Overreaction to Conversions Would be Fatal to New Yorkers

Beware of statistics, especially from interest groups pursuing an agenda.

Construction unions, for example.

They’re advancing a narrative that if you want a job done safely, it has to be done by them. Unions have been saying this for decades, but it’s amplified when a high-profile story like buckled columns at the former Pfizer building comes up.

In the wake of that incident, Steamfitters Local 638’s Brian Hunt pointed out that 81 percent of construction workers who died in 2024 across the state were nonunion.

That must mean nonunion construction work is much more dangerous than union work, right?

Not necessarily. About 70 percent of the construction workforce in New York is nonunion, so we would expect them to suffer more deaths. They also probably work more weeks each year than union members.

Consider that 80 percent of private construction in the city is open-shop, meaning it can have union and nonunion workers. If 80 percent of fatalities were at open-shop projects and 20 percent were at union projects, you could surmise that open-shop and union sites are equally safe.

It’s not that simple, of course. Any analysis would have to account for other factors, including that union status affects what kinds of projects workers do. Unions dominate government infrastructure projects while nonunion workers build most of the city’s housing. If one kind of project is inherently more dangerous, it skews the numbers.

But that’s exactly the point. You can’t take statistics like the one cited by Hunt at face value. Context matters.

Brian Sampson of ABC Empire State (ABCNYS)

“What’s super frustrating is that whenever we have an incident like this, people use it to promote their political narrative regardless of the circumstances and the facts,” said Brian Sampson, president of the Associated Builders and Contractors’ New York chapter.

Sampson added that he doesn’t trust statistics Hunt gets from NYCOSH, a nonprofit whose homepage features union members holding placards.

Even if unions could definitively show that their projects were safer than equivalent open-shop projects, that wouldn’t settle the debate about lives saved. Follow my logic:

Imagine if the state legislature responds to the buckled-columns incident by adding union-requested wage mandates to 467m, the state program for office-to-residential conversions, as it did for 485x, the program for ground-up multifamily projects.

The result of higher labor costs would be less housing created, because fewer office conversions would pencil out. Basic economics.

At an event last week, former deputy mayor Maria Torres-Springer said she hopes the government doesn’t respond to the Midtown scare by weighing down conversions with “a hundred new regulations…that, while well-intentioned, take us many steps backwards.”

Overregulation could mean tens of thousands fewer homes created by conversions. We’re already seeing 485x fall short of its potential as developers stop at 99 units to avoid the wage requirement.

What does this have to do with safety?

There’s a direct correlation between homelessness and tight housing markets like New York City’s. In places where housing is expensive and vacancy rates are low, homelessness is a big problem. Where housing is cheap and available, it isn’t.

We tend to associate homelessness with social problems and poverty, but in places where they are common and housing is cheap, like Detroit, the homelessness rate is far lower than in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Hawaii.

“Above any other factor,” the Brookings Institution reported, “regional housing market dynamics — particularly when rents rise by amounts that low-income residents cannot afford — drive geographic variations in the prevalence of homelessness and correlate with higher homelessness rates.”

Above any other factor! That includes median income, drug use and past military service.

Homelessness is unsafe. It drastically shortens lifespans, especially for people living outside rather than in a shelter. That is not true for nonunion construction.

In all of 2024, there were 19 construction deaths in the city. In just three weeks last winter, the same number of homeless people were found dead outside.

Even if a prevailing-wage mandate for office conversions improved their safety by steering work to unions, the gain would likely be more than offset by the resulting homelessness. Only, the victims would be different.

The unions are right about one thing: Lives are at stake. Just not theirs.