Mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised that someone will answer for the deadly Brooklyn building collapse, but the trail is starting to lead back toward his own government.
The three-story building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue came down on Wednesday, killing eight people, including two children. As the investigation began, Mamdani vowed there would be consequences for anyone found at fault.
"If we find anyone that has violated the law, we will hold them fully accountable," the mayor said in a video posted to YouTube. He repeated the pledge at a press conference near the site, saying, "If there is anyone or any entity operating in this city that bears responsibility for what happened, we will hold them fully accountable."
According to The Western Journal, the mayor may not have to look far beyond City Hall to find part of the answer. Recent reporting indicates the city failed to enforce a stop-work order issued in March at the construction site next door and left a long list of violations at the collapsed building unresolved for years.
The record at the neighboring lot is especially troubling. In March, the Department of Buildings ordered work halted after inspectors found too little safety protection for nearby properties during demolition, yet work resumed in April in defiance of that order.
The city issued another violation, and the order was lifted in May after the problems were corrected and a $10,000 fine was paid. In other words, the agency knew this site had already ignored its commands once before excavation ever began.
The project itself had grown well beyond what the city signed off on. As City Limits reported, initial plans called for a three-story building, but the developer later decided to build a nine-story structure.
Those larger plans had not been approved. It remained unclear whether the excavation underway at the time of the collapse was meant to support a three-story or a nine-story building.
Investigators' attention has settled on that digging. The current theory, according to the New York Post, is that excavation work next door triggered the collapse.
The Department of Buildings said it received an anonymous complaint shortly after the collapse alleging that crews had dug too close to the building that fell. "The subcontractor may have excavated too much of the area along the neighboring foundation at once," the complaint said.
There were warning signs on the doomed building as well. A pre-construction inspection report from March found cracks in its facade, and when Mamdani was asked about it, he said he was "incredibly troubled."
City records show the building carried 98 open violations, some of them decades old. The owner, Olufemi Falade, owed the city more than $450,000 in unpaid taxes, water bills and fines, according to the Post.
Then there is the question of staffing at the agency charged with enforcing the rules. As noted by WNBC-TV, the Department of Buildings has a vacancy rate of 9 percent, with 168 positions sitting open.
For a mayor who campaigned on an expansive vision of what city government can do, those empty inspector posts are an awkward fact. Delivering on promises to protect tenants starts with the basic work of enforcing building codes that are already on the books.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, a Democrat, said that with two children among the dead, the city would "meet this moment." How often inspectors actually visited the excavation site before Wednesday, however, remains uncertain.
Mamdani has said the Department of Buildings is sweeping other sites tied to the companies behind the project. The families of the eight victims are still waiting to learn whether the accountability he promised will extend to the city agencies that let the warning signs pile up.
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