NEW YORK | City plans BIG rezoning of Midtown

[chris08876]

Found this interesting:
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Property in the Upper East Side is worth more than several US states






Interactive Map/Stats: http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-p...n-perspective/

[sparkling]

3.5M SF of Air Rights for Sale in Midtown East if Steering Committee Recs Get OK

TERENCE CULLEN
OCT. 29, 2015

The owners of landmarks throughout the east side of Midtown are about to see the market open up for their 3.5 million square feet of air rights.

A steering committee made up of elected officials and community groups has released its much-anticipated recommendations to rezone the Midtown East area.

There will be two options for increased zoning, if the plan is approved. The first is to allow developers to increase their floor-area-ratio by initially investing in nearby public transportation, namely subway platforms, according to the executive summary of the report. The other option lets owners of landmarked buildings within Midtown East would be able to sell unused air rights to a project throughout the 73-block district bound by East 39th and East 57th Streets, and Second through Fifth Avenues.

Continue Reading

[C.]

Originally Posted by sparkling

3.5M SF of Air Rights for Sale in Midtown East if Steering Committee Recs Get OK

TERENCE CULLEN
OCT. 29, 2015

I wonder if this has anything to do with the lawsuit the owners of Grand Central Terminal filed against the city for (intentionally or unintentionally) reducing the market value of the air rights when it rezoned One Vandy. Under the old rules, there was no one which could accept Grand Central's air rights and the property is landmarked, forbidding it's redevelopment to take advantage of the allowable air rights.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by CIA

I wonder if this has anything to do with the lawsuit the owners of Grand Central Terminal filed against the city for (intentionally or unintentionally) reducing the market value of the air rights when it rezoned One Vandy. Under the old rules, there was no one which could accept Grand Central's air rights and the property is landmarked, forbidding it's redevelopment to take advantage of the allowable air rights.

It has nothing to do with Grand Central. This has been in discussion for probably 10-15 years now, long before talk of rezoning the area.

And Grand Central's air rights are available to anyone. The reason the entity that controlled the air rights was against the East Midtown rezoning is because they believe it devalues their air rights (previously they had a monopoly on air rights in the area).

[sparkling]

Midtown East rezoning will likely be passed in 2017: Garodnick
Council member hopeful de Blasio will make proposal this year

February 03, 2016
Konrad Putzier

Council member Dan Garodnick expects the Midtown East rezoning to pass before the next mayoral election in 2017. The remark, made at Wednesday’s B’nai B’rith real estate luncheon at the Cornell Club, offers further hope that an issue whose many twists, turns and delays have galvanized the real estate industry could finally be resolved.In October, a steering committee including Garodnick and Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer proposed a sweeping rezoning plan for Midtown East between 39th Street and 57th Street. The de Blasio administration is currently reviewing the proposal, and is set to present its own plan in turn.

“I think you’re going to see a proposal from the mayor this year” Garodnick said. “They will propose it, then it goes through ULURP, and then we pass it. My expectation is that we will pass the East Midtown rezoning in 2017.”

Garodnick is a key figure in the long-standing quest to rezone and promote new construction in Midtown East – a district shaped by stately but ageing office buildings and cramped subway cars. In 2012, then-mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a sweeping rezoning plan. The plan failed a year later in large part due to the opposition of Garodnick, who lamented a lack of provisions for transit improvements.

In 2015, City Council passed a more modest rezoning plan for a five-block stretch along Vanderbilt Avenue, which it billed as the first phase of a Midtown East rezoning, and paved the way for the development of SL Green’s office tower One Vanderbilt. Phase two is set to cover the entire neighborhood, stretching from Third Avenue to Madison Avenue.

Under the Garodnick and Brewer proposal, owners of landmarked buildings could sell up to 4 million square feet in unused air rights to developers across the district at market rates. The city would take a 20 to 40 percent cut of the sales proceeds to fund transit and public infrastructure improvements. The de Blasio administration has made the rezoning one of its priorities.

[NYguy]

http://ny.curbed.com/2016/5/10/11650...ngs-identified

LPC Earmarks 12 Midtown East Buildings As Part of Neighborhood Revitalization
Includes the Graybar Building, the Pershing Square Building, and the Yale Club of New York among others



The Yale Club of New York pictured here is one of the buildings being considered for landmarking



BY TANAY WARERKAR
MAY 10, 2016

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission has identified 12 buildings in Midtown East, including the Graybar Building and the Pershing Square Building, to be potentially landmarked in the future. It's part of the agency's move to provide greater protection to historic buildings in the neighborhood.

In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio created the East Midtown Steering Committee to tackle a series of goals for the neighborhood including density, sustainability, and historic preservation. That's where the LPC comes into the mix.

