of traffic congestion. It should be a world-class system for a world-class city. The plan also calls for making basic improvements, like adding more bus shelters, seating at bus stops, and more real-time clocks to show when buses will actually arrive. A couple weeks ago, I joined hundreds of New Yorkers lined up outside the city store in Lower Manhattan with hopes to purchase the limited edition New York City-inspired World Cup jerseys. Only 1,500 of the $50 kits were made. And no, I didn't get one.

But now the jerseys are back. Mayor Mumdani announced the restock this week. It's another limited supply and available online only. Visit nyc.gov slash city store to find out how to copy yours. I'm going to try to. Still ahead, rain has gotten intense in New York City lately, leading to flooding and a whole lot of issues. After the break, why the area is seeing so much flash flooding

and what you can do to prepare. Stay close. Welcome back. It's officially summer in New York City, and if you've been paying attention, we've been in some sort of pattern. Sunny hot weekdays, and then the weekend hits, and so does the rain. And the science says it's only going to get more frequent. Climate change means more intense storms, and at the same time, sea levels are rising. Drain's get overwhelmed, basement apartments become death traps.

All these problems hitting all at once are overwhelming city infrastructure. Today, we're talking about what flooding actually looks like across the five boroughs, why it's hitting some neighborhoods harder than others and what you can do about it. Joining me now is for Hana Hesani, Director of Programs and Climate Initiatives at the Waterfront Alliance. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Jeney. I'm really, really excited to talk to you during this time. Can you tell me about your work at the Waterfront Alliance before we get into all of this? Yeah, sure.

So Waterfront Alliance is an organization of over our third. thousand different alliance partners. So we work everywhere from, you know, being on the ground and working with residents and community organizations that are dealing with flooding, as well as accessing water, to building resilience on a very regional and sometimes even national lens. What does your day-to-day look like? If it's flooded, you know, we're on the ground. We're talking to residents. We're trying to give out sort of information on how to report on damages. to actually helping to plan some large-scale infrastructure. That's really interesting.

You know, we've had a lot of really big storms so far this year. I wonder what's been your biggest challenge in 2026 so far. Oh, my God, keeping up. I think that, honestly, that's a huge challenge is, you know, the weather changes and the weather patterns have been so extensive recently that it's hard to almost keep track of when these extreme weather events are happening. Yeah. But the biggest concern that I have right now is actually preparing communities for a lot of this flooding.

And one of the things that I hear often is that it doesn't flood here. Hmm. But that's because our perception of flooding is very different than what we normally understand it to be or what it actually is. What exactly is flooding for people who aren't necessarily experiencing it in their neighborhood? can you just break that down for us what it looks like? Yeah. The way that I've understood flooding is that it's essentially this idea of compound flooding.

Flooding is happening in different ways. There's coastal flooding where we see a lot of that storm surge that's sort of bumping up against the water's edge and causing a lot of damage to coastal neighborhoods. The other type of flooding is stormwater flooding, and that's where we're seeing a lot of these things called cloudburst events, where after extreme heat, all that,

That more mare carries all that rain and that water. And it just drops very quickly in a short amount of time. That's the more obvious one. You know, those big sort of rain events, such as May 20th. Yeah. That happened where, you know, we saw people being sort of run down by the street. And then it also just all came down that same thing. The rain came down.

Yeah. And the last type of flooding is groundwater flooding. And groundwater flooding is the invisible kind. and it keeps sort of seeping up from the ground into our basements. And so we often see those sort of social media posts of that sort of the flooding going into the subway systems. But flooding actually happens on a less dramatic scale. We talked about how flash flooding has knocked out subway lines. You know, we've seen those videos, as you mentioned, on social media.

Sometimes we see trapped cars in the street, basement apartments. as you mentioned, getting filled up multiple times in the last few years. What's behind all of this? Like, what's going on? I know we mentioned climate change, but if you can break it down, I guess, in layman's terms for us. Yeah. Well, yeah. I think the world is getting hotter.

Yeah. And warmer air holds more moisture. And so particularly after an extreme heat event, we see intense rainfall. fall. Because that warmer air holds a lot more moisture, those clouds get really heavy, and we see storms dumping more rain in shorter periods of time. What's really interesting is that the Northeast has experienced about a 60% increase in the heaviest rain events over the past century. So this is a good example of how climate change is actually making a huge impact and how, you know, these rain events are happening on a more frequent and intense basis.

And our infrastructure was not built for this. No, it was not. You know, when it comes to not just people in basement apartments, but people who may deal with flood damage in general, is that covered by renter's insurance? Is that something we all should have? That's a really, really good question and so complicated. There is an organization that helps navigate what this insurance sort of landscape looks like.

because it's not always covered. Yeah. And that organization is Flood Help NY. You can actually put in your zip code and they'll tell you what your risk is. They'll tell you sort of how to navigate some of the sort of the complications of flood insurance. And they'll help to also get you access to grants. Well, that's great. Yeah, grants and loans to help improve your resilience for retrofitting your homes.

Yeah. Earlier you mentioned that you talked to folks and they say, you know, I don't experience flooding in my neighborhood. Why is flooding hitting some neighborhoods much harder than others if the infrastructure is so bad? Right. It's honestly historic disinvestment. One of the biggest factors behind this is historic redlining. Several different neighborhoods have not had the same investment as other neighborhoods have. We work heavily in the South Bronx, in Red Hook, in the Southeast Queens, and Elmhurst, Flushing, Corona. These are a lot of the historic disinvested neighborhoods, historic redline neighborhoods, and you'll also see very much overlapped. That's where the most flood risk is as well.

