MTA Takes Building Owner to Court After He Declines to Let Transit Agency Inspect a Structure They Need to Build Under
EAST HARLEM, N.Y. – The Metropolitan Transportation Authority went to court this week seeking emergency access to a six-story apartment building on East Harlem’s Second Avenue, after the building’s owner declined to allow an inspection that engineers say is necessary before the agency can proceed with the nearly $7 billion extension of the Q line, a project that has been in various stages of planning, funding, litigation, and optimistic announcement since approximately 1929 and that is currently being blocked by one man who is worried about what the inspection might find.
The landlord, who owns 2049 Second Avenue, has argued that allowing the MTA’s structural engineers access to his building for assessment and reinforcement work would expose deficiencies that would be expensive to repair, a concern that legal scholars describe as ‘a legitimate property rights issue’ and that everyone who has been waiting for the Second Avenue Subway since the Truman administration describes as ‘an extraordinary amount of nerve.’ The MTA’s position is that it cannot assess the structural integrity of a building adjacent to a planned tunnel without accessing the building, a requirement that the laws of physics have supported and that the landlord’s attorney is contesting in court, apparently on the grounds that the laws of physics should not apply to his client’s financial interests.
A Century of Waiting
The Second Avenue Subway’s history is, at this point, one of the great New York stories of institutional ambition meeting structural reality, budget cycles, political will, world wars, fiscal crises, and now residential landlords. The original proposal for a subway line under Second Avenue was made in 1919. Tunneling began in the 1970s, stopped due to the city’s fiscal crisis, and left several segments of completed tunnel sitting unused for decades while the subway map continued to show nothing between Lexington Avenue and the East River above 63rd Street. Phase 1, which brought the Q train from 63rd Street to 96th Street along Second Avenue, opened in 2017 after years of construction and cost approximately $4.5 billion for three stations, a figure that established New York’s reputation as the most expensive subway-building city on Earth.
Phase 2, now blocked partly by a court case about a landlord’s building deficiencies, would extend the line to 125th Street with stops at 106th and 116th Streets, opening a transit-poor stretch of East Harlem to a subway connection for the first time in the neighborhood’s history. The project is funded through the MTA’s capital plan, relies in part on federal contributions, has been the subject of multiple legal disputes about funding authorization, and is now the subject of a new legal dispute about whether a man who owns an apartment building has to let engineers look at it. New York infrastructure: it finds ways.
The Cost of One Building
The MTA’s lawyers argued in court that without access to 2049 Second Avenue, the project cannot proceed, because the structural reinforcement work the building requires is on the critical path of the tunnel construction sequence. Delaying access means delaying construction, which in New York infrastructure terms means cost escalation, since the city’s tunneling costs are a function of time as much as materials, and time in a major infrastructure project in Manhattan costs approximately $1 million per day depending on what phase you’re in and who you ask.
The landlord’s attorneys have not publicly specified what deficiencies they fear the inspection would reveal, which is its own kind of information. Building deficiencies in New York City are common, the Department of Buildings has an extensive violations database, and most landlords comply with inspection requests because the alternative – a court order and a very public dispute about what is wrong with your building – is worse than whatever the inspection finds. The landlord in this case appears to have calculated that the inspection outcome is worse than the court case, which suggests the inspection would find something significant, and which is, for the 140,000 residents of the building’s surrounding blocks who have been waiting for subway service since the 1970s, approximately the least surprising development in the entire history of this project.
What Happens If He Wins
The City reported that the MTA has also been fighting the Trump administration over a freeze on federal funding for the Second Avenue Subway, a separate but related threat to the project’s timeline. The combination of federal funding uncertainty and a local landlord dispute creates what project planners describe as ‘a multi-vector schedule risk’ and what New York subway riders describe as ‘the usual situation.’ The MTA has indicated it will pursue the court action aggressively and expects to receive access, though the timeline for resolution adds uncertainty to a project whose timeline has not, historically, benefited from additional uncertainty. The Second Avenue Subway will be built. It has been going to be built for 100 years. One apartment building is not going to stop it. It will just add an entry to the project’s remarkable history of things that almost stopped it but did not quite.
The broader lesson of the Second Avenue Subway for New York City infrastructure is simple and frequently ignored: every major project in this city eventually encounters something that the project plan did not anticipate, because New York is a city of eight and a half million people built over 400 years of accumulated decisions, infrastructure, and property ownership, and the gap between a plan and its execution is always occupied by something surprising and expensive. The landlord at 2049 Second Avenue is this project’s something surprising. The courts will resolve it. The subway will proceed. And somewhere, in an apartment building on an avenue that has been promised a subway for 100 years, residents are waiting for the Q train with the resigned patience of people who have heard the announcement before and who will believe it when the doors open.
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