“Gotta go,” a young woman murmured into her phone, slipping into a gaggle of gawking New Yorkers pointing and staring at a teetering office tower in the heart of midtown Manhattan on Tuesday. “This building’s like collapsing in New York.”
What that wobbling New York office tower reveals about America’s housing crisis
A building almost collapsed in Manhattan. The backstory is surprisingly hopeful.
If you squinted past the police barricades, you could see the sagging upper floors of the old Pfizer building at East 42nd Street between Second and Third Avenues, where steel beams had begun “bending like cigarettes” that morning, threatening dozens of luxury apartments being carved into the empty office spaces above.
Making housing out of high-rises was supposed to be common sense, a lemons-into-lemonade fix for a nation with a massive glut of underused office towers and a dire shortage of homes. In the six years since the pandemic instigated a major pivot to remote work, tens of thousands of such office-to-residential conversions have sprouted up across the country, including the 1,600-unit project planned for the former Pfizer headquarters, the largest project of its kind in New York City history, which involves retrofitting the existing structures and adding multiple new floors and expansions above them.
It’s not yet known precisely why a chunk of it nearly came tumbling down this week, or why inspectors and project managers failed to note that the original 1960s columns would buckle under the weight of the added floors. One union worker blamed the developer’s reliance on mostly non-union labor. Others have pointed to the site’s history of safety violations. Still others, including many experts, say that it could well have been an engineering failure or a miscalculation baked into the renovation’s blueprints. (Neither the building’s developer nor the architectural firm behind the redevelopment responded to Vox’s request for comment.) Regardless, the near collapse is not an indictment of all such projects, but a reminder that they are often exceptionally hard to pull off.
They are also worth it. Over the past few years, cities have gotten much better at turning empty offices into housing by offering generous incentives for wary developers and peeling off layers and layers of red tape. Meanwhile, architects have gotten much cleverer with the design hacks that can affordably and safely retrofit a vast, sterile office space into a place you could call home. As a result, over 90,000 apartments are now being built out of empty office buildings across the US, according to RentCafe, up from just over 23,000 in progress in 2022.
If momentum continues to grow, these new apartments could help put a serious dent in America’s housing shortage — experts agree that we need a few million more homes to lower rent and mortgages — with the bonus of being located in some of the most desirable and well-connected neighborhoods in the nation. Converting empty office spaces into housing is also significantly faster, often cheaper, and much less carbon-intensive than building from scratch.
But teaching an old building new tricks is still difficult, delicate work. And as New York City learned the hard way this week, if something goes wrong, it can go very wrong very fast. “Every building is different,” said Anita Kramer, senior vice president at the Urban Land Institute. “You don’t know what you’re getting until you take it down to the bare bones,” until you “rip out the guts and get down to the cement slabs and the beams.”
What it actually takes to turn an office building into an apartment
You’d be forgiven for assuming that turning offices into apartments is more or less as simple as plucking out the water coolers, swapping cubicles for kitchenettes, and erecting a few extra walls here and there.
Not so. In many cases, such conversions involve gutting the original building to comply with housing codes requiring dwellings to have amenities like operable windows or a running shower. When you build from the ground up, you can incorporate those requirements from the get-go, but it can be pricier and more complex to make them work after the fact.
“If someone gets a piece of fabric and sews it [to the contours of] your body,” explained Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at Brookings Metro, who studies office-to-residential conversions, “it’s going to fit way better than if you turn a bag inside out and cut a hole for your head.” Likewise, you can’t tweak a building made for corporate offices into one built for living without getting quite crafty.
Some buildings are naturally easier to change than others. New York City legitimized thousands of once illicit artist lofts — located inside abandoned warehouses, mills, and factories — by bringing them up to city housing codes in the 1980s. This was relatively straightforward because such factories were built over a century ago, when the sort of narrow floor plans, high ceilings, and wide windows well-suited for apartments were still the norm for most new construction.
But most post-World War II office towers were built differently, with massive floor plans whose windowless interiors and central air conditioning might work for cubicles, but that work less well when broken up into individual units. As if poking a hole through a slice of bread and calling it a bagel, the developer behind the old Pfizer HQ carved out two deep atriums in a converted office tower in Manhattan’s financial district to let in enough natural light to build 1,320 apartments. Since most such buildings have central air conditioning and plumbing, making sure each new unit has its own individualized systems means punching small Swiss cheese-style holes throughout the structure and patching up the gaps with a concrete slab later.
“There’s this whole subsegment of developers that are learning how nimble they have to be” to make such designs work well, said Kramer, finding themselves “redesigning and redesigning the configuration of all the units” as they unearth unanticipated challenges or materials in the original building that they didn’t know about until they took out the guts.
Loh emphasized that adding new floors on top of old ones, as in the Pfizer project, is a common practice to make the most of a prime location. Under normal circumstances, she said, “steel-frame high-rise construction is incredibly stable.” But stitching new, widened top floors to the top of a building’s pre-existing 1900s structure is also a delicate, somewhat miraculous engineering feat. If something gets overlooked, either in the engineering or construction process — like a failure to properly reinforce a building’s original steel columns, as appears to be the case this time — it can have drastic consequences.
“The need for checks and balances to protect health and safety are real,” said Loh, but “the key takeaway here is not ‘Oh, we shouldn’t have done that’” at a time when momentum is rising rapidly, and developers are getting better and better at anticipating new challenges each year. Turning empty office buildings into housing is challenging, and sometimes even risky, but it can be done. Or as Loh puts it, “We should do that. We just need to make sure we have enough inspectors.”