The agency studied the area known as Greater East Midtown, which spans East 39th to East 57th Streets, from Fifth Avenue to Second Avenue. And through that study the LPC identified three eras of development — buildings constructed prior to the existence of the Grand Central Terminal (pre-GCT), those built during its construction or soon after, and finally, those that were built after 1933 (post--GCT).

Buildings were then selected from each era and calendared to be considered at a future date. Most of the ones chosen including the Graybar Building and the Pershing Square Building were from the Grand Central Terminal era, when construction was spurred by improvements in transit.

"Greater East Midtown has always been the commercial center of New York, and its authenticity and dynamism largely derive from the textured coexistence of historic buildings and new construction," Meenakshi Srinivasan, the chair of the LPC, said in a press release. "Our challenge was to conceptualize a preservation strategy to protect a collection of significant buildings that, together, establish a historical narrative that will continue to be legible amidst future change."

East Midtown already has 38 individual landmarks and one historic district, and landmarking the 12 selected buildings could potentially bring that up to 50. Some of the other buildings under consideration include the Hampton Shops Building, the Yale Club of New York, and the Shelton and Beverly Hotels.

[NYguy]

Just a quick note, the final Midtown East rezoning kicks off next month. Here's a look at the sites under consideration for development. None will be as large as the sites previously rezoned next to Grand Central, but will provide the opportunity for new development and conversions.



























With change...

[Crawford]

Per Crains NY, Vornado is eventually planning a new office tower at 350 Park Avenue, using the new Midtown rezoning. That will be a major site.

Leases signed at 350 Park all contain demolition clauses, meaning the building can be cleared out when ready.

[NYguy]

http://nypost.com/2016/10/25/will-ci...mercial-heart/

Will City Hall save NYC’s ailing commercial heart?


By Steve Cuozzo
October 25, 2016

Major League Baseball’s decision to move its headquarters from Park Avenue to Sixth Avenue, announced last week, should light a fire under city planners. Manhattan’s future depends on making East Midtown once again attractive to Major League companies. But a proposal to do that is stuck at third base.

A rezoning plan that was unveiled in August still has an alarming number of unresolved issues. It raises the possibility that the measure will go down swinging, as an earlier one did in 2013. Planning Commissioner Carl Weisbrod and Council Member Dan Garodnick, the pol with the largest say in East Midtown, must hold all feet to the fire before it’s again too late.

Rezoning East Midtown would allow larger and taller new buildings than now stand in the district, where structures are on average 75 years old.

Major League Baseball’s decision to move its headquarters from Park Avenue to Sixth Avenue, announced last week, should light a fire under city planners. Manhattan’s future depends on making East Midtown once again attractive to Major League companies. But a proposal to do that is stuck at third base.

A rezoning plan that was unveiled in August still has an alarming number of unresolved issues. It raises the possibility that the measure will go down swinging, as an earlier one did in 2013. Planning Commissioner Carl Weisbrod and Council Member Dan Garodnick, the pol with the largest say in East Midtown, must hold all feet to the fire before it’s again too late.

Rezoning East Midtown would allow larger and taller new buildings than now stand in the district, where structures are on average 75 years old.

The area bounded roughly by Third and Fifth avenues, and East 39th and 57th streets, was once unchallenged as the nation’s premier commercial district. Iconic landmarks like Grand Central Terminal and a wealth of hotels, stores and cultural attractions shared the streets with an unparalleled concentration of Fortune 500 companies.

But the zone atrophied over time. Most of its office buildings are too antiquated for today’s large companies, which demand advanced digital infrastructure, energy-efficient environmental features and more open-plan floor plates than exist in mid-20th Century towers. Current zoning law, much of it written in 1961, makes replacing them with new structures even of the same size all but impossible.

City Hall finally put out a new plan to up-zone the area last year. It could pave the way for about 16 large new buildings over the next 20 years. But it won’t even begin the peril-frought, seven-month public-review process until the end of 2016, if then.

Drawing all “stakeholders” — preservationists, elected officials and landlords — into talks that began in June 2015 was supposed to ensure smooth sailing on the way to approval by the City Council.

But now, real-estate lobbyists want the rezoning to allow even more large new buildings. Churches and synagogues object to rules regarding sale prices for their air rights.

There’s confusion over a crucial requirement for developers in parts of the district to pay for transit upgrades, which they must do to earn size-and-height bonuses. How much would they pay? How will the city and the MTA agree on what should be done?

Without immediate resolution of such issues, it could be years before meaningful rezoning goes forward.

