« The Shiffman solution: a timeout for megadevelopment projects | Main | Wednesday Night, Books and Cinema! »
October 18, 2006
Relocation Blues
New York City’s shortage of office space hampers its economic future.
City Journal
By Steve Malanga
Lack of affordable office space in Manhattan is driving corporations to the burbs, as development in Lower Manhattan to replace the loss of the World Trade Center has plodded slowly along.
What are the causes and who's responsible?
The city and state bear some responsibility for the space shortage. A nearly ten-year effort to rezone Manhattan’s Far West Side for commercial development wound up getting bogged down in Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to build a stadium there and lure the Olympics to New York. Potential construction of office towers in the area is thus still years away. The city has now missed two real-estate expansions, going back to the late 1990s, in trying to rezone the Far West Side.
Meanwhile, state and city officials haggled for years over the plan to redevelop Ground Zero, with some observers, including Mayor Bloomberg, pessimistically calling for a reduction in the office space planned for the site, assuming that it would be unneeded. As a result of the delays, only one building, 7 World Trade, is nearing completion—developer Larry Silverstein could rebuild it quickly because it wasn’t part of the site that the government controlled. Other Ground Zero towers won’t be ready for years.
A point made about outer-borough development deflates the myth of the success of Bruce Ratner's Metrotech:
When commercial buildings do rise in the outer boroughs, they are still too costly to be competitive. Consider Metrotech, a massive, heavily subsidized suburban-style office campus in downtown Brooklyn, intended to be the place where financial-services jobs would move when they left Manhattan. But after a few successful leases in its early years, the 20-year-old initiative has mostly drawn tenants already located in Brooklyn. Undeterred by that floppy performance, the city is now promoting another Brooklyn top-down mega-project by Metrotech’s developer, Forest City Ratner—the controversial Atlantic Yards, which, even if approved, will take years to realize and will have little impact on the city’s current commercial-space crunch.
Posted by lumi at October 18, 2006 7:35 AM