When something goes wrong with a building in New York, it shakes more than steel and concrete. It also shakes trust.
A month ago, two structural columns buckled on the 21st floor of 235 East 42nd Street in Manhattan, part of the former Pfizer headquarters complex being transformed into what will be the nation’s largest office-to-residential conversion. Rumors circulated that the entire building might be in danger of collapse; spectators gathered to gawk.
Several nearby buildings were evacuated until the floors could be reinforced and the high-rise stabilized. Soon there were reports of problems on many other construction sites, including other office-to-residential conversions.
Life in a crowded city like New York depends on trust, not the least in the stability of the massive towers around us and in the humans who build them. At a time when confidence in essentially all of our institutions is at a low, it’s understandable that New Yorkers might look around and question whether corners are being cut and whether their safety might be at risk.
That fear is real. The industry can’t just say “nothing to see here” when something like the Pfizer mess happens so visibly. And unfortunately, mistakes do happen on job sites. Modern construction is governed by a complex system with many levels of scrutiny — and that system is strengthened by lessons from its failures, including the one at the Pfizer building.During my time at City Hall working for multiple administrations, on housing, economic development and infrastructure policy, I worked with public servants to consider regulatory reforms to protect public safety and build more housing. On construction sites, I got to see projects through a different lens: hundreds of skilled professionals, inspectors, engineers and tradespeople, whose daily work is devoted to building safely, on time and on budget.
Those experiences leave me with a respect not only for the complexity of building in a city like New York but also for the remarkable number of people and systems whose job it is to prevent failures.
Earlier this year, I left government and started a firm that advises owners and developers pursuing complex real estate projects, including office-to-residential conversions. Right now, there is a concern among many in the industry that the incidents of the past month could put a damper on the office-to-residential success story and the next generation of conversion projects, precisely at the time when these projects are delivering thousands of units into a housing market that is drastically undersupplied.
Buildings are not designed, reviewed, constructed and inspected by a single all-knowing entity. Instead, they emerge from a long chain of decisions involving owners, architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, special inspectors and public regulators. A sound calculation can be undermined by a field condition that differs from the drawings, a construction sequence that was not anticipated, a warning that was not promptly reported or an ambiguity about who had authority to stop the work.
The Pfizer building failure deserves a complete and transparent investigation. We need to know what happened, when warning signs appeared and whether the plans, construction and inspections conformed to the law and accepted professional practices.
The subsequent issues at other conversion project sites deserve similar scrutiny. Indeed, investigators have broadened their review. The appropriate lesson is not to presume every project is unsafe, but to let evidence — not anxiety — determine whether systemic changes are warranted.
New York has a long history of learning from failure — even disaster. Its building code, fire code and body of construction law are, in part, accumulated records of past failures. That iterative process has made the city far safer.
Major alterations that add substantial weight or change a building’s structural system could warrant expanded independent review at defined stages of design and construction. Structural distress encountered in the field should trigger immediate, unambiguous reporting requirements.
The Department of Buildings needs enough experienced engineers and inspectors to focus on projects with the greatest consequences. But, as was pointed out in a June report by the state comptroller, the Buildings Department has had a hard time recruiting and retaining inspectorial and engineering staff members. The last reported head count, in December, was 1,613 employees, but the budgeted head count is now 1,855, so the department may have as many as 242 funded but unfilled positions. Hiring must be sped up, even if that means easing some Civil Service restrictions.
And when an unexpected condition appears, the person empowered to stop work and the professional accountable for deciding whether it can resume should be unmistakably clear. Right now, whether or not something is reported to the Buildings Department is a judgment call by owners, contractors, subcontractors or engineers on each project. In the weeks after the Pfizer incident, there were a few additional stop-work orders at other buildings . The industry needs to have tighter protocols on reporting potential problems to the Buildings Department.
The city should also publish the findings of its investigation in a form that engineers, builders and regulators can learn from.
This is particularly important now. New York has a severe housing shortage, while millions of square feet of older office space no longer meet the needs of the commercial market. Converting and expanding those buildings can produce tens of thousands of homes, reduce office vacancy rates and renew aging business districts. Conversions are also faster than ground-up construction and, by adapting what is already built, have smaller carbon footprints.
But these projects are complicated, which is a reason to manage them well.
Cities have always been acts of optimism. Every bridge, tower, tunnel and apartment building reflects a collective decision to trust strangers — to trust that engineers did the math correctly, that inspectors asked the hard questions, that workers took pride in their craft and that our institutions kept us safe. That trust can never be blind, and instead it must be earned and maintained and continuously strengthened. The events of the past month are an opportunity to do just that.
Nate Bliss, the founder of Latent Urban Ventures, is a veteran of the Adams, de Blasio and Bloomberg administrations in New York, where he worked on housing, economic development, and infrastructure policy.
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