Meanwhile, the list of companies itching to leave grows longer. Those gone or going include Citigroup, Sony, Twitter, Boston Consulting, Hudson’s Bay Co., Wells Fargo, Point72, MarketAxess and two major law firms — Jones Day and Kaye Scholer. They’re headed to the West Side, Downtown or Midtown South.

Now, landlords are trembling over the likelihood that Blackstone, one of the district’s remaining financial anchors, will bolt for the Far West Side when its leases are up in a few years.

In an ominous parallel trend, glamour firms based in other neighborhoods that needed to expand — such as Condé Nast, Time Warner, Time Inc., Coach Inc., IBM Watson and the National Hockey League — have shunned East Midtown.

How did it come to this?

Former Mayor Michael Bloom­berg had the vision to rezone neglected parts of town, such as the Far West Side and the Brooklyn Waterfront. But he long ignored creeping stagnation in the traditional economic powerhouse, East Midtown.

By the time the city finally woke up to it, a crash proposal to rezone the area ran into a wall of flak that killed it three years ago.

Mayor de Blasio’s planners this year did manage to rezone Vanderbilt Avenue — but that’s a mere five blocks long. The first new office tower the rezoning is making possible, One Vanderbilt, will bring 2 million state-of-the-art square feet to market — but even it won’t open until 2020.

Time is of the essence to get the rest of the job done before East Midtown’s greatness lives on mainly in movies and old postcards.

[Dac150]

Midtown East will always be a stronghold given GCT. If anything, these departures allow landlords the opportunity to rehab their properties. Although many of the buildings appear to be timeless, they are in fact many decades old and simply cannot compete in their current form with new construction.

[NYguy]

The broader Midtown East rezoning gets underway.


http://nypost.com/2017/01/03/east-mi...inally-happen/

...Existing buildings, hobbled by ancient infrastructure unsuited to today’s digitally attuned companies, are an average 70 years old, mainly because 1961 zoning rules made replacing them near-impossible. Freeing the area from the straitjacket could restore its allure to companies needing 21st-century bells and whistles.

...If the Department of City Planning measure survives the seven-month Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which requires approval by the City Council and the mayor, it will bring a net increase over 20 years of more than 6 million square feet of office space to the district’s current 90 million square feet, the DCP projects.

But the area will gain more than 15 million square feet of modern, state-of-the-art space because some old buildings will be torn down for new ones.

Rezoning’s fate is being closely followed by landlords who want the option to redevelop older properties — among them, publicly traded SL Green, Vornado and Brookfield; privately held Rudin Management and the Durst Organization; and companies that own their office towers such as JPMorgan Chase and Pfizer.

Some take aways from the DEIS that was released, along with potential or expected development sites, lot sizes, etc. Projected height numbers are just numbers for reasonable development (no bearing on what will actually get built). Projected FARs, for the most part, will range from 23 - 25.







Locations of individual projected sites...



























Development would minimally impact or overburden existing resources in the already dense area...











An sample of projected development sites and what could be built...

[C.]

Not bad but I was hoping for more use of transferable development rights. We're going to see a loss of a lot of older buildings replaced with modern ones, which was the intent I guess. I would rather have some of the older buildings preserved with the potential for very tall developments on soft and other underutilized sites.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by CIA

Not bad but I was hoping for more use of transferable development rights. We're going to see a loss of a lot of older buildings replaced with modern ones, which was the intent I guess. I would rather have some of the older buildings preserved with the potential for very tall developments on soft and other underutilized sites.

The older buildings are being preserved. The few that will be demolished aren't anywhere near enough to change the look and overall feel of east midtown. That's just not going to happen, and for a variety of reasons. While this will only account for a small fraction of the overall office space there (a net gain of about 6 msf), it will allow for the construction of about 15 msf of new office space in the neighborhood. That's on par with what is being built in the hudson yards, something not easy to do because the sites in midtown east are more restrictive, with smaller footprints.

For those who were worried we would see large scale demolishment of the neighborhood, that's not going to happen either.

As for the use of air rights from landmarks, that is a large part of the plan also, but it's up to individual developers to put that into play.

[chris08876]

A plan to rezone Midtown East could make the neighborhood 10% darker

The rezoning plan the city is seeking for Midtown East could eventually make streets in the district 10% darker.

That's because an obscure formula known as the Waldram diagram, which is used by developers to calculate how much daylight a new building will block out, is being relaxed as part of the rezoning, allowing for taller and bulkier spires in the neighborhood.

According to Alex Duda, an architect who specializes in helping builders shape their plans to conform to the Waldram formula, the current equation would require the new, larger towers permitted by the rezoning to taper dramatically in order to block out less of the sky from the street below. But that type of design would discourage builders from raising new towers.

