New York City Enclaves, Long Gated, Seek to Let In Storm Aid Benjamin Eisenstein, walking over debris in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, grew up in the community and came by to help a friend who still lives there. Sea Gate looks the same as many storm-scattered waterfront communities do. Home after home torn apart by the ocean. Streets filled with sand. Shattered sidewalks and clogged sewers. A sea wall, which had already been inadequate to the task of safeguarding residents, reduced to rubble. Ordinarily, New York City or other governmental entities might take over the tasks of restoring a middle-class neighborhood like this. But Sea Gate, with its 850 homes on Coney Island's western tip, is not an ordinary neighborhood. It is a 113-year-old private, gated community, where the razor-wire-topped fences and armed security checkpoints that keep outsiders from its streets, beaches and parks serve as a constant reminder that the residents of this community have chosen to live somewhat apart. Once the gilded retreat of the Vanderbilt family, Sea Gate, like other gated communities in New York, preserved its exclusivity with the promise that the residents would assume the costs of community upkeep, maintaining their own streets, parks and sewer systems and even fielding the distinct Sea Gate Police Department. The special status endured, through occasional controversy and political efforts to open the streets to the public, because of the community's self-sufficiency. But the damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy to Sea Gate, in Brooklyn, and another gated community, Breezy Point, in Queens, was so monumental that residents who are already struggling to figure out how they will pay to rebuild their homes say they cannot afford to pay the additional cost of repairing communal infrastructure. So neighborhoods that have long held the rest of the city at arm's length now seek the financial embrace of the city, state and federal governments. That turnaround has been ill-received among some on the other side of the fence from Sea Gate, in historically troubled apartment towers like Sea Rise, where Cesar Catala, 29, picked up some hot food from a relief tent on Monday. "They seclude themselves," said Mr. Catala, who has lived in Coney Island nearly his entire life. We don't have problems with Sea Gate, but they put their noses down at us. We get treated like we're second class, just because they live in houses and we live in the projects and we rent. They say they need assistance and, fine, maybe they do need assistance. But they have insurance on their houses. We don't have insurance. We don't have much out here. In Breezy Point, a gated community on the western edge of the Rockaways, 111 homes burned to the ground during the storm. "We'd be foolish not to ask for help," said Steve Greenberg, former chairman of the Breezy Point cooperative's board and a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley. We would hope that we see something, but if we don't see something we're prepared to go forward to keep the community. Leaving aside the policy question of whether flood-prone communities should be rebuilt at all, these insular areas pose unusual challenges for public agencies. Community officials have long maintained that their enclaves are no different than a Park Avenue apartment house with its own doorman, a horizontal rather than a vertical development. But, to continue the analogy, apartment buildings do not ask the city to retile their hallways or fix their plumbing. The residents of gated communities pay all the same taxes - sewer, water and property - that any city property owner does, in addition to their private association charges. But the city does not appear to have a formal obligation to provide services, like road and sewer maintenance, for the infrastructure that gated communities agreed to maintain. "Now, with this unexpected act of God, those same communities, quite ready to point a finger at government shortcomings, are placed in the difficult position of having to reach out to government for a substantial helping hand," said Paula A. Franzese, a law professor at Seton Hall University who has written extensively about gated communities.