The troubled 850-unit portfolio has racked up more than 2,300 housing code violations.
Page F141From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 12 November 2026
Mamdani's three-week-old law to force sales of derelict buildings missed its first building by eight lives.
As it ran on the front
Eight people died: six adults and two children. Two of those six adults have been identified as construction workers from the site next door. Eighteen more people were hurt. Rescue crews worked, in the mayor's own words, through extremely dangerous conditions to make sure no one else was left under the rubble.
The law passed on October 22 does one specific thing. It requires an owner of a distressed building to give nonprofits and community land trusts a ninety-day head start to buy it before the owner can list it on the open market for anyone else. It is a sale-forcing mechanism, built for buildings with the kind of record Flatbush Avenue had: violations piling up, an owner not fixing them, nobody with the standing to force a transfer until the law gave somebody that standing.…
…(cont) The city had already run the play once, on buildings that had already stopped being anyone's problem to force. On September 3, City Hall sent out a press release taking a victory lap over the sale of three derelict buildings — more than a thousand code violations between them — left behind by a landlord who had died. An expert quoted in that release said to expect more such property transfers.
On the same day the collapse made the wire, so did an accounting of what the mechanism is up against now that it has to work on buildings whose owners are still alive. One portfolio — 850 units, more than 2,300 housing code violations — has a mayor's office trying to force its sale to a nonprofit, with creditors refusing to let that happen. The report does not say whether this is the building that fell, or one just like it. It says only that the forcing mechanism, pointed at a living owner with live creditors, is still a fight, not a closing.
That is the gap, hon. The law that can force a sale took twenty-one days to get from the council floor to a collapse site. The one sale it has already finished belonged to a dead man. The sale it is still fighting over belongs to creditors who get a say the tenants never got. Somewhere between those three dates is a building that did not wait for any of them.
“They've got a law that can force a sale off a slumlord's hands, and so far they've used it exactly once — on a dead guy who couldn't lawyer up. The live owners still have creditors standing between the violation report and the closing, and a building came down waiting on that fight. Eight people paid the bill for how slow that process runs.”
“You can't just seize a man's building because the paperwork's ugly — there's a process, creditors have rights, ninety days isn't exactly overnight... okay, for a building that's already coming down, it kind of is overnight. Forget I said that.”
The receipts
At least eight people were killed and more than a dozen others injured when a three-story building in Flatbush collapsed on Wednesday, officials said.
New York mayor Zohran Mamdani says crews are working in ‘extremely dangerous conditions’ to find anyone trapped Rescue crews have continued to search for survivors in the rubble of a collapsed building in Brooklyn, New York , as the death toll rose to eight. Six people were found dead in the wreckage and two others died later from…
New York City officials have confirmed at least eight casualties – six adults and two children – in the collapse Flatbush Ave in Flatbush, New York, stood still and in shock after a three-storey apartment building collapsed on Wednesday afternoon near a construction site. “The last time I saw something like this was when I went to work…
· Mamdani takes victory lap over sale of dead landlord’s derelict buildings, as expert warns more property ‘transfers’ coming from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· NYC Council quietly passes bill that forces owners to give nonprofits first dibs on buying their properties for 90 days from the morgue, 22 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.