A Tower on Billionaires' Row Is Full of Cracks. Who's to Blame?
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A luxury tower on Billionaires' Row in NYC is experiencing structural issues, sparking debate about developer accountability and the prioritization of aesthetics over engineering realities.
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It also raises the issue of new dev condos in NY in general - there are always problems and stakeholders are often busier trying to allocate blame than fix them.
The $100M repair bill sounds staggering, but put against a $2.5B sell through price for 125 units.. we are talking 4%.
The facade photos are scary for such a young building, this thing is not going to age well, clearly will be a public safety issue soon. This is what the city's otherwise overzealous facade inspection schedule is made for.
Sloppy is not knowing what externalities are.
TBD how much "over" might be. Further down, there's a $160M estimate.
Then there's the issue of whether all those repairs would work correctly, to actually fix everything. Vs. needing a $tbdM second round of repairs. Or more.
To summarize - a quarter of the floors of the building are uninhabited mechanical floors, which exist purely to push up the total height of the building. This allowed pushing inhabited floors higher more desirable views and pricing.
The loophole was more or less that only inhabited floors counted against the building square footage / height zoning. No one contemplated that a developer would be willing to waste 25% of floors to juice the height, but given the 0.1% market he was selling into.. it worked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/nyregion/tallest-building...
I’m curious if this just isn’t already well known in the zoning world? We build tall buildings because the higher floors are more valuable which make up for the smaller amount of total real estate. Logical extension of this is to sacrifice whole floors for height if that is what zoning required. I’m also curious how long it took someone to figure out this loophole (since it’s easy to say it’s obvious after the fact).
What actually happens is square footage per floor decreases with increased height. But a 20 or 80 story building still has strictly much more square footage than a 15 story one, perhaps excepting the absolute narrowest buildings.
And due to the premium you can charge for the upper floors, there's eventually an inflection point where profit per floor starts increasing again.
(Land-constrained, as in, when buying two equivalent lots and building half-height buildings becomes less profitable than building a skyscraper or supertall, due to massive demand for high-floor views, combined with sky-high nearby lot prices.)
Point of trivia: apparently there are terms for each 100m of height: Lowrise -> Highrise -> Skyrise (Skyscrapers) -> Supertalls.
Given the state of capitalism I wouldn't put it above and beyond ruthless property developers to consider the initial building costs as cheap investments to reserve space on the property map, and help keep condo prices high. And cut corners during the construction to increase ROI.
(This is the whole reason "old mill into apartments" conversions exist, obviously not in NYC though. You literally couldn't build those footprint buildings on those lots today without non-starter size investments in compliance stuff).
Chinese, Russian, and Gulf billionaires buy them to serve as emergency assets. Losing some value doesn't matter to them as long as they have a few hundred million dollars stashed away in NYC, London, Geneva as physical property.
https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/geography/chpt/spatial-fix...
https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...
Not sure if it's enough, but it's something.
I like this part:
False declarations
False property status declarations may result in fines of up to $10,000 per day of the continuing offense, in addition to payment of the tax.
Is there a requirement for owner occupancy?
But I fail to see how a hundred or so buildings sold to millionaires and billionaires numbering in the thousands has any affect at all in a city with 20 million people.
Again, surely it’s not the best nor most democratic thing that these buildings exist at all.
But I don’t see how it can impact the bread and butter real estate and rental market. Surely this is caused by the city’s numerous bad housing policies like rent control, zoning, public transportation, education.
Regardless, given the scarcity of housing space in NYC, I’d expect that if more of it is used as a store of wealth, housing prices will generally increase.
Are you suggesting that, in practice, the currently levied taxes prevent this?
In expensive parts of Northwest Brooklyn & Queens, the waterfront which is a 15 minute walk to the subway was zoned to put up a ton of 40+ story residential towers. It's far enough away that many of them run private shuttle busses to the subway.
Meanwhile the subway station (Bedford Ave particularly) that you walk to from said waterfront is surrounded by 3-4 story buildings.. as is most of the walk there.
The difference is there were already people in those 3-4 story buildings to show up to city council meetings & whine about any zoning changes, unlike the previously industrial water front.
> Why would you want to eliminate this?
Because I believe we can do better than living off the scraps of the obscenely wealthy.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-overheard-hot-mic-apparently...
(I'm of course always expecting to be disappointed though)
> ...and new cracks are appearing in its load-bearing facade.
No bets on whether it'll survive the next https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_in_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_8lrUPaLIY
The problem here is not a general one with urban building quality in the US, but the fact that this specific piece is a part of a many-headed scam: the developers themselves built it quickly and cheaply because they knew that their clients are using it as a (foreign) asset, and not as a living space. The tenants in turn are doing exactly that, and they knew exactly what they were getting into; the reason they’re suing is to protect the value of their asset for the next sucker. Normal buildings in the US, including new builds, do not have this particular dynamic.
In terms of freeze/thaw cycles, it's not really about having annual cycles that makes a climate harsh, but rather having persistent daily cycles. A climate where the winter daily high sits comfortably above freezing and the winter daily low sits comfortably below freezing is going to be much harsher on buildings than one where the weather goes below freezing in fall and stays below freezing all winter--you're seeing like 10× the freeze/thaw cycles per year.
Between climate change and urban heat island effect, Manhattan is probably moving into the winter-daily-freeze/thaw-cycle climate zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_the_mos...
And ironically, San Francisco's "Billionaire's Row" (Pacific Heights) is the exact opposite of NYC's, being mostly old single family homes far away from the core of the city.
The three countries you mention build skyscrapers in far more densely populated areas. Canada and Australia may be huge, but they are mostly empty and all the population congregates in a tiny fraction of the land area. The US is more more evenly populated by comparison.
The thing to compare here, which might be tricky to get numbers on, is skyscrapers per local population density.
Housing can either be an affordable resource for people to live in, or an asset that’s likely to appreciate faster than the rate of inflation. There are strong arguments for both. As New Yorkers we need to make our vote in November count and decide which is the priority.
Even if someone guaranteed to me that this was the safest building in the world, my acrophobia would absolutely prevent me from living in a place that swayed in the wind like this.
His channel is an interesting view into how badly designed a lot of very expensive real estate happens to be.
https://youtu.be/j8_DZQrfgRA?si=FcfIU3B6KFw3s31N
I'm sure that'll be good for the long-term safety of those buildings.
/s
The repair cost sounds cheap tbh.
Also recommend watching the B1M video on this that others have recommended.
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