Building at risk of collapse in New York exposes city's housing crisis

A 37-story building at the intersection of 42nd Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan, which housed Pfizer's former headquarters and is being converted to residential use, showed risk of collapse earlier this week. Columns on the 21st floor were visibly giving way, with cracks, after reports to the city's Fire Department. The entire surrounding area was evacuated, affecting commercial buildings, hotels, and the Brazilian Consulate, located across from the building — consular services resumed on Thursday (9).

The incident reignited the debate over New York's housing crisis, which has worsened since the 1990s and intensified after the pandemic. The project is by Metro Loft, a company that pioneered this type of conversion since 1997, and if completed, would be the largest of its kind in the city's history, with more than 1,600 high-end apartments planned for 2027 — now suspended.

The city's vacancy rate, at 1.41% according to data from two years ago, is the lowest since 1965, with only 33,000 units available out of a stock of 2.3 million. The average available rent in 2023 was $3,500, requiring an annual income of $140,000 to avoid spending more than 30% of the household budget. More than half of the city's families are burdened by housing costs, and evictions have risen: 8,000 families were evicted in the first half of this year alone.

In response, Mayor Zohran Mamdani proposed, at the end of June, a rent freeze on approximately 1 million apartments between October of this year and September of next year. In the early hours of Wednesday (8), engineers managed to stabilize the building's structure with additional beams, and part of the area was able to resume operations, although the main road remains blocked to cars and pedestrians.

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