Almost two years after Hurricane Sandy tore through coastal Queens, the city spearheaded a job fair there in a first-of-its-kind effort. NY1′s Michael Herzenberg filed the following report.
Jude Merced lives in Coney Island. He was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy two years ago.
“I actually got affected pretty bad,” he said. “Lost furniture, a lot of my stuff.”
Merced came to a job fair in the Rockaways hoping to improve his life and the life of his daughter, who came into this world around the time Hurricane Sandy came ashore.
“I’m hoping to get a potential job with sanitation out of this, hopefully,” he said.
Dozens of city agencies, nonprofits and contractors set up at the job fair organized by the city in a Sandy-impacted community, offering more than 200 recovery-related jobs.
“We’ve made a priority to get jobs to the people who were affected in the areas that were affected,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio.
In addition to access to employers, the fair attendees at Challenge Prep Academy were also offered training, apprenticeships and career guidance.
“I’m just somebody from the community that’s also looking for a job,” Brown said. “Hurricane Sandy affected my house really bad.”
He escaped actual water damage, but thousands of others still wait for help from the city.
Twenty-thousand people applied to the city’s Build it Back program, designed to help homeowners rebuild. Six thousand of those withdrew. The mayor’s office says about half of the applicants remaining have now received an offer from Build it Back.
The city says 1,500 homes are in design, 851 families have received a reimbursement check and another 700 have started construction, compared to zero earlier this year.
“There’s no victory lap,” de Blasio said. “There’s simply acknowledgement that we took something that was at zero, literally, and turned it into something that was beginning to work. But it has to work a lot better.”
De Blasio, in office for 10 months, overhauled Build it Back after the Department of Investigation found it plagued by confusion and delays. The administration says it will soon announce new goals for Build it Back and expand the program capacity.
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