NEW YORK — A Midtown Manhattan high-rise being converted into 1,600 apartments has been stabilized after buckling support columns triggered evacuations and fears of a collapse. But officials and engineers on Wednesday were still trying to determine what went wrong.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that emergency crews had installed temporary shoring and steel beams from the 18th to the 23rd floors and that there had been no further movement of the structure since Tuesday morning, when two columns buckled and several floors began to sag.

The 37-story building on East 42nd Street, once ⁠Pfizer‘s corporate ​headquarters, is located about a block from the United Nations. It was evacuated along with neighboring properties after bricks fell from the structure and responders discovered damage on the 21st and 22nd floors.

“There has been no additional movement of the structure since yesterday morning,” the mayor told reporters.

Neighboring buildings, including a school, had been evacuated, and busy 42nd Street was closed down. Some buildings have since reopened, but four remain evacuated and a ground-floor restaurant on a fifth is still shuttered, Mamdani said.

Eva Notwicz, 47, who lives across the street, had been happy to see the office tower being converted into much-needed housing. But watching the addition of several floors atop the building, right above where the columns eventually buckled on Tuesday, had made her nervous.

“It felt like it’s hanging there,” she said. “But you know, you trust the builders.”

She and her son were ordered out of her apartment on Tuesday morning, with time only to grab her phone and the dog but were allowed to return that evening.

“I’m sure they’re gonna make it super safe now,” she said.

On Wednesday, bystanders took photos from the street, while office workers at the News Building across the street – the former home of the Daily News – said they were told to return to their workplace.

One of the developers behind the project told the New York Times that the building was never in danger of collapsing and described the buckling columns as a run-of-the-mill problem.

“This incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,” Nathan Berman, the managing principal and founder of developer MetroLoft, told the newspaper. He said the columns were likely not reinforced properly and thus could not bear the weight of the addition above.

Experts agreed that the risk of collapse was minimal, but that city inspectors would have to determine the exact cause of the buckling columns before allowing construction to proceed. There were several possible explanations, experts said.

“Typically, it’s not just one mistake,” said Michael Chajes, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Delaware.

Converting an existing building carries more complications than building a new structure, said Magued Iskander, chair of the civil and urban engineering department at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.

“There are more unknowns,” he said. “It is easier to design from a blank sheet of paper.”

The building, which served Pfizer for decades, is being converted into a 1,600-unit apartment complex. Completion is expected in 2027, according to the architectural firm’s (Gensler) website.

Mamdani said Wednesday he remained supportive of converting office space into residences to help address the city’s housing affordability crisis. The city’s building department will conduct a “rigorous assessment” to ensure that the high-rise is safe and compliant with all codes before any further construction work can proceed, he added.

The post NYC tower stable after columns buckled, officials say appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

PROJECT: The Loft

LOCATION: 3015 S.W. First Ave., Portland

SIZE: 21,000 square feet

START DATE: March 2025

ANTICIPATED COMPLETION DATE: fall 2026

CONSTRUCTION COST: $12 million

OWNER/DEVELOPER: Ukandu

CONSTRUCTION MANAGER: MearsCPM

GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Walsh Construction

ARCHITECT: Gensler

ENGINEER: Froelich Engineers

OTHER ASSOCIATES/CONSULTANTS: Holzy Designs/Ian Holzworth

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Construction crews are building The Loft, a community space and headquarters for Ukandu in Portland’s Lair Hill neighborhood. The 40-year-old nonprofit will provide free, year-round support for people impacted by a childhood cancer diagnosis — patients, survivors, siblings and caregivers.

Trauma-informed design was used to create space for inclusive programming and on-site mental health services. The center will offer warm, welcoming spaces where families can come together, as well as unique spaces for teens and caregivers. Amenities will include an active space with an obstacle course, a two-story climbing wall, and a sports simulator bay with golf, baseball, archery and zombie dodgeball; a lounge and sanctuary for caregivers; an arts and crafts room; a multimedia room featuring music and games; a reflection room (an immersive digital environment for celebrating and honoring the lives of loved ones); and an outdoor patio with a firepit, stage and movie screen.

Solar power, LED lighting, low toxicity paint, and high-efficiency appliances are being used for the building.

Pacific Bank was instrumental in helping the owner acquire the building. Construction is being self-financed. Grants were provided by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust ($300,000) and the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation ($100,000).

