JB Weld IS epoxy resin, with some steel imbedded in it. It has worked tremendously well for me for joining metal to metal, while being also much easier to use than regular epoxy.
5-minute epoxy is much weaker than slow-cure epoxies. I don’t use it for anything that really needs to stay put.
I’ve obsessed over this disaster story since I lived in Kansas years ago, and I never came across as clear an analogy as this one, until now, thanks to you.
They haven’t. They’ve stabilized it. That just means that it’s not going to come down right now. It’ll still almost certainly have to be demolished, and the developer should be watched closely to make sure he doesn’t flee to a non-extraditing country with investors’ money before that’s officially determined.
The New York Times has a report (gift link) that Domani Inspection Services, the private firm conducting inspections of the construction work, “has been repeatedly cited for missing warning signs at other building projects in the city.”
This surprises me: I thought the dodgyness was most prominent at the very top: the city council, the mayor and his advisers, the borough presidents. I expected someone here would be quoting how much in political contributions the developer had made.
Has anyone else noticed that when one of these sketchy buildings is being renovated it’s usually to luxury apartments? At this point I would feel safer living in a flophouse than a million dollar apartment.
This sort of redevelopment is expensive, no matter whether luxury apartments result or affordable housing. So to maximize the return, most often luxury apartments are built.
Which, based on the pictures and promotional materials I’ve come across, have all the charm of the average operating theater. “Sterile” seems to be all the rage in such conversions.
There is a real crisis in NYC with empty office buildings due to WFH and companies moving elsewhere as cost saving measures unless they really have a business need to be in Manhattan.
Converting them to housing of some kind is about the only profitable thing that could be done. And that process is difficult and expensive even if nothing goes wrong. So when you get done, you’ve still got a very expensive building on a per square foot basis.
Not just Manhattan; many cities in many places have an excess of office buildings and not enough residential buildings. So office-to-residential conversions are happening all over the place.
Incidentally, three years ago, the New York Times ran this interactive article (gift link) about what’s involved in converting an office building to residential use, and why older buildings are easier to convert than modern ones.