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February 9, 2009
With Credit Frozen, Developers Downshift
The New York Times
by Diana Marszalek
More woes for Forest City, this time in New York's Westchester County.
Today, however, such visions of Westchester’s future do not look as rosy, primarily because of the financial meltdown that, in some cases, has brought the business of construction to a halt, developers and local leaders said.
“It’s a mess,” said Geoffrey Thompson, of the public relations firm Thompson & Bender and a spokesman for Cappelli Enterprises, Core Plus Properties and other developers. “No one saw anything of this magnitude coming.”
With banks not lending money readily, retailers facing dismal sales and the housing market woefully hurt, now is hardly prime time for investors to spend millions or billions creating a new vision of Westchester, developers said.
...The developer Forest City Ratner has asked New Rochelle to formally delay approval of its proposed $450 million Echo Bay waterfront revitalization project. That means the mixed-use project will most likely break ground in early 2011 rather than 2010, officials said.
We're pretty sure Echo Bay is a Forest City Residential project, which would but it under the auspices of parent company Forest City Enterprises. However, Forest City Ratner has its own headaches in Westchester County.
Even projects already under construction — Forest City Ratner’s $600 million Ridge Hill development in Yonkers, for example, with shopping, entertainment, office and hotel space — are facing less certain futures than they were a year ago, real estate analysts said.
With the retail outlook bleak, many stores are more apt this year to scale back or close than expand, meaning not only will new space be hard to fill, but there may also be new vacancies in existing space as well, real estate developers said.
Businesses that do move into new space will most likely pay rents far lower than originally expected, so developers, municipalities and investors may not recoup their investments as planned, some developers said.
Posted by eric at February 9, 2009 10:58 AM