The 10-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy is a little more than a week away, and News 12 is remembering how we were impacted in New Jersey and the road to rebuild – as some are still recovering 10 years later.

News 12’s Brian Donohue was in front of a Lavallette house 10 years ago that his family rented every year for a two-week vacation in the 1970s and 80s -- go back now and things look very, very different. There's a new, bigger house there now.

One with a story to tell about how the Jersey Shore has rebuilt in the years after Sandy, about how the shore has changed and whether we're going in the right direction as sea levels rise and storms intensify.

The house was a simple two family, the rental unit had no phone or TV. The owners were a retired Yonkers police officer and his wife, who lived downstairs. They sold in the late 80s to another family who kept it the same until Sandy hit.

A year later, a developer bought it for $1.1 million, sold it again in 2014 for $2.5 million, with a realtor's sales flier telling buyers to knock the old place down and "build big,” and as was done up and down the shore amid the post-Sandy gold rush -- build big they did.

The new house was built even closer to the ocean. This is quintessential New Jersey.

In North Carolina, for example, the state requires any a waterfront home being rebuilt after a storm to be built farther away from the water. If there's not enough room on the lot, the property owner is out of luck. Managed retreat, experts call it -- common sense most would say, also a dirty word in New Jersey real estate.

“It doesn't seem like New Jersey really chose an approach; the approach was to elevate,” says Peter Kasabach, with the planning advocacy group New Jersey Future.

“So when a property was destroyed if someone wanted to rebuild, they just had to rebuild a bit higher which is probably a little bit better than rebuilding exactly the same way, but it doesn't take into account the long term impacts which people in North Carolina are looking at, which is these storms are only going to get worse, these situations are only going to get worse,” says Kasabach.

Over the past decade, the story of 1202 oceanfront repeated thousands of times over, bigger higher buildings, and yes, in some places moving even closer to the water. It's made the shore a different place. That's been the strategy for when the next storm comes along, and time will tell if it was the right one.