NEW YORK | Hudson Yards; 40 msf of development

[NYC4Life]

Originally Posted by NYguy

Now, imagine that same view a decade from now

[THE BIG APPLE]

Stephen Ross is seriously eyeing Nordstrom as his second major tenant, and let me tell you if that happens this'll be the new 5th Ave, with two major fashion campanies. This is much more than "Time Warner Center on Steroids" as they like to call it.

[RobertWalpole]

http://www.observer.com/2011/12/the-...oised-for-nyc/

The White Whale of West 57th Street: Nordstrom appears poised for NYC
By Daniel Geiger 2:00pm

According to brokers familiar with Nordstrom’s search, the options are emblematic of the dilemma that has kept the retailer bouncing around Manhattan for years. The department store is ideally searching for a roughly 250,000-square-foot box, a commodity so rare in the city that the only major department stores that have it—Macy’s and Saks among a short list of others—are ones that have been established in the city for decades and hence had a chance to address their real estate needs before the market became as expensive and supply-starved as it is now.

The solution, of course, has been for Nordstrom to accept a smaller space with a layout that is atypical for a traditional department store. Many brokers say the template for this configuration is the Bloomingdale’s on Broadway in Soho, where the retailer had to greatly reduce the size of its store and tailor its clothing line and layout to appeal to the type of shoppers in that neighborhood.

A similar reshuffling of the Nordstrom concept would likely be necessary to bring the chain to Extell’s project, brokers told The Commercial Observer. The attractiveness of the rail yards stems from an assumption that the company could design a building from the ground up to meet all of its specifications.

But the rail yards are considered a new frontier in the city with little retail connecting the site to Midtown, making a deal there a gamble if the neighborhood takes longer than expected to develop into a popular destination for shoppers.

[NYguy]

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/...sEnabled=false

Hudson Yards on Manhattan's far West Side plagued by cost overruns
City in denial on costs, potential of project

Juan Gonzalez
December 7 2011

Meanwhile, costs have ballooned for Hudson Yards’ two main public improvements: extension of the No. 7 subway to 34th St. and 11th Ave., and construction of a new ribbon park and midblock boulevard between 10th and 11th Aves.

During the past few months, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has quietly revised the price tag for the subway extension to nearly $2.4 billion from $2.1 billion. City Hall continues to insist, nonetheless, that the overall project is still on budget.

They miraculously found $235 million in “cost savings and unused contingencies elsewhere within the project budget,” according to a Hudson Yards bond document released in October, while also adding $32 million to pay for “certain 11th Ave. reconstruction work necessary to construct the subway extension.”

The city will have spent $51 million on 11th Ave.’s reconstruction by this year, says the Independent Budget Office. It plans to spend another $63 million to rebuild an additional few blocks of 11th Ave starting in 2015.

Then there’s an item in the Department of Environmental Protection’s budget that’s labeled “Hudson Yards Water and Sewer Reconstruction.” It earmarks $48 million for new water and sewer lines between 2015 and 2021.

[J. Will]

Why does the topic say 40m square feet of development when the official website only says 12.87m square feet?

[THE BIG APPLE]

Originally Posted by J. Will

Why does the topic say 40m square feet of development when the official website only says 12.87m square feet?

12.87 msf or more is supposed to be the amount of class A office space. The entire development is 40 msf.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by J. Will

Why does the topic say 40m square feet of development when the official website only says 12.87m square feet?

There is no official website for Hudson Yards. It's a neighborhood, not a development.

You're referring to the Related website. Related has rights to about 13 million square feet of development, out of the 40 million total. Related is just one of many landowners in the neighborhood.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by THE BIG APPLE

12.87 msf or more is supposed to be the amount of class A office space. The entire development is 40 msf.

No, there is no mandated breakdown of uses within Hudson Yards.

The zoning allows office, hotel, residential, etc.

No one knows what the final product will be, but I would guess it would be far more office-intensive than anything else. Probably 25-30 million square feet of office space.

[THE BIG APPLE]

Originally Posted by THE BIG APPLE

12.87 msf or more is supposed to be the amount of class A office space. The entire development is 40 msf.

^I think I basically said that.

[J. Will]

The lead developer, Related Companies, released a fairly detailed breakdown of the plan for the entire site more than a month ago. It calls for 6 million square feet of office, and 12.87 million square feet total. Their website seems to be down right now, but this is from the .pdf:

[Roadcruiser1]

Originally Posted by J. Will

The lead developer, Related Companies, released a fairly detailed breakdown of the plan for the entire site more than a month ago. It calls for 6 million square feet of office, and 12.87 million square feet total. Their website seems to be down right now, but this is from the .pdf:

The floor space for this site is equal to the floor space of the original World Trade Center. That is just so cool.

[THE BIG APPLE]

But the old WTC contained around 12 msf of office space. This is office, residential, commercial, and hotel space around 12 msf.

[J. Will]

That's what I'm saying.

[THE BIG APPLE]

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Crawford

There is no official website for Hudson Yards. It's a neighborhood, not a development. You're referring to the Related website. Related has rights to about 13 million square feet of development, out of the 40 million total. Related is just one of many landowners in the neighborhood.

