Eight people were killed and at least 17 injured when a three-story building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, collapsed on the afternoon of Nov. 11 into an open excavation pit next door, where work had begun on a planned apartment building. “I am heartbroken that eight New Yorkers have now lost their lives and at least 17 have been injured, including three firefighters,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement posted the morning of Nov. 12.
City officials have not said what caused the collapse. The Department of Buildings and law enforcement are investigating. Public records show the neighboring construction site, at 2625 Bedford Avenue, is being developed for a mixed-use building with 64 apartments.
What happened in Flatbush
The FDNY received the first 911 call about the collapse at 4:01 p.m. on Nov. 11, ABC News reported. Six people were pronounced dead at the scene and two died at the hospital overnight, according to authorities cited by ABC News, and four bodies recovered on the morning of Nov. 12 appeared to be those of construction workers. Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said seven children were among the victims but did not say whether any had died.
The FDNY described the collapsed building as a four-unit apartment building dating from 1930, NBC News reported. It had a business on the ground floor and apartments above. A neighboring building that shared a wall with it remained standing, but its wall was sheared off, leaving apartments open to the street. Bonsignore called it “such a very fragile situation” and said crews would “continue to look until we find everybody.” The FDNY said the toll could rise because it was not known how many people had been inside.
“There are no words for a loss of this magnitude,” Mamdani said. Gov. Kathy Hochul also issued a statement of condolence.
The construction site next door
The building fell into an excavation at 2625 Bedford Avenue, where a one-story building had been fully demolished. Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said the work underway on Nov. 11 was excavation. “They have a plan approved for a three-story building, but they have current plans looking for a nine-story building,” Tigani said, according to CBS New York. Officials said the nine-story plan has not been approved.
City filings fill in more of the picture. In the Department of Buildings’ DOB NOW job-filing records, published on the city’s open data portal, the lot’s owner is listed as W6 Facility X. LLC. A new-building application filed Jan. 15, 2026 describes a “proposed new 9 story + cellar mixed use building” with 64 dwelling units; its status is listed as “Objections,” meaning the main application has not been approved. Two related filings under the same job, one for support of excavation, the shoring that holds back soil and protects neighboring buildings during digging, and one for foundation plans, are listed as fully permitted, with first permits dated Sept. 9, 2026. A separate job for full demolition of the one-story building on the lot was filed in November 2025.
The records do not explain how the approved three-story plan Tigani described relates to the nine-story application, and the filings reviewed for this article do not show who was doing the excavation. CBS New York reported that the city cited a demolition contractor at the site in April after inspectors found an “entire building was demolished” despite an order to stop demolition work; that violation is listed as resolved, and the contractor told CBS it did the demolition months earlier and was not doing the digging.
The collapsed building’s record
The Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s violation records for 1321 Flatbush Avenue stretch back decades. Eleven violations were issued after inspections in 2026 alone, in March, April and May. They include orders to repair “unsafe electric wiring,” to “provide an adequate supply of water for the wet sprinkler and/or standpipe system,” to replace defective self-closing doors and to fix smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. None of the 2026 violations describes a structural defect, and officials have not linked any of them to the collapse.
What it means for builders and owners
Excavation beside older masonry buildings is routine across New York City, where new infill buildings often rise against neighbors built a century ago. That is why support-of-excavation plans, like the one permitted on this job, are required before digging starts, and why the investigation into this site will be watched closely by developers, contractors, insurers and owners of older buildings. On our reading, the questions investigators face are what work was being done on Nov. 11, under which approved plan, and whether the neighboring building was being monitored.
The collapse follows a structural emergency in Midtown this summer, when buckled columns at a 37-story building on East 42nd Street led to vacate orders nearby, and the city later halted a second office-to-residential conversion in the wake of that scare. Mamdani’s administration has also announced stricter enforcement at the city’s most distressed apartment buildings and signed COPA, which gives nonprofits a first shot at buying distressed buildings. More construction and development coverage is in our Commercial Real Estate section.