And so that's something that, you know, we're really trying to understand is how do we now get to particular neighborhoods to build a level of preparedness? because this kind of infrastructure is going to take years to improve and years to invest in. And I wonder what is the city doing to acknowledge all of that? Actually quite a bit. Okay. But the issue is these planning efforts require decades. But there are smaller things that can actually be done, which the city is starting to look into, such as these catch basins.

Oh, yeah. Many of these catch basins get sort of filled up with garbage, right? And one of the things that we could do is just something as simple as putting garbage cans on, you know, as many street blocks as possible can help to reduce the amount of literal garbage on catch basins. There's a network of flood sensors going up across the city. Can you talk a bit about that? I think it's through floodnet. Yes, that's right. Floodnet is such a cool initiative.

that's also run by a partnership by the city and NYU and Kuni. They're coming together to sort of establish a network of flood sensors actually owned almost by community. Right. So it's this idea that community members know where flooding is happening. So they can actually ask for sensors to be established in their own street. But they know where it's flooding. Yeah. They're the experts.

And so the idea is to put a flood sensor on their own. street request it. And it actually in real time measures the amount of rainfall that's happening in that exact moment. So the technology is really incredible. And there's a live dashboard that you can actually pull up and that is looked at by residents, community leaders, the city itself. Sometimes New York City emergency management also looks at this dashboard because it actually shows where the rainfall is happening at what time, how much, which area is getting inundated. And it also holds that historic data. Okay.

So you can, you know, residents can start to look at where it's been flooding. What are some of the patterns? How can we now use this data to start to advocate for better protection for myself, for my street, for my community? But also, what are some of the things that I can do in order to protect myself? Yeah. And I guess it's also a helpful tool when you're moving to a new neighborhood, right? Like, these are things that you would want to know. Absolutely. Yes, especially because a lot of our flood mapping tools right now use historic, very much historic data. So they're not always looking at what, you know, flooding sort of looks like today. But the flood sensors do a really good job of capturing it. The one issue is that there's not enough of them. Yeah. So what needs to be done to get more?

It all comes down to funding. It all comes down to the green. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I think about flooding, I have to be honest, in my neighborhood, I'm the type of neighbor I look out for my neighbors, right? Like, I'm concerned. I say good morning.

I might be aggravating. I'm not sure. But I also, when it's raining, I am concerned about people who live in basement apartments. So what advice do you have for folks? You know, you have a flash flood warning. what advice do you have for folks who do live in basement apartments? I think everyone, no matter where they live, should sign up for Notify NYC. Absolutely. I know the texts get a little out of hand.

Notify NYC is really, really critical. What Notify NYC has done recently is they've established a basement apartment alert system. So signing up for that will help, especially basement apartment, residents get a better sense of some of the tips and tricks that they can do in order to establish stronger preparedness for themselves, but also when to not open their door, when to go up and not out. One of the things that we've been talking to basement apartment dwellers particularly about is knowing your neighbor. That sometimes is more important than infrastructure. Definitely. So if you know your upstairs neighbor,

going upstairs when you start seeing those Notify NYC alerts and that there's flash flood warnings to go up and not open that door and let that flooding in. Yeah, yeah. You know, while we're talking about Notify NYC alerts, what's the difference between flood watch and flood warning? So a flood watch, the way I understood it, is to be prepared. Just be prepared. A flood warning is to sort of take action now.

Another question. So let's say I just received a flash flood warning or flash flood watch and I'm stepping out of the house still. You know, that may be risky, right? Absolutely. Especially if Notify NYC tells you that there's going to be a heavy amount of rain that will exceed a certain amount of inches, which is, by the way, 1.75. is anything above 1.75 inches of rain per hour, which they will tell you and notify NYC, try to stay home. Honestly, it'll take a couple of maybe 30 minutes for that cloudburst event to happen.

It'll take a little bit of time for that flooding to sort of subside, but it is not worth the risk. It is better to seek higher elevation, especially if you're in a basement apartment, go up to your upstairs neighbor, but don't go out. But for Hannah, I pay $200 for these Broadway tickets. Stay home. It's not worth it. You know, looking ahead and thinking about the future, obviously this is going to continue to get worse and worse.

Climate change isn't going away. What happens to this city if we don't think. things and get this right? You know, the city was built on a series of creeks, marshland, wetlands, water will always want to go where water was. And that's why, you know, if you actually map where some of the flooding is happening, you'll see historic creeks underneath it. I think if we don't get this right, that flooding will continue to follow that path. And we're going to have to explore ways to retreat. We should really start to explore where there are no go zones for building housing because it would be underwater in several years. And if we don't tackle them now,

I think our city is going to be less and less livable. So for Hana, as we wrap up here, what are the main three tips that you have for New Yorkers as we continue to, I don't know, Dash to floods. I think be prepared. Sign up for Notify NYC. I think if I could just tell every single New Yorker to do that, sign up for Notify NYC and text Notify NYC to 692. That's number one for sure. Number two is raise your voice.

Tell people where it's flooding. Get those flood sensors. Try to track that data. Be an advocate for your community. Yeah. Number three is get to know your neighbor. I think it's through building community that we cannot be prepared together. Yeah.

And I'll add a fourth. Clean that hedge basin. Oh, yes. Absolutely. It's filthy. It's covered and it's filthy. Farhano Hussaini is Director of Programs and Climate Initiatives at the Waterfront Alliance. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time. You know,