Right, people (media included) often confuse the Hudson Yards redevelopment plan with the railyards development that is a part of it. The specific Hudson Yards redevelopment plan that was approved by the City covers every thing in the Hudson Yards district from the railyards, to towers like the Girasole and Manhattan West, and the new Hudson Boulevard around which most of the towers will rise.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/hyards/proposal.shtml

http://hydc.org/html/home/home.shtml





http://hydc.org/html/home/home.shtml

The absence of sites in Midtown Manhattan for large floor-plate office buildings has led many companies to leave the City for larger sites elsewhere in the region. Rezoning would ensure that redevelopment of the area supports the larger goal of keeping New York competitive as a global city for the next several decades. While accommodating approximately 28 million square feet of commercial office growth, the plan also provides for approximately 12.6 million square feet of residential expansion.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/hyards/hymain.shtml

For centuries, New York has grown to meet the employment and housing needs of its citizens. The foresight of the city’s leaders – exemplified best in Manhattan's grid plan of 1811 and the annexation and consolidation of 1898 – has been matched by private entrepreneurship, especially in the railroads and in the subway systems that reached out from the City's point of origin in Lower Manhattan to the outer boroughs. Over time, in large part because of that confluence of transit lines, the office market settled in Manhattan.

That demand continues – the 2000 Census indicated that over 8 million people now live in New York City, the most in the City’s history. Companies continue to seek out New York City as a place to set up headquarters, the latest example is Bank of America. In the New York region, it is anticipated that there will be the need to accommodate over 440,000 new workers, requiring 111 million square feet of new space by 2025. If Midtown captures near its historical share, 45 million square feet of office space would be needed over the next 20 years. The problem is that there are few sites remaining in Midtown to accommodate new office buildings. Recent studies indicate that at most, there is perhaps room to accommodate only 20 million square feet in Midtown. In a place where dreams and ambitions are limitless, land is not. Manhattan in a few short years will be out of developable land for new office construction.

There is one last frontier available in Manhattan - Hudson Yards, the underutilized area bounded roughly by West 42nd Street and West 30th Street, Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River.

[J. Will]

My apologies. I thought people were suggesting there was going to be 40m square feet of development just from 10th Avenue West between 31st and 33rd Streets, which of course is absurd. That would require a site-wide FAR of over 50 by my calculations.

[NYguy]

Numbered days for the Javits?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...b43fe476a792c8

NY gov seeks Aqueduct convention center, casinos

By MICHAEL GORMLEY
Jan 4, 2011

A privately funded plan to build the world's biggest convention center in New York City with 3,000 hotel rooms and an inside track to expanded gambling got a powerful boost Wednesday from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo pushed for a development company's proposal for Aqueduct racetrack in Queens in his State of the State speech as part of his recommendation to grow gambling in a bid to create jobs and shore up sagging state tax revenues.

The proposed $4 billion, nearly 4 million-square-foot convention center in Queens between New York City's major airports would replace the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. The Javits Center was considered too small almost from the outset and poorly suited for the kind of bold, glitzy convention center that would be appropriate for Manhattan as a world destination; an ongoing expansion project slated for completion next year would increase its size to nearly 900,000 square feet.

"Let's build the largest convention center in the nation, period," Cuomo said.

Reactions from legislative leaders indicated no immediate opposition. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said New York City needs a bigger convention center to draw more visitors. "Aqueduct would probably make a decent location," he said, noting it has the advantage of available land.

The New York Daily News first reported Wednesday the project would be funded by the Genting Group of Malaysia. Genting runs the video slot machine center at Aqueduct.

[NYguy]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...ADQO07SXKX.DTL

Cuomo Calls for Biggest U.S. Convention Center in New York City

Esmé E. Deprez
January 4, 2012

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called for building a 3.8 million-square-foot convention center, the largest in the U.S., in the New York City borough of Queens.

The center, which would be bigger than McCormick Place in Chicago, would be built at Aqueduct Racetrack in a joint venture with the Kuala Lumpur-based gambling company Genting Bhd., Cuomo said today in remarks prepared for his State of the State speech in Albany, the capital. The $4 billion "private investment" would also include as many as 3,000 hotel rooms, he said.

Cuomo, a 54-year-old Democrat beginning his second year, said the center would allow the state to turn the Jacob Javits Convention Center into a mixed-use facility to help revitalize the far west side of Manhattan. The Javits Center is "obsolete and not large enough to be a top-tier competitor in today's marketplace," he said.

_______________________________________________




http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...120109978/1072

Cuomo wants nation's biggest convention center



By Jeremy Smerd
January 4, 2012

Razing the Javits Center would leave a multi-block, $4 billion piece of waterfront property that could be parceled off and developed alongside Related Cos.' planned Hudson Yards project and the redevelopment of the Farley Post Office into Moynihan Station. The redevelopment of Javits will be modeled after Battery Park City, where the state leases the land to developers in exchange for a percentage of their rental income. Revenue for the state would increase along with apartment values.

