New York City is crumbling — and officials don’t “have enough oomph” to build it back up
New York City is a complicated place where several million people make life work for themselves and their families every day. It’s a place where on the same day a seven-story apartment building can collapse with no one injured, and a few hours later an 11-year-old boy can hang himself with his shoelaces.
It’s a mélange of the miraculous and the despairing.
It’s recovering from a once-in-a-century mass death event that, at one point, was killing over 700 people a day early in the more than two-year COVID pandemic that also disabled tens of thousands more. State and local governments, depending on the severity of their COVID experience, are still dealing with the consequences of the fractured, dysfunctional, and hyper-partisan response to the pandemic by the Trump administration
Such an unprecedented tribulation, including shutting down much of the economy for an extended time period, has impacted everything from truancy to building code compliance and enforcement. Hundreds of career New York City civil servants died due to their occupational exposure to the deadly virus that they brought home to their families. Thousands of career civil servants from a myriad of essential titles like first responders, civil engineers, social workers, mechanics, and teachers have opted to retire or move on.
There isn’t a realm of city services not affected — from social service agencies to the city’s Department of Design and Construction. The latter is shy several dozen engineers and architects. The Department of Buildings has 73 building inspectors open positions from its existing 550-member workforce.
Fiscal quicksand
This year, New York City’s full recovery is being kneecapped by a budget shortfall of several billion dollars that’s a consequence of excessive spending by the previous administration, as well as long-standing hidden subsidies to Wall Street, including the rebating back for decades of New York State’s nickel per hundred dollar Stock Transfer Tax that’s been on the books since before the First World War.
Since the early 1980s, when Albany decided to send the nickel per $100 tax back to Wall Street, the state lost out on well over $300 billion, all while the level of wealth concentration and inequality rose to levels not seen since the Gilded Age.
And while the federal government has declared the pandemic over and ended billions in state and local aid, the very local consequences from COVID are still playing out. The ending of the expansion of the Earned Income Child Tax Credit and curtailing of easier access to Medicaid means more struggling families turning to local and state agencies for help. Surviving family members are now caring for orphaned children. Teachers are grappling with a significant increase in chronic student absenteeism with Chalkbeat reporting “thirty-six percent of New York City public school students were chronically absent last school year, missing at least 10 percent of the school year.”
That represents an improvement from the previous year when chronic absenteeism exceeded 40 percent, “the highest rate in decades.” It still remains a “stubborn challenge” for educators trying to help students make up for “years of pandemic-fueled disruptions,” the news source reports.
“Every collapse is a bad collapse. But many of our buildings come from an older stock, and so you have this from time to time.” — New York City Mayor Eric Adams
New York City’s last such mass death, the so-called Spanish Flu during the First World War, officially took the lives of 30,000 New Yorkers when the city’s population was 5.6 million. COVID took the lives of nearly 45,000 New York City residents out of a population of roughly 8.3 million. Half a million of those survivors have subsequently left.
“When compared with other large U.S. cities, especially its two largest neighbors, Boston and Philadelphia, New York City did not fare poorly in its overall mortality burden. During the [Spanish Flu] pandemic, New York City’s excess death rate per 1,000 was reportedly 4.7, compared with 6.5 in Boston and 7.3 in Philadelphia,” according to public health researcher Francesco Aimone’s paper The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New York City: A Review of the Public Health Response
By contrast, New York City’s cumulative per capita COVID-19 death rate was about 50 percent higher than Los Angeles County’s, according to data from Johns Hopkins University through early March of this year.
“In raw numbers, New York City — with a population of more than 8.3 million — reported about 45,000 COVID deaths. L.A. County’s death toll was notably lower, about 36,000, even though the region is home to roughly 1.7 million more people,” the L.A. Times reported. “Put another way: For every 1 million New York City residents, about 5,400 of them died from COVID-19. The comparable figure in L.A. County is about 3,540.”
