This is actually good news as the writer points out. If Durst didn't think the tower could get the higher rents in the open market he would certainly come down on the rates for the government tenants...
Real Estate Weekly
Durst reveals that state tenants will likely not occupy 1 WTC
Daniel Geiger
11/4/2010
Rents in building too expensive to be economical for the state Durst says as deal with Conde to fill 1 million s/f progresses
Douglas Durst, the patriarch of one of Manhattan’s most successful real estate families who is negotiating with the Port Authority to become an equity partner in One World Trade Center, said that state tenants might not take space in the 2.6 million square foot tower after all.
Speaking at a real estate conference organized by the financial reporting and media firm Bloomberg LLP in midtown this morning, Durst, who is head of the real estate development and investment company the Durst Organization, projected that the tower’s rents would be about $70 per square foot, too expensive for state tenants.
When One World Trade Center was first conceived, state and Port Authority officials said that government tenants both on the federal and state level would lease hundreds of thousands of square feet of the tower’s space in what was essentially a government subsidy to make the over $3 billion tower financially viable.
Although the Port Authority was able to structure a non-binding agreement with the General Services Administration, the government office that handles leasing for federal tenants, in the years following 9/11 when plans to rebuild the site were originally drawn, the state’s commitment and what tenants it had in mind to occupy the tower remained murky.
There has been speculation before that government tenants might not occupy as much of One World Trade’s square footage as originally envisioned, but Durst’s statements are among the first from someone so closely involved in the building to seemingly confirm that the state will not move in.
“The state would have to sign a lease at rents that are higher than what they’d have to pay at other buildings and doesn’t make economic sense,” Durst said.
Federal tenants would likely still take space in the building, Durst said, noting that that arrangement made sense because “the building was designed and built to their specifications.” It still isn’t clear what federal offices will move into One World Trade but Durst said that the roster that may have originally been envisioned might also be in flux to
“more business-oriented types of tenants than originally planned.”
The good news, of course, is that One World Trade Center no longer appears in such desperate need of public sector occupants. Conde Nast, which currently has its headquarters in a Durst-owned tower in midtown, Four Times Square, is negotiating to take about one million square feet in One World Trade in a deal that overnight appeared to reverse the building’s image as a white elephant. Durst said that between the federal tenants, Conde Nast, and a deal with the Chinese real estate company Vantone that was arranged in 2009, nearly two million of the tower’s 2.6 million square feet had been leased.
The Bloomberg real estate reporter David Levitt, who moderated the panel that Durst was participating on, noted that the remaining 600,000 square feet of space suddenly made what had initially seemed like a daunting leasing assignment far more manageable.
Durst said that leasing of the remaining space, which is situated in the upper portion of the 1,776-foot tall building and will likely command higher rents because of its views, would be now be done at a more patient pace to allow the Manhattan office market to continue to improve and the building to hopefully fetch those higher rents.
Though the building is scheduled to be ready for occupancy in 2013, but Durst said that the vacant 600,000 square feet wouldn’t likely get filled until 2015, in part also because it will take time to build out the space to prepare it for occupancy.
Durst said that both his deal to invest about $100 million to become an equity partner and the lease transaction to bring Conde into One World Trade Center were both progressing.
http://www.rew-online.com/news/story.aspx?id=1113
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the old 7WTC (174m) had 47 floors and the new 7WTC (226m) has actually 56 floors if you take the mechanical floors into consideration. so i don't understand what's all the fuss about 1WTC cheating with floor numbers. 
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