A Tower on Billionaires' Row Is Full of Cracks. Who's to Blame?
36 comments
·October 19, 2025steveBK123
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
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.
bell-cot
> 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
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
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).
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reactordev
Probably a shell front for laundering money. Like the I-4 eye sore in Central Florida. Or Trump Towers. Or crypto.
billy99k
Or million dollar art sold from a politician's son.
digdugdirk
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0
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.
blactuary
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
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
An interesting thought experiment, but given the height of the building… it will be the victims families collecting any payday.
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cyanydeez
Externalities are the bane of capitalism. We wouldnt have capitalism if it had to be accountable.
rapnie
> 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
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).
betaby
Housing construction quality is generally poor in the USA and Canada. xUSSR countries (Russia, Estonia, etc ) have harsher climate and yet concrete building there are fine.
browningstreet
Arvin Haddad has made a few videos about units in this building, including the penthouse, but here he reviews an average unit’s layout.
His channel is an interesting view into how badly designed a lot of very expensive real estate happens to be.
noir_lord
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01KX_JXHH2M solid overview from the always informative b1m.
m101
Exposed concrete, in a building with challenging engineering around wind, in an environment with regular freezing temperatures. Sounds like it was bound to happen even with that ash.
The repair cost sounds cheap tbh.
bell-cot
Sounds like the developers felt that being "true to" their 1400-foot-tall artistic vision trumped any mere engineering realities. And churned through engineers and consultants 'till they found ones were were willing to tell 'em what they wanted to hear.
> ...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_...
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ipnon
If this becomes unfit for habitation it will likely stay in the skyline indefinitely. 1 Seaport has had construction stalled since 2017 because of a 3 inch tilt off axis. The default in NYC is to let the concrete stand as a monument to failure. Perhaps it’s for the best. Every time New Yorkers raise their eyes to the sky they are reminded of state of local real estate.
alecco
https://www.nytimes.com/video/realestate/luxury/100000010458... (short video version)
Simulacra
Responsibility is attributed primarily to the building’s developers (namely CIM Group and Macklowe Properties) and the design/construction team. I'm curious about the concrete composition, would not substandard concrete cause this problem, or is it more the bedrock? I couldn't discern that clearly.
lvl155
That too but it’s also NYC’s antiquated codes.
San Francisco also has a well-known hi-rise disaster. You would think that after decades of the USA building skyscrapers that new construction would be a slam dunk.