A 56-year-old man suffered “trauma throughout his body” when heavy winds brought down the tree near 700 Euclid Avenue in East New York.
Page F6From§Eachthe late evening edition — 26 September 2026
HUD proposes cutting flood protections for low-income housing as nor'easter kills, floods New Jersey homes
As it ran on the front
In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed rescinding key portions of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, the rule requiring federally funded housing to account for flood risk before it is built. That is the filing. Here is the table: on September 2, ProPublica reported that in North Carolina's Hurricane Helene disaster zone, on the same flood-prone parcel where the storm killed a man's wife and destroyed his mobile home, a new set of tenants is now leasing the ground. The land did not change. The paperwork did.
On September 8, housing and environmental advocates went on record against the HUD rollback, warning it would shift flood costs onto taxpayers and flood risk onto low-income households, and would do so ahead of the next storm rather than after the last one.…
…(cont) On September 26, the next storm arrived on schedule: a nor'easter, not a hurricane, moving through the tri-state with gale winds and heavy rain. In East New York, a 56-year-old man was killed when the wind brought down a tree near 700 Euclid Avenue; the reported cause was "trauma throughout his body." Across the Hudson, roads in New Jersey went underwater, some homes with them, and more than 70,000 customers across the Northeast lost power.
Reconcile the ledger, hon: one standard proposed for removal in July, one warning filed against it in September, one man killed under a tree in the same storm season, one round of New Jersey road and home flooding the same weekend, and one Helene-zone lot, already known to flood, currently under a new lease to people the file does not show were told what happened to the last tenant.
This desk counts; it does not accuse. The receipts do not say the rollback moved the tree limb over Euclid Avenue, and this desk will not say it either. What the receipts show is narrower and harder to explain away: the standard came off the books in a flood season, the flood season delivered a death and a flooded state within three weeks of the advisory against removing it, and the parcel that already failed once is back on the market before the next family finds out the hard way. The gap between what gets cut and what keeps happening to the same ground is not a coincidence column. It is the only column that balances.
“They pull the flood rule before the flood, then turn around and rent the exact same washed-out lot to the next family too broke to ask why it's cheap — that's not bad luck, that's a business model with a zip code. A man's dead under a tree in Brooklyn, roads are underwater in Jersey, and the paperwork in Washington got there first. Follow the address, not the storm.”
“Look, the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard was slowing down permitting for the exact affordable housing everybody says they want built faster, so HUD's cutting red tape, that's efficiency, that's supply — the units get built quicker, they just also apparently sit downstream of a tree. Did I say that? That's not the line. The point is the rule was outdated, and any storm activity this week is a completely separate meteorological matter, unrelated, don't connect those, I didn't connect those.”
The receipts
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) — More than 70,000 customers were without electricity in the U.S. Northeast on Saturday, the effect of a powerful nor’easter expected to create dangerous conditions through the weekend. Forecasters warned of gale winds that could down trees and heavy rain that could put roads underwater.
· Critics Decry Trump HUD's Proposed Rollback of Flood Protections for Low-Income Homes from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Hurricane Helene Killed His Wife and Destroyed His Mobile Home. New Tenants Are Now Renting the Same Flood-Prone Land. from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.