TBD how much "over" might be. Further down, there's a $160M estimate.
Then there's the issue of whether all those repairs would work correctly, to actually fix everything. Vs. needing a $tbdM second round of repairs. Or more.
To summarize - a quarter of the floors of the building are uninhabited mechanical floors, which exist purely to push up the total height of the building. This allowed pushing inhabited floors higher more desirable views and pricing.
The loophole was more or less that only inhabited floors counted against the building square footage / height zoning. No one contemplated that a developer would be willing to waste 25% of floors to juice the height, but given the 0.1% market he was selling into.. it worked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/nyregion/tallest-building...
I’m curious if this just isn’t already well known in the zoning world? We build tall buildings because the higher floors are more valuable which make up for the smaller amount of total real estate. Logical extension of this is to sacrifice whole floors for height if that is what zoning required. I’m also curious how long it took someone to figure out this loophole (since it’s easy to say it’s obvious after the fact).
What actually happens is square footage per floor decreases with increased height. But a 20 or 80 story building still has strictly much more square footage than a 15 story one, perhaps excepting the absolute narrowest buildings.
And due to the premium you can charge for the upper floors, there's eventually an inflection point where profit per floor starts increasing again.
(Land-constrained, as in, when buying two equivalent lots and building half-height buildings becomes less profitable than building a skyscraper or supertall, due to massive demand for high-floor views, combined with sky-high nearby lot prices.)
Point of trivia: apparently there are terms for each 100m of height: Lowrise -> Highrise -> Skyrise (Skyscrapers) -> Supertalls.