By Samantha Delouya, CNN
(CNN) — New York City has bet heavily on converting aging office buildings into apartments to help ease a housing shortage. But the threat of a partial collapse Tuesday by one such conversion in progress highlighted the significant challenges of those construction projects.
The former Pfizer building, located on East 42nd Street, was undergoing work to become roughly 1,600 apartment units with amenities such as a rooftop pool and a fitness center.
But on Tuesday, structural columns buckled and floors sagged, prompting the evacuation of that building and several others nearby, according to New York City officials. Nearby bus routes that pass were also delayed or partially suspended.
Office-to-apartment conversions have surged since the pandemic emptied out aging office buildings, offering cities a way to add desperately needed housing. And New York City has championed these conversions, offering tax incentives to turn older vacant office buildings into livable spaces.
But the projects often require extensive structural, plumbing, mechanical and redesign work that can make the project more complicated than building new housing from scratch.
The conversion of the former Pfizer headquarters is among the most ambitious office-to-apartment projects in the country. It is the largest such conversion in New York City history and is slated for completion in 2027, according to the project’s architectural firm, Gensler.
The project, located just a block away from Grand Central Terminal, consists of two buildings originally built in the 1970s and includes adding 19 new stories atop one of the existing 10-story structures – and “reconfiguring and recladding” the adjoining 33-story tower, according to Gensler.
Videos and photos circulating on social media showed steel columns on the building’s higher floors buckling and contorting on Tuesday. The FDNY said the building was at risk of a “localized collapse” and “continued to move” as of Tuesday afternoon.
Andrew Alpern, an architectural historian who has written extensively about New York apartment buildings, told CNN he was skeptical of the conversion from the outset because the building’s design didn’t easily lend itself to apartment units. Apartments need more windows than an office space, for example.
“The project bothered me right from the start, and now this has happened,” he said.
New York City’s comptroller said in a social media post Tuesday that “there will be an investigation into what caused this dangerous situation.”
Like a ‘surgery’
Breaking up sterile, expansive workspaces into inviting multi-family homes is harder than it may look. Office buildings are designed with very different considerations than apartment dwellings.
For example, unlike a traditional office layout, each apartment unit must have at least one bathroom and a kitchen, which means the plumbing must be reworked. Most office buildings have central air conditioning, so the system needs to be replaced with individual heating and cooling systems for each unit.
Larger office towers, like the former Pfizer headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, present another major hurdle: Because many areas sit far from exterior windows to maximize office space, developers often must completely reconfigure the layout to bring in natural light, which can require removing and rebuilding portions of the building.
Robert Fuller, a principal at Gensler working on the Pfizer building conversion, compared the project to surgery in an interview with Bloomberg last year.
“There’s just a lot of technical challenges and unique conditions from floor to floor. All those things collectively make this quite a unique endeavor and I would argue probably more challenging than any other one I can think of,” Fuller said.
Bloomberg also reported at the time that contractors were pouring a new floor every four days to meet a deadline to open.
Offices in Midtown Manhattan are more difficult to convert than in other areas of the city, said Jonathan Marvel, an architect and urban designer whose firm, Marvel Architects, has transformed several New York City buildings into apartments and other structures.
Soho lofts and prewar buildings with smaller flowers in Lower Manhattan are both easier to deal with, Marvel said to CNN via email. “Adding anything beyond a single floor makes the project even more challenging.”
Tackling NYC’s affordability crisis
Office-to-apartment conversions have gained momentum in recent years as remote work has left many older office buildings underused or vacant.
But Manhattan’s office market is a different story: Its overall office vacancy rate was 12.4% in the first quarter of this year, far below levels in many other major cities, according to a CBRE report. That compares to 25.5% in Los Angeles and 28.9% in Chicago.
City leaders hope conversions can help solve New York City’s worst housing affordability crisis in decades.
In 2024, New York City updated its zoning code to allow non-residential buildings like offices to be turned into housing. Previously, many buildings constructed after 1961 or outside the city’s largest office centers could not be converted into housing due to older rules limiting conversions, in part to preserve commercial space.
But office-to-apartment conversions need to be just one of dozens of solutions to address New York City’s affordable housing woes, a task made more difficult because Manhattan is an island, said Brett Theodos, a housing and community development researcher at the Urban Institute.
“It’s not the silver bullet, but I don’t think there is a silver bullet,” he said.
In a city like New York, construction and debris removal are especially expensive. It often ends up being cheaper and more environmentally friendly to convert existing buildings rather than tear them down and build all over again, Theodos said.
Still, he said developers and city officials will need to reassure future residents that converted buildings are safe after the structural issues at the Pfizer building became clear this week.
“My question is, what needs to be established to offer people the assurance that they will not be at risk?” he asked. “With these things, the psychology matters.”
CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn contributed to reporting.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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