Making residential towers safer

No one can forget the images of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers jumping from the top floors to their deaths below.

As shocking as those images were, New York had seen this terrible spectacle nearly a century before, during the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, the largest industrial accident in the history of the city, where 146 workers — most of them female — jumped to their deaths from a Greenwich Village sweatshop.

Last month, nine Malian immigrants, eight of them children, perished in a Bronx apartment fire started by a space heater and a faulty electrical wire.

New York remembers its fires, but the evolution of its building codes tends to be more reactionary than progressive, according to technical experts who are revising city regulations. The new city codes will use the International Building Code as a model and will serve as the most comprehensive overhaul since 1968. In particular, the revisions seek to improve the safety of New Yorkers who find themselves high up in a building during an emergency or fire.

But not all high-rise buildings are created equal — commercial towers have far more safety requirements than residential towers. And with condo high-rises sprouting in many corners of the city, that lack of foresight could be costly.

Height records for residential buildings are being set in neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side, Financial District, Upper West Side, Downtown Brooklyn and on the far West Side on West 42nd Street, meaning more apartment dwellers will soon be living high in the sky.

The old codes and their periodic revisions, the last of which passed in 2004, don’t apply equally in the city’s tallest buildings.

“Why is it that I am protected in my office environment, but my wife and children are not protected?” asked Evan Lipstein, an expert in creating high-rise safety and fire programs. “In a home environment, they are asleep for many hours; it is even more important to be protected in those cases.”

He and other experts say city rules and the International Building Code, developed by the International Code Council, a safety and prevention organization, diverge here. The international rules make no distinctions between residential and commercial buildings; New York does. One of the biggest reasons is cost, said experts.

Some of those differences were addressed with the adoption of Local Law 26, which revised the codes in 2004, and the proposed new Draft Model Code, which is being considered by the city for adoption. Recent code changes have addressed a range of building specifications that make vast improvements to residential safety — including requiring sprinkler systems and special evacuation procedures for people with disabilities. But the new laws don’t address all the challenges that residents could face in a high-rise residential building.

Learning lessons from Sept. 11

As the city recovered from the Sept. 11 attacks, a legislative step was taken in 2004 when a Department of Buildings task force created the rules that became Local Law 26. The new codes required all large commercial buildings over 75 feet, or six stories, to add photoluminescent directional signs in the stairways, create exit routes, install sprinkler systems by 2019, develop emergency evacuation and fire safety plans, appoint an emergency and fire safety professional for each building, and provide a fire tower if no exterior stairs existed.

The law also required commercial buildings to provide a direct entry and exit on every floor, create an enclosed lobby with smoke protection on an interim floor where people can wait for firefighters, a communications/intercom system that can be commandeered and utilized by the FDNY to communicate with tenants, and a backup generator for use in the event an electrical failure.

None of these rules applied to residential buildings of the same height. Fortunately, the simplest rule of Local Law 10, which was adopted in 1999, said that all residential buildings with four or more units built from that year forward needed to install a sprinkler system, which most experts agree is the single most effective way to save lives in a fire.

“I don’t think there has been a single fatality in a sprinkler building for 30 years,” said Lipstein. “It is the No. 1 safety measure to reduce property loss and loss of life,” he added.

But what neither Local Law 26 or Local Law 10 account for is the retroactive requirement to install sprinkler systems in buildings constructed before 1999.

Instead, under Local Law 26, residential high-rises were only required to provide a fire tower in lieu of stairs, perform controlled inspections of fire damper systems, and prevent excessive fuel pumping above the lowest floor.

Goals of the new proposal

The newest model code proposal is a major undertaking by the Department of Buildings. After a period of public review, the model code draft will be submitted to the City Council, which will vote on whether to adopt the new provisions.

A recent city report on the new code admits it weighs cost against safety. It notes that its authors, after having evaluated the additional costs, could not agree that the safety improvements were worth the additional money owners would have to pay. Proposed rules that did make it into the draft will require three-family buildings to install sprinkler systems, but not one- and two-family buildings.

Items that survived the analysis for residential high-rises were safety acceptance testing of smoke control systems, fire rating of corridors and better standpipes for delivering water to sprinklers and firefighters. But the rules would also call for the reduction of fire-resistance ratings — the amount of time a floor should retain a fire before it spreading to another floor — from two hours to one when a building utilizes sprinkler systems.

And there will prohibitions on the use of unvented space heaters in dwelling units — the one rule that might have saved the Soumare and Magassa families in the Bronx.

The Real Deal contacted New York developers, and only Extell Development executive vice president Raizy Haas was willing to speak on the record about the regulatory divide between commercial and residential buildings.

Extell’s 60-story Orion on far West 42nd Street is the 75th tallest residential building in the world, according to buildings database Emporis.com, and the loftiest in its far West Side neighborhood. It has a backup generator that will function during a blackout and will provide energy for lighting exits and moving elevators.

But the Orion is built to residential New York City code, which does not yet require residential buildings to have the same safety features as high-rise commercial buildings.

“The fact is that they can make the commercial buildings pay for [the safety enhancements] and pass it on to the tenant. If you do it on the residential side, you start to have unaffordable housing,” said Landmark Facilities Group president Ernie Conrad, who is part of a 400-member task force working on revising the city codes.

The Trump Organization, which developed the tallest residential building in New York City — the 72-story Trump World Tower — and is now tackling the tallest residential building in Jersey City, at 58 stories, declined to comment on safety in their buildings. The group referred calls to the architect of Trump World Tower, Costas Kondylis, who did not return phone calls.

Forest City Ratner, which is developing the tallest residential structure in Downtown Brooklyn, the Beekman Tower, as well as the mixed-use Miss Brooklyn tower — both designed by architect Frank Gehry — as part of the Atlantic Yards complex, also declined to comment. Even a spokesperson for the Department of Buildings would not comment on the application of the new model code and how it would impact the safety of residential high-rises.

Extell’s Haas said she was unfamiliar with most of the detailed safety requirements for commercial high-rises that have evolved since Sept. 11. She said she was not sure whether Extell’s taller buildings had added additional features voluntarily to their new residential structures.

One of the reasons, Lipstein said, is that such safety features are not mandated by law, and don’t increase the value of the property. “[Creating more safety measures] makes the building safer, but it doesn’t do anything to make the building more saleable,” Lipstein pointed out.

But Lipstein also recommended that building owners add safety features to their lists of amenities when marketing to the public. Extell is ahead of the curve: the back-up generator is included in their Orion marketing brochure.