Real Estate Market Along Coast Upended by Hurricane

But that was before Mr. Vento and his wife watched from the top floor as 10 feet of water ruined the home in which they had raised their three children. Last week, he sold it for $279,000, less than half his original asking price, unable to wait for a better offer.

“I was fortunate to get what I got,” he said. “I’m 72 years old. What am I going to do? Wait until I’m 82? By that time I’d be living in a nursing home.”

The real estate market along the New York and New Jersey coastlines has been as upended by Hurricane Sandy as the houses tossed from their foundations. In places where waterfront views once commanded substantial premiums, housing prices have tumbled amid uncertainty about the costs of rebuilding and the dangers of seaside living.

Homeowners have had to decide quickly whether to sell out or pour more money in to fix storm-damaged homes, as the real estate speculators who have descended on these areas make offers that would have been preposterous just two months ago.

Some owners have indignantly balked and even gone so far as to take houses that were already on the market off, waiting for values to rebound. But many others who lack the means or the desire to rebuild say they have no choice but to try to get out from under these properties for whatever they can.

“They’ve had enough,” said Steve Kaplan, 49, an investment banker from Long Beach, on Long Island, who has been buying damaged properties there since the storm. “They are going to move on, they don’t want to deal, they don’t want to redo their house.”

“There’s an opportunity here,” Mr. Kaplan added, “that you can buy houses for cash because they want to move on very quickly.”

Experts are divided on whether the effects of the storm on property values reflect a new reality for waterside areas or whether prices will come back stronger, as they did in Lower Manhattan, where prices tumbled after the Sept. 11 attacks. Real estate agents are urging patience, worried that entire communities are hemorrhaging value.

In the meantime, a range of real estate prospectors have arrived. A truck advertising a company that buys distressed homes for cash started patrolling the waterlogged neighborhoods along the Rockaways, in Queens, almost immediately after the storm. Signs offering the services of similar companies have cropped up like crab grass in front of supermarkets on Long Island.

And there were so many paltry offers for properties on Craigslist that one person posted: “Real estate is high enough and many are trying to suck the life out of people who have lost homes, cars and all their possessions. Where are your hearts and consciences?”

But the cash-in-hand these companies offer may be too desperately needed for some homeowners to pass up.

Ryan Case, a partner at Seaside Funding, a national “flip company” that often offers 60 percent to 70 percent below market rate for properties, acknowledged that would-be sellers would be wise to ignore his agents’ offers.

“We are not your best option,” he said.

Yet those who find bargain-basement offers tough to swallow — compared with the value their houses had before the storm — sometimes find themselves with little alternative. Mr. Case recounted how one New Jersey woman reacted with outrage at his company’s offer. “She said, ‘I’ll burn the house before I sell it to you guys to make a profit,’ ” he said. But she called back a week later to see if the offer still stood.

There have also been amateur speculators, who see a chance to realize the dream of owning a second home or an investment property.

Mr. Kaplan and his friend Bob Gregor talked for years about buying houses in Long Beach, their hometown. But it was not until a few weeks after the hurricane that they finally went shopping.

Cara Buckley contributed reporting.

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ArtsBeat: Landfill Park Proves Savior in Hurricane

During Hurricane Sandy, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island absorbed a critical part of the storm surge. Its hills and waterways spared nearby neighborhoods like Travis, Bulls Head, New Springville and Arden Heights much worse flooding. The 2,200-acre site, which closed a decade ago and is being turned into a park, was also temporarily reopened as a transfer station, helping officials and relief agencies clear debris from around the city.

If many New Yorkers, Staten Islanders included, still can’t help thinking of the place as a mountain range of stinking trash, that’s understandable. But since its closing, Fresh Kills has become a model for landfill reclamation around the world, having been transformed into a vast green space full of wildlife. Now it is also demonstrating the role of wetland buffers in battling rising waters.

Maybe this will help push officials to ready what is known as Freshkills Park for visitors. James Corner, the landscape architect who helped design the High Line and heads the firm Field Operations, won a competition years ago to transform the site and imagined a decades-long, evolving earthwork of different grasses, grown, cut and replanted, creating a rich new soil and landscape.

It’s a visionary plan. But regulatory and financial hurdles, along with the usual bureaucratic conflicts, have stalled progress. The state environmental agency wants to make sure the site is safe, which makes sense. At the same time, the price tag — by some estimates, hundreds of millions of dollars — has clearly daunted city leaders and led officials to pursue a piecemeal transformation that could undo Mr. Corner’s concept.

Considering the unconscionable $4 billion (or more) that is being squandered on a new PATH station at the World Trade Center site for perhaps 50,000 commuters, the cost of Fresh Kills doesn’t sound quite so crazy. Now there’s word that the Metropolitan Transit Authority may need to spend $600 million to restore the South Ferry subway station, which opened just in 2009 and was flooded by the storm. It’s hard to say which is more scandalous, that the authority’s planners hadn’t anticipated flooding at a station on the water’s edge, or that subway fare increases will partly go to pay for their shortsightedness.

By comparison, Fresh Kills has come out smelling like roses.

I recently paid a visit and shot a video of the site with my colleague David Frank and Eloise Hirsh, administrator of Freshkills Park for the New York City Parks Department. No wonder Mr. Corner discovered such potential in what has become a timely research post for climate change and ecological restoration. Once it is opened to the public, the park also promises to repay long-suffering Staten Island residents who endured generations of stench and anger, and more than that, to give the entire city an immense, bucolic urban playland — a 21st-century postindustrial landmark rising from mounds of 20th-century waste.

Who knows? In its shift from blight to boon, it could become a park as unexpected and transformative for the city as the High Line.

Follow Michael Kimmelman on Twitter, @kimmelman.

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