The Empire Building was converted to 237 apartments in 1997 by World-Wide Group of Manhattan, which had purchased the foreclosed property for approximately $10 million. At the time, some 30 tenants occupied in the building. The renovation cost $40 million and was designed by Schuman Lichtenstein Claman &amp; Efron. The residential units were quickly occupied: One of the residents of 71 Broadway was the politician and economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was placed under house arrest in the building in 2011 during the criminal lawsuit filed against him, after another apartment building on the Upper East Side declined to host him. During Strauss-Kahn's house arrest, the Empire Building received extensive attention from the media and from passersby on Broadway, and it was dubbed "a new tourist hot spot".