Happy Thursday in New York City, where homes are getting redesigned, shaken and “demolished.”

Starting with the iconic bubble house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The spaceship-looking townhouse with its bulging, insectoid windows is something of a landmark to neighbors, though it’s never earned an official landmark distinction from the city. So when new owners purchase the home, as a family of buyers did last week for $5 million, there’s nothing stopping them from demolishing the facade and rebuilding something a bit more… normal.

“We don’t know yet,” the new buyers wrote to Curbed when asked if they planned to redesign the community fixture. Richard Pretsfelder, who sold the home, says the new owners are “very likely” to take out the windows. “The majority who came in were planning on restoring it to a more traditional facade,” Pretsfelder told Curbed. 

Meanwhile, a pile driver in Prospect Lefferts Garden is so violent that it’s literally shaking bricks free from the surrounding buildings, regardless of whether the owners were planning a redesign or not. “It’s as if a train were running through the house,” neighbor Dean Foster told The City. 

The pile driver is part of a construction site at 1935 Bedford Ave. Without proper safety monitors to protect nearby homes, including two 90-year-old co-op buildings, vibrations from the machine are strong enough to convince some unsuspecting neighbors that an earthquake is passing through. Some residents reported cracking in their homes, items falling from shelves and plaster and brick shaking loose from the walls.

One building that might be getting knocked down, depending on how you define the term, is 303 West 74th St. The residents of the Upper West Side apartment building, like a number of other tenants throughout the five boroughs, are being forced from their homes due to one of the stranger loopholes in New York’s new Good Cause Eviction Law: landlords can refuse to renew the lease for rent-paying tenants by citing an attempt to “demolish” the residence. But what counts as demolition is now very much up for debate.

In some cases, as with 303 West 74th St., landlords are invoking the demolition clause in the case of simple apartment renovations, such as relocating a bathroom or redesigning a kitchen. Does that count as a demolition? What about gut-renovating an entire apartment unit? Or 5 units? Or 10?

“We don’t know what demolition of an apartment means,” Ellen Davidson, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, told The City. “It’s a live question.”

From our signature townhouses to our historic co-ops to our apartment units, it seems like nothing is ever really finished in New York City, least of all our linguistic debates.

The housing market in Downtown Brooklyn exploded last year with over 4,800 new units, smashing the previous record of 2,925. Since a 2004 rezoning, the neighborhood has added over 26,000 units. 

A big issue is that no new green space has been created in the surrounding neighborhoods to keep up with this population spike, advocates say. 

Learn more about the gap between population and park space in Downtown Brooklyn.

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