Economic development officials had considered Willets Point, Queens, a possible site for a new convention center because of its proximity to La Guardia Airport and infrastructure improvements that are already underway. But the Aqueduct Racetrack site in Queens has clear advantages, too: Genting could build a convention center on one story and, perhaps most importantly, finance it.

"Genting Americas is extremely excited about this opportunity to partner with Gov. Cuomo to build the largest convention center in the country,” said Christian Goode, the company's senior vice president for development. “It's a great time to invest and grow in New York, and we are thrilled to be able to play a role in creating jobs and increasing tourism."

______________________________________


http://www.scribd.com/doc/77151117/SOS-Book

(page 9)

We Will Master Plan the Javits Convention Center Site

We can then master plan the 18-acre Jacob Javits Convention Center site as a mixed-use facility to revitalize New York City’s West Side. We will follow the highly successful Battery Park City model, which has resulted in housing, hotels, museums, and over 10 million square feet of Class A office space. As part of the redevelopment, we will explore options for serving the needs of smaller and medium sized trade shows at the Javits site or elsewhere onthe West Side of Manhattan. We estimate over $2 billion in private sector development increating a new 21st century neighborhood for the West Side.To put it in perspective, the Javits Center site is larger thanthe World Trade Center and the United Nations. This will complement the development at Hudson Yards andMoynihan Station.

[RobertWalpole]

It is mind boggling to think of the sea of supertall structures that this area will have in 20years!


http://www.superstock.com/stock-phot...es/1566-326885

[RobertWalpole]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...come&mg=id-wsj

NY POLITICS
JANUARY 5, 2012
Another New Idea for the Javits Center

By JOSEPH DE AVILA

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's plans to redevelop the West Side facility and build a new convention center in Queens come as the Javits Center is searching for a new chief executive and is completing a $500 million renovation.

Making the announcement in his State of the State address, Mr. Cuomo summed up what critics have said about the state-owned Javits Center for years: It is too small and outdated to host world-class events in the nation's largest city.

"Right now the Jacob Javits Center is not competitive," Mr. Cuomo said, adding that it is smaller than convention centers in cities like Anaheim and Atlanta. "That hurts the New York economy."

Replacing Javits would be what Mr. Cuomo billed as the country's largest convention center, a private venture proposed near the Aqueduct Racetrack and a casino in the South Ozone Park section of Queens. The plan would add the Javits site as another prime parcel of developable land in a fast-growing part of Manhattan near the Related Cos.' Hudson Yards project and Moynihan Station.

Under Mr. Cuomo's plan, the 18-acre Javits Center site would become a mixed-use facility that could include housing, hotels and office space. It would be modeled, Mr. Cuomo said, after the Battery Park City Authority, which signs long-term leases with private developers and provides revenue to the state. Small and midsize conventions could still take place at Javits, while larger shows would happen in Queens. The Cuomo administration estimates that more than $2 billion in private-sector investment would flow into a redeveloped Javits Center.

Carl Loewenson, chairman of the New York Convention Center Operating Corp. that runs the Javits Center, declined to comment on Mr. Cuomo's speech.

Mr. Cuomo's plan is the latest effort by the state to reconfigure the Javits Center, which was built in 1986. Ever since, governors have made halting efforts to expand the center, which is currently in the midst of a $500 million renovation that includes an 80,000-square-foot addition scheduled to be completed in two years.

The Queens convention center proposal—on which Mr. Cuomo's Javits plans hinge—would face significant obstacles.

Malaysian gaming company Genting Americas would have to obtain financing for a 3.8-million-square-foot facility that would cost more than $1 billion at a time when construction loans are hard to get, industry experts said. A Genting subsidiary already runs a casino at the racetrack.

The Queens location could be another hurdle because many tourists prefer to stay in Manhattan with easy access to restaurants and Broadway, said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, an industry association.

"Part of the planning will have to be the transportation to get people around the city of New York," Mr. Spinola said. "But if you make it big enough and make it exciting enough, I think you will be able to overcome that."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the Aqueduct area would be a "decent location."

"I think all of us agree that we need a bigger convention center," he said. "It would be a great idea to get it done."

Christian Goode, senior vice president of development of Genting Americas, said in a statement: "It's a great time to invest and grow in New York, and we are thrilled to be able to play a role in creating jobs and increasing tourism."

Mr. Cuomo's vision for the Javits Center would open for development a Manhattan parcel of land that the governor said was "larger than the World Trade Center and the United Nations."

"This becomes the biggest development parcel in the city," said Bob Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, which had pushed for a similar plan for Javits last year. "It's the opportunity to create a large mixed-use district that would complement the Hudson Yards site."

The proposal comes as the Javits Center has hunted for a new chief executive for several months after its longtime leader Gerald McQueen stepped down last year. Mr. McQueen had been credited for rooting out the mob corruption at the center and helping it turn profits from fiscal year 1997 to 2009.

The center's financial health declined after the 2008-09 recession. Shows have become smaller, and there have been fewer of them as more groups opt for video conferencing instead of traditional conventions, Mr. Loewenson said.

"People have recovered from the shock of the financial crisis, but it's still not back to where it was before 2008," Mr. Loewenson said.