steveBK123
4 hours ago
Used to work next to this tower, was always oddly empty. The only movement you ever saw were maids cleaning the occupied units. Many units were unoccupied concrete shells, 7 years after sales began and 5 years after construction completion.
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.
nabla9
3 hours ago
As many of the owners are billionaires or close to it, it's no surprise that it's mostly empty. Most of them don't live in NYC; they just don't want to live in a five star hotel while visiting.
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.
raybb
an hour ago
It’s also an example of the "spatial fix," where global capital parks itself in real estate as a safe asset rather than in the local economy. Basically turning urban housing into a storage vehicle for surplus wealth instead of a place for people to live.
https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/geography/chpt/spatial-fix...
pbronez
37 minutes ago
Yup. We should tax this out of existence.
bbarnett
12 minutes ago
In Vancouver they charge more property tax if the building is empty.
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.
bell-cot
4 hours ago
> In all, the problems at 432 Park could cost over $100 million to remedy, according to engineering reports that the condo board commissioned and the independent engineers who reviewed the tower’s condition.
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.
steveBK123
3 hours ago
Worth noting that dubious concrete is not the only way in which this developer pushed the envelope. The height itself was only possible by using a loophole that was quickly closed.
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...
milesvp
2 hours ago
Any building taller than 15 stories is likely already sacrificing square footage for height. As I understand it the square footage maximizing height with modern building techniques and materials is somewhere around 15 floors. As you go taller you need to start sacrificing internal volume for more reinforcing material and, surprisingly (to me when I learned this) elevators. The taller you go the more elevators you need to quickly move people around.
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).
margalabargala
8 minutes ago
It's not "sacrificing" square footage for height, it's just encountering diminishing returns. To say it's sacrificing for height, means square footage decreases with increased height.
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.
Projectiboga
16 minutes ago
I head from an architect that in most of Manhattan that the level where structural difficulty gets harder is just above 20, maybe 22 stories. That slightly higher level may be due to lots of Mahattan having solid bedrock close to base upon.
2OEH8eoCRo0
4 hours ago
I could picture an alternate reality where the cost of pedestrian injury is factored into the cost of doing business. People gathering below hoping to be hit by falling billionaire debris in hope of a payday.
ramses0
4 hours ago
blactuary
2 hours ago
A 2 year old was killed by a piece falling from a building a few years ago. Her father wrote a heartbreaking book about it https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/once-more-we-saw-stars-jays...
ks2048
3 hours ago
Reminds me of São Paulo's famous Copan building. It's tiles were falling off, so they covered it in a big net and haven't been able to fix it for 10+ years.
steveBK123
4 hours ago
An interesting thought experiment, but given the height of the building… it will be the victims families collecting any payday.
cyanydeez
3 hours ago
Externalities are the bane of capitalism. We wouldnt have capitalism if it had to be accountable.
m0llusk
an hour ago
That is sloppy thinking. If you have private property and the ability to profit from labor then you have Capitalism. The need to regulate architectural liabilities goes back as far as history. The current thinking that any regulation impedes Capitalism is both radical and new.
reactordev
3 hours ago
Probably a shell front for laundering money. Like the I-4 eye sore in Central Florida. Or Trump Towers. Or crypto.
billy99k
3 hours ago
Or million dollar art sold from a politician's son.
digdugdirk
2 hours ago
I do hope you've tuned your hypocrisy radar to appropriately detect the impact and scope of the issue, rather than blindly following partisan talking points.
_DeadFred_
an hour ago
I mean Trump just got caught on mic discussing business for his son. His sons literally made a billion dollars from a crypto pump and dump that's only value was it's ties to the current regime. This person doesn't care about corruption, they care about using it to promote their narrative:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-overheard-hot-mic-apparently...
reactordev
an hour ago
Corruption is the family business.
rapnie
4 hours ago
> against a $2.5B sell through price
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.
potato3732842
3 hours ago
Given the state of regulation I wouldn't put it beyond anyone with a brain to build now and just accept that the building is a cheap investment to get their floor plan and unit count grandfathered in and while they might have to deal with low vacancy and high ongoing/refit costs it'll pencil out in 5-15yr when every new development is saddled with costs they didn't pay and they'll be able to under-cut the market.
(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).