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.
Page F141From§Eachthe evening edition — 13 November 2026
Three-week-old law meant to force violation sales arrives eight lives late, mayor orders 100-building review.
As it ran on the front
Eight people are dead in Flatbush: six adults, two children, after a three-story apartment building caved into the excavation pit next door Wednesday afternoon. The New York Post names excavation work as the lead theory, and Mayor Mamdani has ordered roughly 100 properties tied to "five entities" involved in that construction reviewed for the same risk.
Walk it back three weeks. On October 22, the City Council quietly passed a bill built for exactly this kind of property: an owner with a distressed building and a pile of violations now has to give nonprofits and community land trusts ninety days of first dibs before listing it on the open market. Walk it back further, to September 3: Mamdani took a victory lap over the sale of a dead landlord's derelict buildings under an earlier version of the same push, while an expert on hand warned that more property transfers were coming. The warning was right about the direction and wrong about the timing. The Flatbush building landed on the wrong side of the calendar — the sale-forcing law was not yet a month old when the building went down instead of onto the market.…
…(cont) The hundred-building review ordered this week is the same fix, run forward instead of back: the city naming every address tied to those same five entities and asking, this time, before the ground gives. How many of those hundred carry the same stacked violations as the Flatbush building is a question the review will have to answer; it is not a question the collapse waited around for.
This is not the only building to go down mid-construction this season. No receipt names excavation as the cause there; what it shares with Flatbush is only the shape of the failure — a building under active work, coming down with people inside it. Twenty years before that, in 2006, a section of the Mahon Airport terminal in Menorca gave way mid-renovation; the BBC reported the collapse may have been caused by a buildup of heavy rainwater, trapping twenty, hurting three. The cause there stayed at "may have been" and was not pinned down any further — the same hedge now sitting over the excavation pit on Flatbush Avenue, three weeks into a law built to get ahead of it.
“They write a law giving a violation-stacked landlord ninety days to find a buyer before the city can force a sale, and the first time anybody tests it, eight people are dead under a Flatbush building. Now the mayor's reviewing a hundred more buildings tied to the same five entities — the same check, run after the collapse instead of before it. The fix landed on time for the press conference and eight lives too late for the building it was named for.”
“Look, you can't pin a structural collapse on a housing bill — the ninety-day nonprofit window has nothing to do with excavation permits, those are different departments entirely. The violations piling up for years before this mayor even took office are a maintenance backlog, not a failure of code enforcement, and reviewing a hundred buildings now actually shows the city getting ahead of it, not behind. Wait — if it's ahead of it, why'd it take eight bodies to start the review? Scratch that, the point is the system worked exactly as designed, eventually.”
Earlier in this story
- Mamdani's three-week-old law to force sales of derelict buildings missed its first building by eight lives. By Ruth · the afternoon edition, 12 November 2026
The receipts
The three-story Flatbush apartment building caved into the adjacent lot Wednesday afternoon as the excavation work was underway -- prompting Mayor Zohran Mamdani to order a review of about 100 properties across the city linked to "five entities" involved in the construction.
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…
· A partial roof collapse occurred in part of the Mahon Airport terminal building in Menorca, Spain while undergoing renovations/construction work. The collapse may have been caused by a build-up of hea from the morgue, 14 Sep 2006
· First body recovered from collapsed multistory building in Nairobi from the morgue, 30 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.