In the countdown to Hurricane Sandy last month, construction workers on a teeming pier in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, rushed to strap down materials and move forklifts and excavators into half-built structures to shield them from the tempest to come.
But the real storm preparations had been accomplished six years earlier, when Sims Metal Management approved a design for a state-of-the-art city recycling plant that is rising at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal.
Reviewing projections for local sea-level rise, the company and its architects decided to elevate portions of the site to heights exceeding city requirements by four feet. Using recycled glass and crushed rock discarded from projects like the Second Avenue subway line, they raised the foundation for the plant's four buildings and a dock.
The fill added $550,000 to the plant's costs of around $100 million, said Thomas Outerbridge, Sims Metal's general manager.
But it proved more than worth it. When a 12-foot storm surge swept through nearby streets and parking lots on Oct. 29, the plant's dock and partly completed buildings did not flood.
"It paid for itself long before we expected it," Mr. Outerbridge said. "It was built with the idea that, over the next 40 years, this would prove a prudent thing — and the proof came during construction."
For years, experts have warned that New York City has failed to keep pace with the threats posed by sea-level rise along the 520-mile coastline of the city's five boroughs. Builders that have taken steps on their own, like Sims Metal, have been relatively few.
But as city officials and real estate developers ponder a landscape of devastation from the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan to the Rockaways in Queens to Midland Beach on Staten Island, new flood protections for all building types suddenly seem inevitable, whether voluntary or mandated by new laws.
"Now there's a different calculus," the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said. "You pay now or you pay more later."
Last week, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn convened a new "building resiliency" task force to study potential changes in the building code and to make recommendations by the summer. Ms. Quinn said she anticipated that the city would require retrofits to reinforce existing structures and more floodproofing for new projects.
The chairman of the task force, Russell Unger, is executive director of the Urban Green Council, which advises the city on sustainable building issues. He said the new group would need to address both direct impacts from the storm, like structure collapse and flooding, and secondary ones, like power losses from utility failures. Levels of protection will have to vary according to location, building use and other variables, he said.
Speaking of the different expectations for different buildings, for example, Mr. Unger said, "we probably expect elevators at senior centers to work, no matter what happens."
Some of the potential measures are relatively simple, like keeping sandbags handy and installing floodgates at building entrances. Others are more complicated, like relocating critical equipment like boilers above ground level or encasing them in watertight enclosures and rebuilding houses on concrete piles.
The storm's aftermath also revealed a need for emergency generators to run at least one elevator in tall residential buildings and to pump water to high floors so the buildings remain habitable after a severe storm, some owners said.
Yet some builders say they have every incentive not to wait for government mandates and have taken some steps on their own.
At Queens West, the sprawling multiuse riverfront complex in Long Island City, Queens, the developer TF Cornerstone built higher over fill, eliminated basements, installed mechanical systems on the first and second floors and added floodgates at the entrances of five residential buildings, said Jon McMillan, the firm's director of planning. He said the firm was acting on advice from Architectonica, a Miami firm that is familiar with the ravages of hurricanes.
During Hurricane Sandy, Mr. McMillan said, the water did not reach the lobby doors of the five buildings, which are all occupied, so the protections were not tested.
Still, such provisions might have made a big difference at another TF Cornerstone property, the 52-story luxury high-rise at 2 Gold Street in Lower Manhattan, he said. The flooding there knocked out the building's electrical and mechanical systems, and residents of its 850 apartments have been told they cannot return home until March because the equipment, which corrodes with saltwater, has to be reordered and built.
"This is in the center of Lower Manhattan on the East Side, so we were not thinking about sea-level rise," Mr. McMillan said of the building, completed in 2005.
TF Cornerstone is now planning to create watertight, submarine-like enclosures for the electrical room and other equipment at 2 Gold, he said. And the firm is considering placing all mechanical equipment above ground in a new Midtown project it envisions building on the Hudson.
Some in the real estate industry predict a new appeal for midrise buildings. Thomas Guss, a broker who caters to an international wealthy clientele, said interest in smaller luxury residential buildings like the 19-floor Centurion, a condominium at 33 West 56th Street designed by I. M. Pei, had doubled since the storm. He said potential buyers had told him they feared being trapped in their apartments with no lights or water, or having to climb 50 flights of stairs.
"Suddenly, people who wanted the 50th floor now want the 15th," he said. "People realize that when there's no elevator, maybe the view is not as magical anymore."
Some developers worry about losing rentable space above ground to mechanical equipment. Others are reluctant to forgo the aesthetics of ground-floor luxury retail stores. Still, that lesson has been well absorbed in flood-prone areas of New Orleans and Hamburg, Germany, where homes have been rebuilt on stilts and waterfronts raised.
Some architects and building experts say the city should widen its efforts to plant more wetlands and parks that can serve as natural buffers to floods. "All the little blades of grass actually makes the flow of the water lower," said Susannah C. Drake, associate director of the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design and the principal architect at dlandstudio.
What does not seem to be getting consideration, at least for now, is banning development altogether in the city's flood zones, humble or affluent.
"This is not a viable policy option in New York City, and to be honest, nor is it in any other major coastal city I've been working," said Jeroen Aerts, a water risk expert from the Free University in Amsterdam who has been hired by the mayor's office to assess flood protections. "The stakes of developers and general economic activities in the waterfront are too high."
In Mr. Aerts's view, the most realistic options for New York are to build levees and surge barriers, and elevate and floodproof buildings.
Ms. Quinn, a likely candidate for mayor when Mr. Bloomberg's term expires at the end of 2013, said changes in the building code were a far higher priority than rethinking zoning rules. But she said that nothing was off the table.
"I don't think there's anything that's taboo to discuss at this point," she said.
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