“Building Blocks” spotlights noteworthy projects either under construction or approaching the start of construction. To submit a project for consideration, please visit: djcoregon.com/building-blocks.

The post Building Blocks: The Loft appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

With aging office buildings trading at discounts because of high vacancies, developers have opportunities to invest in conversions of buildings into housing, education facilities, hotels, life science centers, and health clinics, according to a published by Gensler late last year.

The surplus of outdated office buildings and the flight of office users out of many cities has led to a boom in such projects, according to the firm. The adaptive reuse boom is poised to create valuable new real estate, Maurice Reid, office managing director in Gensler’s Portland office, stated in an email. Creative conversions could include retail to health care, retail to sports, office to senior living, and office to science labs, according to Gensler.

“While conversions have been discussed a lot over the last year, conversations have shifted to alternative options for these transformations, especially considering the challenging policies that make such conversions more cost-prohibitive,” Reid stated.

Permits issued in Portland from January 2024 through April 2025 led to completed conversions such as an office space to an ice cream shop at 3987 N. Mississippi Ave.; a vacant athletic facility to a retail store at 9312 S.E. Stark St.; a tattoo shop to a comedy club at 1510 S.E. Ninth Ave.; an open office space to a pickleball area at 2201 N.E. Lloyd Center (suite F); and an auto repair shop to a food court and bar at 16116 N.E. Halsey St.

Conversions in the works include a billiard hall to a coffee shop at 8435 S.E. Powell Blvd.; a chiropractic clinic to a restaurant at 7834 S.E. 13th Ave.; and an office to a coffee shop at 4826 N.E. 105th Ave.

Converting offices into residential spaces holds promise, Reid stated. But there is a growing concern about what to do with buildings that are not suitable for housing and will not recover as office spaces, he added.

“It’s worth exploring how former courthouses, grand bank buildings, and historic public structures — no longer serving their original purposes — could be repurposed into recreation centers, sports facilities, and community hubs, offering new ways for people to connect with and engage in their cities,” Reid stated.

Old courthouses with large internal courtyards could be covered with glass roofs, creating indoor atriums that house climbing walls, racquet courts, and multipurpose recreational areas, Reid stated. Other new uses could include cafes, lounges and social gathering areas.

Gensler is seeing a significant number of office-to-residential conversions happening on the East Coast, where seismic upgrades are not required.

The Oregon Casket Building and the Falcon Building are the first two office-to-residential conversions that have been issued permits and remain on track for completion, Portland Permitting & Development spokesperson Ken Ray stated in an email.

A project team plans to convert the Oregon Casket Building, at 403 N.W. Fifth Ave. in Old Town, into a 25,000-square-foot mixed-use building with 34 residential units and retail space. The exterior scope of work would be limited to replacing windows and doors and reconstructing the storefront along Fifth Avenue. Design Research Office is the project designer. Construction is expected to start in January 2026 and finish around March 2027.

The Falcon Building, at 321 N.W. Glisan St., previously held 85,500 square feet of office space. It’s set to become 59 units of middle-income housing. In January, the project team submitted a building permit request. The permit intake was approved by Portland Permitting & Development, but fees must be paid prior to review. The project’s design is by Brett Schulz, Architect PC.

Portland City Council in March 2023 passed incentives for building conversions. One exempts developers of office-to-residential building conversions from paying system development charges (SDCs). This exemption applies to conversion of an office building to residential use when a required seismic upgrade is completed as part of the process. The city will cover up to $3 million in SDCs or the cost of the seismic upgrade, whichever is lower.

A second incentive amends the seismic design requirements for office-to-residential conversions to meet the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 41-BPOE (Basic Performance Objective for Existing Buildings) standard, which is for life safety – enabling occupants of a building to exit it safely following a major earthquake. The change could ensure feasibility for some projects.

Also, a city initiative to boost housing development is under consideration in Portland. The proposed ordinance would waive SDCs until either 5,000 housing units are built or three years pass. The proposal will go before the Revenue Committee in early June and then the Portland City Council.

The post Office building conversions to housing could boost Portland appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Hillsboro’s data center industry is increasingly gaining national attention with rapid growth, and quickly emerging as one of the leading markets in the U.S.