"Having a building that dramatically tapers really doesn't work from an efficiency standpoint for builders," said Duda, whose company, Cad/4D, uses proprietary software to calculate a building's imprint on the skyline. "New building codes require three stairwells and extra shafts for smoke ventilation, so the floors can only be so small before they become impractical to build."

To encourage development, the Midtown East rezoning plan will allow towers to be built that are more than 40% bigger than the existing buildings in the district and also keep more of their bulk as they rise, in turn eclipsing more of the sky. Relaxing the Waldram formula is a key part of the plan, but has received little attention.

The Department of City Planning, which submitted the rezoning plan to a land-use review process in January, has stated that the plan will spur only a handful of new towers, totaling about 6.5 million square feet in the 73-block neighborhood, in the coming years. That suggests that a darker streetscape will be seen in select areas.

The Waldram diagram is a little-known formula in the zoning code that is applicable only in Midtown, Duda said. Builders have the choice either to use the equation or conform to more formulaic criteria, such as prescribed setbacks.

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http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...state-20170302

[mrsmartman]

Improving Transit with Midtown East Rezoning

Originally Posted by vanshnookenraggen

Last week the NYC City Planning Commission moved forward with one of former mayor Bloomberg’s last major rezoning proposals for Midtown East (the area between Fifth Avenue, Third Avenue, East 39th Street and East 57th Street). The idea is to encourage large new development in a transit rich area of the city which was last built out in the 1950s and 60s. This was the prime showcase for the city’s 1961 zoning plan which introduced plazas as an incentive for taller buildings. The Seagrams Building on Park Ave between 52nd and 53rd streets was the first and arguably most successful of the new modern glass and steel towers built in the International Style. Unfortunately as more and more developments took advantage of the plaza-for-height clause the avenue began to lose it’s street wall to bland, windswept corporate “open space”, not to be considered a city park as it was now privately owned space. Today the issue isn’t public space but rather old space; the office spaces in this post-war towers can only be renovated so many times and today cannot meet the needs for 21st Century high tech companies (which pay top dollar, mind you). Midtown East is built out as far as the previous zoning will allow so a change is in order...

Read more: http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_in...east-rezoning/

[chris08876]

City Planning OKs Midtown East rezoning: Proposal now heads to City Council

The City Planning Commission on Wednesday unanimously approved the rezoning of Midtown East, a proposal that is expected to create 6.5 million square feet of new office space over the next two decades.

The proposal seeks to rezone 78 blocks in the neighborhood in order to modernize the area’s aging building stock. Commission chair Marisa Lago briefly spoke at Wednesday’s meeting, noting that it was a “momentous occasion” that many of the commissioners had awaited longer than she had, since she only joined the agency earlier this year. She called the proposal “consensus-driven and solution driven” and praised former chair Carl Weisbrod, Council member Dan Garodnick, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen for their work on the rezoning plan.

All members of the commission voted swiftly in favor of the rezoning, except Commissioner Alfred Cerullo, who was recused.

“I’m just glad you got through this without me,” Cerullo joked before the vote.

As part of the city’s land-use review process, the City Council will consider the proposal next. Garodnick, whose opposition to the 2013 proposal to rezone the district effectively killed it, has been one of the leading proponents of the revised plans.

Under the rezoning, property owners have a few different options for building out their office spaces, one of which is purchasing from a pool of 3.5 million square feet of landmarked air rights. The Real Estate Board of New York and some public officials have opposed the $393 per-square-foot floor price set for the air rights, arguing that the high cost may discourage some deals from happening. In a statement on Wednesday, the Archdiocese of New York, which owns a significant chunk of the air rights, noted that it will continue to fight to scrap the “artificial floor price.” REBNY President John Banks said that the organization looks forward to working with the City Council to “further improve the rezoning plan.”

Garodnick proposed a bill on Tuesday that would require the city to audit any air rights sale in the district. It’s not yet clear if the measure will pave the way for eliminating the floor price.

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TRD

[Hudson11]

Discussion over this seems to have spilled into multiple speculative threads. It seems Chetrit will acquire 850 Third Avenue. This seems like another prime candidate for eventual redevelopment?

Facing federal scrutiny, HNA in contract to sell 850 Third Ave

Multiple sources told The Real Deal that the buyer is Joe Chetrit’s Chetrit Group, while additional sources said it was a member of the Chetrit family. Isaac Chetrit, who runs the real estate investment company AB & Sons, denied involvement in the deal. Joe Chetrit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[...]

If it closes, the deal would be the second significant office tower purchase for the Chetrit Group in recent months. Last month, the firm bought office tower 1231 Third Avenue and a nearby assemblage for $142 million.