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Old Posted Jun 10, 2012, 11:57 AM
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^ If it never changes, that can only be a bad sign for the City, because if the economy of the City improves enough, that corner will most certainly change, as the City has for years, and will continue to do provided life goes on. And yes, even the museums change.


Quote:
Originally Posted by skyhigh07 View Post
For starters, I lived in Manhattan for a few years and while the city still retains an impressive collection of old buildings, I think it would be naive to say that it's impossible for the city to lose it's historic character. Certainly, there are a number of cities across the country that would exemplify that. Downtown Houston is quite modern and functional. However, I doubt it if anyone would want to live there.
I love these people that come and compare Manhattan to Houston. Absolutely ridiculous, and naive in of itself. As I've said earlier, I don't want to convert this thread into a preservationist battle. New Yorks aging buildings is being discussed here:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=178173



Here we will focus on the development that will take place on this, arbuably the most valuable development space in Manhattan. More from the transcript...

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3125...ent-transcript

Quote:
Okay. Sights in this city, they're big, they're sexy, they're lots of fun. However, they're also complex, they're expensive, they take a lot of time. It's tough to find land. Land is very expensive. It's tough to finance. The public review process is brutal. Zoning really limits what you can do at the end of the day. And last but certainly not least, you need massive rents to justify building a building in this city. And even then, you need a great location. And as you can see here, each of those purple dots, they're not great locations.

There are couple of sites that are actually ongoing now. The first one is the Gem Tower. At the end of the day, this site is only going to be 315,000 square feet of office space. The asking rents are $120 a square foot. It's rather small. The lease that Steve just did is bigger than the entirety of the space that's going to be available for lease in this building. The next site is Boston property site. This site's up to I think Floor 6 in terms of steel. This site was stopped in 2009 when a couple of large deals fell apart. They signed a lease for 180,000 square feet and they're moving forward with this side. Asking rents are approximately $80 in the base to over $100 a square foot in the Tower. The next site is the Hines site. This was an old 8-story building that was torn down. It's now just dirt. But until they get about 50% of this building pre-leased, they're not going to move forward. And this is actually one of the better sites between 39th and 40th Streets.

Okay. Now we get to the sites that are somewhat more uncertain. This is a sprawling site over 12 million square feet of office, retail, hotel, schools, everything you can think of. The total office size is going to be about 5 million square feet, but they've got to build a platform. That's going to cost them over $1 billion over active train tracks, not an easy task. There's one portion of the site that's actually on dirt, and they sold about 700,000 square feet in that building to Coach, but it's still uncertain as to whether that building gets built or not, if they don't find another tenant for the rest of that space. Here's another site on the far west side. It's got to be over a platform again. This platform I believe is $500 million to $600 million and is 132,000 square feet, also over active tracks. And this -- here they're going to have 2 large buildings totaling about 5.2 million square feet, they're targeting the largest users in the marketplace. This has been a site for a very, very long time.

Here's another site. This building is supposed to be one of the tallest buildings in the city at the end of the day. I don't know when the end of that day is. But first off, you'd also have to demolish one of the largest hotels in the city before you did anything here. One more site, over an active bus terminal. This site is currently on hold. And last but not least, there's 3 Hudson Boulevard. Of all the sites on the far west side, this is actually the only site that's actually on solid grounds, and you could actually access directly from the new 7-line extension. So of all those sites, this is probably one of the better ones in terms of access. Even if all those sites got built, which could take anywhere from 5 to 10 to 15 years, it would only add 16 million square feet to the entire market. That's 4%. That is a huge if first off. And then as you can easily see, over the last 20 years, the amount of supplies remained relatively flat. And during that time, 30 million square feet of new product has hit the market.

A think you've heard us say it over the years, time and time again, we redevelop and reposition assets. Our track record on that speaks for itself. There's no question about that. Take a moment, look at these bullets. These are the reasons why we do what we do. There's no question about that. However, when you have the single best potential development site in the city, if not the world, the possibilities are truly astounding.

They've brought in Hines, known for developing and getting towers built, to help get the process going here. With zoning in place next year, it could probably be at least a year or two before we start seeing designs. No architect has been chosen as of yet, so there could also be another design competition. It will be very exciting watching the process here of what will no doubt be another iconic tower for the City.
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