Posted Jan 13, 2022, 8:54 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
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https://therealdeal.com/2022/01/13/e...pecial-permit/
Extell plans Theater District hotel, avoiding special permit
BY KATHRYN BRENZEL
JAN 13, 2022
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When the City Council approved new restrictions on hotel development, it all but ensured that Gary Barnett’s Midtown project would remain unscathed.
Barnett’s Extell Development last week received permits for a more than 541,000-square-foot, 1,350-key hotel tower at 740 Eighth Avenue in the Theater Subdistrict, an area in which certain projects are exempt from the recently enacted requirement that developers must obtain a special permit for new hotels.
“We wanted to do an office building at 740 8th Ave but there were holdouts on 8th Ave that wouldn’t sell for a reasonable price,” an Extell spokesperson said. “The project was grandfathered since we were far along with the hotel, as were other hotel projects around the city.”
In December, the City Council approved a zoning text amendment that requires developers to obtain special permits to construct new hotels or expand existing ones by at least 20 percent. The measure exempted hotels that shelter homeless individuals and grandfathered in projects approved by the DOB before the City Council’s vote.
Applications filed prior to the City Council vote that were not approved by the DOB have a year to get their new building or foundation permits approved in order to be exempted.
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The measure also allowed certain new hotels in the Theater Subdistrict to avoid the requirement. Developers can keep filing plans for hotels in the subdistrict as long as they are located on lots of at least 20,000 square feet and at least half of the space is clear of any buildings or otherwise mostly vacant, as is the case with most of the lots in Extell’s assemblage.
The subdistrict is defined as an area bounded by Eighth Avenue to the west and Sixth Avenue to the east, between West 40th and West 57th streets. Given the lot specifications and Extell’s assemblage at the district’s core, Barnett’s firm is a major beneficiary of the carveout.
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Extell has been piecing together the development site since 2014, and a critical chunk of it was acquired this past summer. The developer bought two properties at 738 and 740 Eighth Avenue, along development rights, for $51 million, paving the way for a development exceeding 500,000 square feet. Extell had previously acquired part of the site from Related Companies, which had also planned an office building there, according to Pincus Co. Extell has spent at least $186 million assembling the 11 lots over the past seven years.
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A few weeks after the City Council approved the text amendment, Extell filed plans for a supertall at 570 Fifth Avenue in the nearby Diamond District. The developer has put forward two options for the site: A 1.5 million-square-foot office project or a 1.4 million-square-foot residential and hotel tower. The latter will require a special permit for hotel use, but the project will require other approvals either way, including two other special permits as well as a text amendment.
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