Posted Yesterday, 3:55 AM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,945
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Some good stuff in this interview…
https://commercialobserver.com/2024/...filling-space/
Colliers’ Michael Cohen On Filling All That Empty New York Office Space
It all starts with rezoning vast swaths of the city and letting private capital come in
BY DAVID M. LEVITT
APRIL 16, 2024
Quote:
The third thing to consider is teardowns, which may result in more desirable office buildings, or hotels or hospitality — the use is not preordained. We’ve emptied out a building in the Plaza District. SL Green (SLG) had 625 Madison, ours is a stone’s throw away at 655 Madison. We’re going to see those buildings get torn down and replaced probably by a mixture of retail, hospitality, and residential. And I don’t have to tell you that all three of those uses are very desirable in the Plaza District.
I have a theory that I haven’t heard anybody else share, which I will share with you. The city has, for a long time, had very little new development. In the real estate business, a modern building was one that was built in the 1980s or 1990s. There was very little in the wake of the 2001 meltdown, very little construction in the 21st century. And part of the problem was that in the most desirable neighborhoods along Park and Madison and so forth, if you tore down a building, you couldn’t even rebuild what you tore down. So intrepid developers like L&L Holding came up with workarounds.
So we had this inability to create new product due to this anachronistic zoning. L&L used these workarounds, but they were not as satisfying as tearing down an old building and replacing it with a new one. So Hudson Yards was born, I believe, off the overflow of tenants who could not find the large modern new buildings that they needed in Midtown.
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Quote:
Simultaneous with Hudson Yards, the city did an experiment with rezoning to allow buildings as large as One Vanderbilt, which proved hugely popular.
The city rezoned the site and allowed SL Green to purchase air rights. In return, the city got transit improvements, and this became a template for the Midtown East rezoning. This resulted in a modern building right in the heart of Midtown.
And, in the wake of One Vanderbilt, the city changed the zoning, so the air rights to St. Patrick’s and Grand Central are fungible over a large swath of Midtown East.
The poster child for this, I always say, is 250 Park, which is in a fabulous location and is being offered for sale right now. It’s a building that has a demolition clause in it. I guarantee you, every buyer looking at that building is looking at it as a development site. It will eventually be torn down and replaced by a supertall.
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“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
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