Supertall: Only in NYC
The “supertall” buildings that have gone up in NYC bring together a combination of zoning questions, building department issues, and ethical questions that are a result of NYC’s unique rules and regulations.
The bottom line is that there’s a lot that’s just only possible in New York…
This video (link) is a nice summation of issues that are part of what makes New York unique.
Some of these issues are things that I’ve waded through over the last 10 years through my own work in NYC, and I have found that it really is a unique place to try and get things built.
There are a number of reasons why these “supertall” buildings have shown up.
Opportunities that revolve around how “incentive zoning” was used, the way that building and zoning codes are being applied, and how tax codes are being leveraged are all part of what we can see in these pencil towers.
For instance, tax abatement opportunities that may have met the specific requirements, but may not have met the intent of the rules have reportedly cost the city ~1.7 billion dollars in the last fiscal year. While some people benefit from this, these tax abatements probably didn’t do what was intended from a city perspective.
Matthew Soules is featured in this video as well, and he wrote a whole book on the way that architecture is being used in capitalistic ways that have been dialed up to 11 here in New York.
He refers to the skinny pencil towers on ‘billionaires row” as being “architecture as spatio-financial form, not as shelter or cultural manifestation”.
Bill Moyers - Link
Since these supertall pencil skyscrapers have shown up, there are lawsuits that have followed at towers such as 432 Park Avenue, which has included complaints related to broken pipes, flooding elevators, and noise that’s related to the building’s sway.
I think that some of this is just simply related to these buildings being soooo “slender”, meaning their width relative to their height. This really just means that they are not easy to build, and the things that we use in other buildings may not work as well in this situation.
For instance, rigid pieces of sprinkler pipe just don’t generally handle movement in this way.
Walls are groaning between rooms as the building sways.
The building’s insurance has gone up by 300% in 2 years, partly because of these water “events” being cited in the lawsuits.
There’s a lot going on, and outside engineering companies have been called in.
They are reporting that many of the electrical, mechanical, and plumbing components aren’t conforming with the developer’s drawings, and that some actually present real life safety issues.
That brings up the safety issue.
To bring it down to nuts and bolts issues, the thing that jumped out to me is that 432 Park Avenue has filed for a string of 36 Temporary Certificates of Occupancy (or TCO’s) since 2015, and has yet to certify it’s sprinkler and standpipe safety, according to the NYT.
In my experience, permitting in New York is a wild ride.
You can literally build a whole building with “Alt 2” permits (which are for each part of the work to be performed), before you get your “Alt 1” permit, which is the overarching permit which controls the “use” and any other major designations for the building.
That’s backwards compared to most other places I’ve seen, where you have to obtain the main permit that governs your intended “use”, and then get the secondary permits after that.
Imagine building a whole building, to only realize that you can’t get approval for the “use” you need for your occupancy.
I get why they set things up this way, and it can help get work done quickly, but it’s a potentially dangerous way to go, and granting year upon year of Temporary occupancy certificates means that people are using structures that haven’t met the final safety requirements.
It’s also probably less appropriate for supertall skyscrapers in Manhattan that are pushing a lot of building industry limits.
From a zoning perspective, the zoning in NYC does not count floor area that’s for structural or mechanical purposes against the building’s maximum size, regardless of how big these spaces are.
In these supertall towers, those spaces can be 25% of their floor area, so it’s pushed to 11 once again, and you have to think that this wasn’t the intention of these zoning laws, because it’s allowing these buildings to be extra tall, due to the way that mechanical floors are distributed throughout the building on many floors.
Only in New York can you get into this type of situation, where you’ve got supertall buildings that are brand new and occupied, that have not received their final occupancy certificates.
One final thing that’s also unique, is that the stair code in New York has always allowed for super-slender towers of all heights, because it’s one of the few places that still allows for the double-helix style fire stair.
In most buildings in the US, you need to separate distinct stairwells by a minimum ratio, so they are far enough apart from each other, so that you don’t have people stuck on one side of a building in an emergency event.
111 West 57th for instance, is only 18 meters wide, and has a slenderness ratio of 1:24, which makes it the most slender skyscraper in the world.
Living Real Estate Group - Link
For reference, a building is considered slender when it’s ratio is above 1:7, so we’re ~4x that here.
When you look at those plans, the fact that there is only one true stair core (with 2 stairs inside it as a double helix), also enables this type of supertall skinny skyscraper.
So why are these supertall towers having issues in New York?
It seems to me because they are truly a new species of building, and that means there will be growing pains.
No matter how much it cost to build and purchase a condo, it is still put together largely by hand, in difficult circumstances, in a city that’s barely holding on to an outdated building code, bizarre permitting process, and zoning that may not be able to absorb this new type of architecture.
It really is only in New York.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your time.
-Chris
P.S. for more information on my work, check my website for additional video content regarding how I work with commercial and residential clients, and join my mailing list, for weekly posts like this one.
