New York City’s building department is having a moment, and Mayor Eric Adams is now facing a call to restore the budget cuts he’s planning for the agency.
“Across the city you’re seeing buildings collapse, we had a retaining wall that collapsed a couple days ago last week, so there’s just a lot of things that are affecting our infrastructure and I worry about DOB’s capacity to do this work,” Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson said in an interview.
The criticism comes after several recent partial building collapses including two in the Bronx, one last month and another this week, and another in Little Italy on Wednesday where the city found illegal construction that brought down an entire wall.
“All the people here were scared, it was scary,” said Marjorie Carrillo, 51, who works across the street from the partially collapsed, four-story building at 188 Grand St. at the intersection of Mulberry St. and Grand St.
Mayor Adams announced across-the-board cuts of 5% for all city agencies late last year. According to the latest data available, the buildings department had an actual personnel headcount of just over 1,500 for 2023, down from more than 1,700 in 2020. The funding cuts are expected to lead to even further reductions in staff. It currently has 300 fewer employees than are currently planned for by the department.
A spokesperson for the building department referred questions about the budget to the mayor’s office which did not immediately respond to messages.
In recent days, Adams has reversed cuts for several city agencies and programs, including the parks department and the department of education’s Summer Rising program.
According to the Department of Buildings, owners of the building in Little Italy were doing illegal construction that led to the collapse. The city ordered the building’s demolition which has closed iconic Mulberry St. between Grand St. and Broome St. where the businesses rely on foot traffic.
The Department of Buildings has ordered the four-story building at Grand St. and Mulberry St. be demolished after it partially collapsed last week.
Charles Lane
Peaking into the construction area where workers were sectioning off 188 Grand and part of the street, Carrillo shook her head at the loss of business.
“How long is it going to take to build another building?” Carrillo asked. “People around here are worried and concerned about that.”
According to city records, the owners of 188 Grand, the Stabile Brothers, received three complaints for illegal construction and afterhours construction in August, but by the time city inspectors arrived no violation was found.
Attempts to reach the owners were unsuccessful.
Earlier this week, an illegally constructed tunnel caused the city to issue vacate orders on several buildings in Crown Heights.
In December, the corner of a seven-story apartment building in Morris Heights collapsed after construction workers compromised a structural column on the ground floor, displacing dozens of residents.
In April of last year, a parking garage on Ann Street in lower Manhattan collapsed, killing an employee. Earlier this month, the city published a contract to pay a private engineering firm nearly $1 million to conduct a forensic analysis of the collapse.
“Any cuts to an agency tasked with the responsibility of overseeing our city’s infrastructure potentially puts our families at risk and is something we cannot afford to do given our aging housing stock,” Borough President Gibson said.
Mulberry St. business owners who rely on foot traffic are also demanding more enforcement to protect the city’s aging buildings.
“People aren’t coming here, everyday we are losing thousands of dollars per store,” M.D. Sarker, owner of PS Giftshop on Mulberry St., said in an interview. “The political people, if I talk to them then maybe they’ll understand.”
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