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March 8, 2010
Developer Steve Roth: "the more the building was a blight, the more the governments would want this to be redeveloped"
Atlantic Yards Report
A New York Observer piece on Vornado Realty Trust Chairman, headlined Steve Roth, Uncorked, described the developer's strategy in holding a key site at Lexington Avenue and 59th Street, later to become the Bloomberg LP tower.
The rationale--acknowledged developer's blight--sounds a lot like a strategy pursued by Forest City Ratner for the Atlantic Yards site.
The Observer reports:
There was another plus to waiting, [Roth] noted, offering a refreshingly candid developer's take on one way to pursue government subsidies:
"My mother called me and said [of the site], 'It's dirty. There are bums sleeping in the sidewalks of this now closed, decrepit building. They're urinating in the corners. It's terrible. You have to fix it.'
"And what did I do? Nothing.
"Why did I do nothing? Because I was thinking in my own awkward way, that the more the building was a blight, the more the governments would want this to be redeveloped; the more help they would give us when the time came.
"And they did."
Laughter followed.
NoLandGrab: ROTFLMAO? No.
Posted by eric at March 8, 2010 9:21 AM