“We’re not going to let the form of the community, whether private or gated, stand in the way of getting the outcome we all want, which is to help them recover,” he said. “It’s in everyone’s interest to get these communities back. If they’re successful, the city is successful.”

William Korn, 52, the owner of a bakery who says his house in Sea Gate sustained over $300,000 in damage, said the city should pay for rebuilding the community even if it is gated because residents pay city taxes. “I don’t pay for water?” he said rhetorically, as if the question were absurd. “I don’t pay for real estate taxes — $6,000 a year? I don’t pay for services? I pay all those. Just because we have a private community? I pay for that private community.”

Charles Brecher, research director at the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission, said that obligation should be factored in to any decision. “We should help people in disasters but we should hold people responsible for what they’ve agreed to be responsible for,” he said.

The city planning department said it did not know how many private communities that control their own streets were in the city’s borders. There are at least eight, though not all are gated, including Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, Edgewater Park in the Bronx and the Tides at Charleston and Bay Street Landing in Staten Island.

More suburban New Jersey has about 6,000 private communities, said Professor Franzese.

Each gated community has discrete historical origins. In the late 19th century Sea Gate boasted plutocratic property owners like the Vanderbilt and Morgan families, but a real estate company bought the land and then sold it to a homeowners association in 1899. Breezy Point was an informal bungalow colony in the early 20th century, but a real estate corporation bought the underlying land in 1960 and residents — many of them police officers, firefighters and city workers — purchased half of that property as a cooperative that today has over 3,000 homes. One of the more recent private communities is the Tides, a six-year-old, 190-house complex for people older than 55.

Developers apply to get the names of any city streets within a purchased plot removed from official city maps, which requires a vote by the City Council.

If demapping is approved, the street essentially becomes private property and the community can choose to bar nonresidents, though the city can apply leverage during the negotiations over land use to keep the street open to the public — as the streets of Fieldston, a private but not gated community, are in the Bronx.