The disaster in Brooklyn compounds a troubling era of structural failures across the five boroughs, following high-profile incidents like the partial cave-in of former Pfizer offices in Midtown last July and the 2023 downtown parking garage collapse.
Decades of Decay Meets Modern Excavation
Old row buildings across the city have long stood past their intended lifespans, often held together by little more than historical charm and neglect. Melanie La Rocca, a former commissioner of the city’s Department of Buildings, pointed to the vulnerability of this housing stock in comments reported by The New Yorker.
“These buildings that have been around since the early nineteen-hundreds, they’re beautiful and they have character and charm in many regards,” La Rocca told The New Yorker. “What’s the old saying? They don’t make them like they used to. Who knows what people thought back then?” Today, La Rocca serves as the chief operating officer for Riseboro, a Brooklyn community-services provider.
Next door to the fallen Flatbush Avenue structure, an LLC tied to developers Robert Fischman and Judy Swimer had been overseeing construction. According to reporting by Gothamist cited by The New Yorker, the developers had a history of cutting corners at the site.
The Department of Buildings previously issued a stop-work order in March during the demolition of a one-story building after contractors failed to install required safety precautions. An engineering firm subsequently recommended extensive excavation and bracing work, including steel, timber, and concrete shoring, to prevent neighboring properties from collapsing. It remains entirely unclear whether those precautions were executed before the tragedy.
Olufemi Falade Has a Notorious Record of Housing Violations
The landlord of 1321 Flatbush Avenue, Olufemi Falade, is a former New York State Department of Environmental Conservation engineer with a notorious record of housing violations. Falade once spent twelve days in prison for refusing to fix 1,800 violations across twelve separate buildings he owned.
Defending his record years prior, Falade posed a question to the Village Voice in 2006: “How can a landlord fix if the tenant does not pay rent?” That sentiment continues to echo through ongoing debates surrounding rent-stabilized properties in the city.
The neighborhood around the collapse, long known as Little Haiti due to the Caribbean communities that settled there in the 1960s, is shifting rapidly under the pressure of gentrification and rising rents. Glass-and-steel luxury apartment towers now loom over older blocks.
Department of Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani told reporters at a press conference that workers on the adjacent site were digging down when the collapse occurred. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that a full investigation is underway. Mamdani shared his grief on X, writing, “There are no words for a loss of this magnitude.”
Vulnerable Lives in the Shadow of Growth
Mamdani said that the victims of the Flatbush Avenue collapse were primarily from South and Central American countries, including Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. Two others among the dead were Guinean immigrants from West Africa. These arrivals mirror the waves of migrants who entered the city during the 2023 crisis, which former Mayor Eric Adams claimed could destroy the city.
Yet, as the city demonstrated, New York survived the influx, even if many newcomers were funneled into cramped and dilapidated housing that ultimately posed a greater danger to them than they ever posed to the metropolis.