Heading into 2022, Hillsboro had under construction a remarkable 234.8 megawatts of data center capacity – 85 percent of which was preleased to a social media company, according to a new CBRE report. (Facebook has been widely reported to have leased space at QTS Hillsboro Data Center).

The under-construction total represented a 481 percent increase, and the second-highest amount in the nation, trailing only Northern Virginia’s 239 megawatts, according to CBRE.

“(Hillsboro) is firmly on the radar, and it’s becoming a transition from a tier-two secondary market to a tier-one primary market,” said Carlo Castoro, a CBRE broker who focuses on Hillsboro data centers. “A lot of money is flowing into Hillsboro. These structures are super-expensive. The pace and scale of development is really remarkable.”

The Washington County tech capital posted the highest absorption among secondary markets in the country in the second half of 2021, taking 6.6 megawatts, according to CBRE.

The data centers are tightly concentrated around a fiber ring network in Washington County. The cluster is located near U.S. Route 26, approximately between Hillsboro Airport and Topgolf.

Hillsboro’s experience working with tech companies has made it easier for data center operators that have chosen the city, Castoro said.

“The city of Hillsboro was accustomed to dealing with Intel and providing the infrastructure to do what they do,” he said.

Hillsboro also benefits from low latency to Silicon Valley and Seattle – both major tech markets – and undersea fiber that reaches land on the Oregon Coast, Castoro said.

Prineville has also seen strong data center growth, driven by Facebook, which has 11 data centers totaling 4.6 million square feet at its massive campus there, industry publication Data Center Dynamics reported. The Prineville campus may be bumping up against power constraints, Castoro said. “If they’re not tapped out, they might be getting close,” he said.

Another major tech company, Google, operates a data center in The Dalles.

Hillsboro’s net absorption of 21.2 megawatts in 2021 placed the market seventh nationally, behind Northern Virginia (303.3), Atlanta (70.4), Phoenix (29.8), Dallas-Fort Worth (28.6), Chicago (27.4) and Silicon Valley (23.3).

The burst in activity is attracting contractors such as Skanska and DPR Construction and professional services firms. Gensler is among the designers that have targeted the market.

“Gensler has been in the critical facilities market and working in multiple Oregon locations for a number of years,” John Wix, principal and managing director of the firm’s Portland office, stated in an email in response to questions. “Recently, however, we have seen a notable increase in data center activities locally and have been focused on building a dedicated team here in our Portland office to help grow the regional and global practice.”

Designers are pursuing better energy performance for the notoriously high-demand buildings. One solution Gensler is working on is immersive cooling, in which servers are submerged in liquid to cool them. The technology has the potential to change the shape, size and location of future data centers, Wix stated.

Both Castoro and Wix said they’ve seen an increase in so-called “edge” centers – smaller data centers that locate processing power nearer to end users.

“While our clients take us to multiple market locations, Hillsboro continues to be very active for critical facility building types,” Wix stated. “We expect this activity to continue in western Oregon, and to see growth in other Oregon market locations as well.”

The post Data center growth explodes in Hillsboro appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The U.S. Bancorp Tower, a 1.2-million-square-foot monument to capitalist dynamism, stands eerily quiet in downtown Portland. Nearly all of the thousands of office workers who give the building purpose are at home.

On the ground-floor plaza, custodians wearing masks and gloves clean again and again, outnumbering the few office workers striding briskly through the lobby.

Furniture has been removed. Signs urge visitors and tenants to “KEEP CALM AND MOVE ALONG,” lest they create a plume of disease.

For office tenants and property managers in Portland and around the nation, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised fundamental questions about the modern workplace: Should we be together, or apart? If we can work effectively from home, should we? Is there still meaning and value in meeting face to face?

As Oregon, in fits and starts, slowly revives its stunned economy, office tenants are reconsidering the basics. They’re coming to different conclusions and watching their competitors, government authorities and news of the virus’ rise and fall for cues.

It’s an open question of whether the pandemic will subside quickly and the workplace will snap back to what, before March, was considered normal. It’s also unclear whether, like disasters and wars throughout American history, change will be good.

In interviews, property managers, tenants and architects expressed a new and humble sentiment: They don’t know.

“This is unprecedented times,” said John Wix, managing director of Gensler‘s office in Portland.

At the U.S. Bancorp Tower, better known as Big Pink, offices are operating at about 10 percent capacity, Unico Properties‘ representatives said. On a typical weekday before the pandemic, 4,000 to 5,000 workers filled the 42-story building.

