Here’s one big problem with the claim that Grand Central-area rezoning might bring forth a fast-growing forest of new sidewalk-clogging, sun-blocking skyscrapers: Masses of office buildings just don’t go up that rapidly in the city anymore.
Since Jan. 1, 2000, all of Manhattan has seen the equivalent of just one large new office project a year open its doors — from the foot of the Battery to 59th Street.
Real-estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle tells The Post that office towers completed in the borough since Jan. 1, 2000 (or to open by the end of this year) added a mere 22.06 million square feet — or about 5 percent of the island’s total 444.23 million square feet. (The tally excludes 7 World Trade Center, which merely replaced the destroyed original.)
How, then, could a horde of buildings shoot up in one narrow slice of East Midtown?
It can’t. History proves the case against rezoning based on overwhelmed streets and subways to be a lie.
City Hall estimates rezoning might bring 16,000 more workers daily to a 73-square-block area — by my count, around 73,000 feet of sidewalk. In the 1990s, four jumbo new office towers at Broadway/Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street brought tens of thousands of employees to a single corner without loss of life or limb.
But the “congestion” fraud has energized those hoping to delay, dilute or kill the rezoning measure entirely. (It’s headed for a City Council vote by early next month.)
Larger new buildings than now allowed are essential for companies needing state-of-the-art facilities and wishing to be in the prime Grand Central/Park Avenue corridor, where buildings average nearly 70 years old.
Yet rezoning isn’t meant to promote a construction frenzy — but merely to allow a new tower to rise on the exceedingly rare occasion when the stars align for a developer and a tenant.
How many new structures might actually go up in East Midtown? Very, very few, based on the historic scarcity and infrequency of new office developments all over
Manhattan.
New construction since 2000 tallied by Jones Lang LaSalle averages a paltry 1.58 million square feet of offices a year, including in mixed-use projects that also contain apartments and stores.
That modest output compares with 63 million square feet newly minted over the same 14-year period in London, New York’s major global competitor, according to another major real-estate firm, CBRE.
Why so little here?
New York City’s land and labor costs are the highest in the nation. Nowhere else are site assembly and financing so difficult. Public approval for projects that make the least departure from city design guidelines can drag on for months or years.
Those growth-constraining conditions won’t magically be suspended in East Midtown. Nor, in a financially strapped municipal future, will developers be able to tap juice from taxpayers — juice that was vital to getting the largest recently completed towers out of the ground.
We’re talking sweet city-state deals such as:
– A $650 million lollipop for Goldman Sachs.
– Low-interest Liberty Bonds for the Durst Organization’s Bank of America tower.
– Tax breaks plus below-market land acquisition for the New York Times Co. headquarters.
None of that’s likely to be available anytime soon. Whoever’s mayor come January will face huge budget holes, while Gov. Cuomo regards even subsidies for World Trade Center redevelopment as a waste.
Plus, Mayor Bloomberg’s requirement that East Midtown developers buy a “District Improvement Bonus” to pay for air rights amounts to a mammoth tax (to support unspecified transit and pedestrian amenities) payable before a shovel goes in the ground — yet another drag on development.
Even so, obsolescent East Midtown must be given a chance for new life. City Councilman Dan Garodnick, who represents the area and is the key to rezoning approval, needs to push it through now — before the district’s future is buried for good in the name of “infrastructure.”