What that wobbling New York office tower reveals about America’s housing crisis

A building almost collapsed in Manhattan. The backstory is surprisingly hopeful.

“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.”

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........

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