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.
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...
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).
> ...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_...
I'm sure that'll be good for the long-term safety of those buildings.
/s
danso•2h ago