Arresting crime
At Mayor Eric Adams’ most recent press conference, he rightly took credit for his administration’s crime reduction efforts post-pandemic, with murders seeing better than an 11-percent drop going from 488 in 2021 to 433 last year, which was still nowhere near the well over 2,000 recorded annually in the early 1990s.
“Crime is down, what I ran on,” Adams told reporters. “Jobs are up. People are back on our subway system. Our economy is recovering, maybe not at the rate we want, but it is. We’ve put money into great programs from summer youth employment to all of these initiatives that we are doing constantly in this city.”
At Mayor Adams’ weekly Tuesday press avail, he parried reporters’ questions on the ongoing federal criminal probe into his campaign finances, as well as on the city’s shaky finances. On the previous Monday, a portion of a Bronx seven-story, almost 100-year-old apartment building, collapsed. A few hours later, an 11-year-old migrant from Venezuela hung himself with a shoelace at the Stratford Arms Hotel in Manhattan.
Adams observed that while the loss of the young boy was a life-altering tragedy for his family, it radiated a wake of misery and moral injury for the first responders and clinicians at Mount Sinai Hospital who fought with all they had to save him.
“Seventeen percent of our children in high school have serious suicidal thoughts —these are some very scary moments for our children, and it’s very painful. It hurts a lot,” Adams said. “You start to ask, did you do enough? Should we have done more? And we know we’ve done all we could possibly do with what we have, but it hurts a lot.”
In asking about the Bronx apartment building complex, a reporter referenced the April parking garage collapse on Ann Street in Lower Manhattan that killed one person and left five others injured. In that case, the facility had a number of open violations, including one from a 2003 inspection when officials wrote the property owner for “cracked, degraded and defective concrete,” according to the New York Times.
Adams disputed that there was an increase in catastrophic structural collapses on his watch.
“One, I don’t know if our numbers are larger than normal, if there’s such a turn as normal,” Adams said. “Every collapse is a bad collapse. But many of our buildings come from an older stock, and so you have this from time to time.”
But both collapses were the foreseeable consequences of systemic, multi-layered failures in a city that’s official mantra is “see something, say something.” With over one million structures and just 500 Department of Building inspectors to monitor them — the City of New York needs to rely on the eyes, nose, and ears of its population to speak up. Yet, in a sprawling bureaucracy that vested interest can easily exploit, those complaints often get lost.
See something, say something — but who is listening?
That’s exactly what thousands of New Yorkers did last year lodging over 21,000 emergency complaints with the Department of Buildings, up considerably from just over 17,000 four years earlier.
Tenants lodged over 364,000 complaints with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development for things like the lack of heat and hot water, up considerably from the 261,300 three years ago.
As the Daily News vividly reported, tenants at the Bronx apartment building had lodged dozens of complaints last month alone.
“In recent years, residents of the brick complex complained of strange odors, elevator outages that lasted days, or weeks and, in some cases, a general sense that the building was not structurally sound. ‘Multiple apartments in this building are overcrowded and you can hear the building deteriorating,’ said a complaint filed in 2017, according to the city Buildings Department.”
Miraculously, no one was killed in this partial building collapse in the Bronx. Would it not be unwise for the City of New York to think that luck will continue?
At the press conference following the collapse, Building Commissioner James Oddo, a former member of the City Council and Staten Island Borough President, said there was ongoing work on the apartment building’s façade, and that the cause of the collapse was under investigation.
Joel Kupferman is a public interest attorney who leads the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project which often represents tenants and workers with serious environmental issues where they live or work. He says the city’s real estate industry, which donates considerably to the city’s politicians, can easily escape accountability under current law.
“We are doing cases with major complaints and they [DOB] go to inspect and they are not allowed into the building,” Kupferman told Work-Bites. “So, there’s no seriousness about investigating. A landlord with just a little bit of smarts will just bar entry and avoid on-site inspection. There are thousands of cases that have been closed administratively — not because they determined the site was safe — but because the agency didn’t have enough oomph to follow up on enforcement.”
