East 42nd Street incident aside, NYC to move forward with more office-to-residential conversions. Here's why.
The former Pfizer building on East 42nd Street in Midtown is among the largest office-to-residential building conversions in New York City history.
The City Council has recently paved the way for similar projects across the five boroughs.
After the pandemic, many office buildings were sitting vacant, and that's about when CBS News New York started covering the push by City Hall to transform them into residential housing.
It was a cornerstone of former Mayor Eric Adams' agenda. However, anyone who works in an office can tell you they are not built to be lived in, so remodeling is an enormous undertaking.
"We need all the supply we can get right now"
Before columns in the former Pfizer building buckled Tuesday, crews were in the process of converting the office space into residential apartments.
City Hall says some of the 2,000 units are being built out of old office space across New York City right now.
"We need all the supply we can get right now, and these conversions are an important tool to do that," said Jay Martin, executive vice president of the New York Apartment Association.
In 2024, the City Council passed a housing package pushed by former Mayor Adams that eased restrictions on these type of renovations and incentivized developers to take them on.
At the time, CBS News New York toured a Financial District building that City Hall was fast-tracking for remodel into apartments.
"We're not just breathing new life into buildings like this, but we're also reactivating business districts," former Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer said at the time.
Office-to-residential conversions must continue, Mamdani says
Fast forward to Wednesday. Mayor Zohran Mamdani agrees with his predecessor that these conversions are part of the solution to the city's housing crisis.
"As soon as we answer the emergency questions around safety in this moment, we are going to be conducting a full investigation as to how we got to this point, because this is not a necessary consequence of an office-to-residential conversion. This, however, is clearly a breakdown in that process," Mamdani said.
MetroLoft, the developer behind the Pfizer building renovation, just last year opened apartments in a former office building on Water Street and is in the process of converting a Wall Street office space into apartments by next year.
Architect Avinash Malhotra has been converting offices into apartments for 40 years. He says among the many challenges, offices are built to hold more weight than apartments, but the support columns that buckled on Tuesday on East 42nd Street were not.
"There are rules and regulations in place to make sure that these kind of things don't happen," Malhotra said, "And what might have happened here is that somebody missed reinforcing those two particular columns that sag, that buckled."
Malhotra says the biggest challenge is creating natural light, adding in one project he previously worked on with that same developer, they had to remove an entire chunk of the center of the building to create a courtyard and windows where there had previously been cubicles.