“When the tenants are ready to come back, the building will be ready for them,” said Keren Eichen, Unico Properties’ director of real estate services.

Unico, the real estate giant that owns and manages the downtown tower, is preparing for tenants’ returns. The company has placed a hand sanitizer station in the lobby. Elevators are restricted to four people at a time, with their standing places marked on the floor. The parking garage has been reprogrammed for contactless entry. An app will call an elevator, as another measure to avoid touching buttons.

Big Pink entered the pandemic with 94 percent occupancy, and Unico has had no unplanned tenant exits, said Brian Pearce, Unico’s executive vice president.

Clackamas and Washington counties are reopening, and Multnomah County is likely to do so at some point in June, if certain benchmarks can be reached.

As offices prepare to reopen, managers are considering measures to ensure distancing. They include installing physical barriers between desks, staggering employees’ start times and asking only a quarter to half of office workers to return at first.

“The new normal is highly individualized by each business and what they can do to protect people,” said Stuart Colby, a principal at SERA Architects and director of its workplace studio.

It may make more sense to keep office density low, and have some employees continue to work from home, rather than undergo costly tenant improvement projects, some experts said.

“Tenants are not looking to spend a whole bunch of money right now, especially with the economy so poor,” Pearce said. “They’re looking at what they can do for little or no cost.”

In Unico’s conversations with tenants, Pearce said, the “vast majority of tenants said, ‘Look, we’re going to take it slow.’”

In other states, employers have reopened offices slowly. In Unico’s markets that have already reopened, including Salt Lake City, Denver, Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas, office use has grown gradually to about 50 percent, Pearce said.

“I don’t expect to see a line out the door the day the (Oregon) governor loosens restrictions,” Pearce said.

In early May, CBRE conducted an international survey of office tenants. Of 203 respondents, 59 percent said they would provide masks, but only 28 percent said employees would be required to wear them at all times at work.

Only 20 percent of companies plan to reopen as soon as government restrictions are lifted, according to the CBRE survey. More than twice as many – 42 percent – plan to reopen after their internal standards are met.

Most companies plan a phased reopening, with 72 percent taking that approach, according to CBRE.

Wade Lange, vice president and regional manager of American Assets Trust, said the company is preparing to welcome back in the Lloyd District workers with employers including WeWork, Genentech and PacifiCorp. AAT employees will have their temperature taken when they return to work, he said.

Tenants’ employees will be asked to wear masks.

“We ask that they please wear face masks from their cars or buses up to their suites,” Lange said.

Building owners will need to prepare the physical systems as well. The Portland Water Bureau and Bureau of Development Services issued a bulletin May 1 cautioning that deadly bacteria can grow in stagnant water pipes while buildings are vacant. The agencies advised running fresh water through commercial buildings at least weekly.

Commercial real-estate professionals are watching closely to see whether tenants’ needs change emerging from the pandemic. Office space could face competing imperatives, with the need for social distance prompting desire for more space, but a greater number of employees working from home on some or most days leading to a need for less space.

“It’s also possible once there’s a vaccine that everybody will go back to the way things were,” Pearce said.

Gensler’s Wix said that with more employees working remotely, offices could have more conference rooms and fewer desks.

“We’re seeing the workplace becoming this place where the office possibly is more geared toward the community and cultural activities – the collaborative activities,” he said. “Individuals don’t need to be there to do their work.”

Most office tenants have signed yearslong leases, which has cushioned the commercial real estate market from shock and given tenants and building owners time to adjust. Still, more than $1 billion in transaction volume disappeared because of the pandemic, Jones Lang LaSalle Managing Director Eric Turner said during a recent 91��Ƶ Builder Breakfast event.

The modern office environment did not materialize by accident, but is a highly evolved, specific model that works for many tenants, SERA’s Colby said.

“Business leaders have been making this very conscious choice for housing their workers for decades,” he said. “It seems like unwinding it to deal with one potential resilience model is highly unlikely.”

Colby said he’s cautioning clients not to lose sight of the workplace’s function as an employee recruitment and retention asset.

“Do we really want to go backwards?” he said. “(With) a command and control mindset, you’re going to lose a competitive advantage with the workforce. Maybe not today, but tomorrow.”

The post Uncertain future awaits office buildings appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.