The annual Mayor’s Management Report supports Kupferman’s observation that gaining access is a considerable impediment to the DOB. In cases where the agency was investigating an alleged illegal residential conversion, which has had deadly consequences for civilians and firefighters, it only got site access 30.9 percent of the time, down from 41.4 percent the previous year. Similarly, in complaints about construction work being done without a permit access was granted and a violation was issued in just 30.4 percent of the cases, down from 33.4 percent the previous year.
“We make every effort to get inside of buildings with potential violations, visiting properties multiple times to investigate complaints if we can’t get inside the first time,” DOB press secretary Adams Rudansky said, adding that his agency has to also be respectful of property owners’ Fourth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution. When it comes to construction sites, the DOB spokesman told Work-Bites, “If we are denied access to a permitted building construction site under our jurisdiction, it will result in an immediate Stop Work Order and violations.”
But Kupferman notes, even when city enforcement produces a fine, landlords and developers often ignore the law and continue to prosper. According to an April report by the city’s Independent Budget Office, between the outstanding fines at DOB ($627 million), the FDNY ($76 million) and the Department of Sanitation ($76 million), there’s close to $800 million outstanding in uncollected fines that have accumulated between 2017 and 2022.
“Even when they get fined, they don’t pay it,” Kupferman said. “So, to me that’s the clearest sign of bad intent. The city is supposed to withhold work permits or new leases — but they don’t do that.”
STRUCTURAL FACADE?
Glenn Corbett is an assistant professor of fire science and public administration at John Jay College at the City University of New York. He believes that the collapse of the apartment building in the Bronx should prompt a citywide review of all structures of a similar vintage that fall under what’s categorized as a Type 3 ordinary construction where the façade of the building, as in the case of the Bronx apartment building, can provide actual structural support.
“I don’t like that term façade because it implies its purely decorative — a surface application — but in this case, it was that old school construction with the masonry exterior walls with the wood floor joists where the wood beams live in a pocket in that wall,” Corbett told Work-Bites. “We need to consider doing a routine inspection of all of these old buildings, perhaps using a threshold of 50 or 75 years old. It could be targeted depending on the age of the building. It needs to be done.”
Corbett said that in the age of climate change, with extreme weather events like flash flooding, higher temperatures and water tables, older structures can be especially vulnerable. He conceded that the city doesn’t have the workforce to accomplish what he sees as a vital task, and so it would have to rely, as it does now, on third party certified professional engineers whose work would need to be audited by the city’s engineers.
“You will get pushback from the real estate industry because they are not going to want to do this because it is expensive and it could find a lot of problems that need to be corrected that will mean lots of dollar signs,” Corbett said. “California did this and they were able to retrofit these buildings with additional structural support so they had a better chance of standing through an earthquake.”
Corbett believes that the Department of Buildings needs to be led by a licensed professional engineer as opposed to a career politician. “I fall into the camp that believes having expertise and experience of having done the jobs of the people you are overseeing as a commissioner is critical — that’s particularly true for police, fire and agencies like DOB,” he said.
Council Member Gail Brewer is chair of the Committee on Oversights and Investigations. She told Work-Bites that she has been told by the Adams administration that the current hiring freeze doesn’t include building and housing inspectors. But in its response to Work-Bites, the DOB said it “had to make painful cuts in the face of significant fiscal challenges.” The agency further stated it is being “mostly” impacted through vacancy reduction” that it expects won’t have “major impacts on current service levels, or service disruptions.”
For Brewer, both April’s garage collapse and the Bronx apartment building’s structural failure are blinking red lights. Both had open violations.
“It’s a good topic for Oversight and Investigation to take a look at the buildings with the most violations and where they have started the investigation, what’s been done to resolve them, “Brewer said.
After all, it’s urban 101, a city can only endure if it keeps its building structures standing.