
World Trade Center Towers Fill Slowly in Shift to Tech - svtrent
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-07/world-trade-center-towers-fill-slowly-in-shift-to-tech.html
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kator
For 4 years I've lived about 5 blocks from the WTC compound and walk by it
daily on my commute and as we move around the neighborhood.

When we first moved here we were surprised at all the openings, it seems most
of the financial companies have folded up or left the area and it's being
rapidly developed as a residential area.

The building I live in is something like 9 years old and all around us new
buildings are going up with signs all over them about new residential housing.
Still many other buildings are being refurbished to support residential
housing and "fully furnished" housing.

When I heard Conde and Media Math were moving in I told my wife "Here it comes
Silicon Valley on a single campus". I recently learned of another very large
tenant in Media and Tech that's moving in (can't share the name) along with
several others related to the media and tech scene in NYC.

My wife and I had been considering moving to another part of the city until we
realized I'd have a 10 minute walk to most of the tech and media companies I'd
either work for or consult for.

Maybe the buildings are filling up slowly, but if they keep filling with tech
and media companies the surrounding residential spaces will fill up quickly as
the employees snag walking distance housing. This could create a really nice
synergistic geographic location for tech and media innovation.

I know this won't be a popular comment since most of HN is valley based, I
spent 5 months of 2014 in the SF area, working for a start-up and consulting
for clients in the valley. I burned so much time on the road my wife offered
to commute with me so I could be in the carpool lane. Our company sold and I
came back home to NYC. I've enjoyed being back home.

One of my frustrations with "The Valley" is having to own a car to really be
able to move around. Yes there is some transit but nothing like NYC. I lived
most of my life in Los Angeles so I am overly aware of how horrific the car
culture becomes. You lose so much time in the car, you're less productive, you
have less family time and you're stressed and burnt before you even sit in
your chair in the morning at work. When you have to start your own bus company
to get your employees in and out of work something is amiss.

I am hopeful that downtown could become the next challenger to the valley and
do it with less people stuck on a freeway somewhere.

~~~
jobu
Every 5 minutes further from the office is about 40 hours of commuting over a
year. When I look at a job that's further away from my house it helps me to
weigh the cost/benefit of losing a week or more of vacation.

~~~
dandv
While that puts commute in perspective, time is not fungible like that in
reality. 5 minutes on the margin won't make much of a different. Will you
really take an extra week of vacation if move 5 minutes closer? No. Let alone
the huge time cost of changing workplaces or residences.

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lmg643
I think there is a major bias against the towers from the finance/insurance
industries in NYC. Too many of their colleagues and friends were killed or
impacted the last time around, like working in a graveyard. Here is a
harrowing story from someone who was working there that day:

[http://www.wernerf.com/article/kamran.html](http://www.wernerf.com/article/kamran.html)

It is plausible that tech firms would fill in the gap as they don't have the
same associations, the buildings are brand new and they can build out or
subdivide as they see fit. Without huge demand for the space, I'm sure the
tech firms are getting awesome deals, well south of the 50-60 per sqft quoted
here when all incentives are factored in.

I'd even guess this is an example of Paul Graham's "The Submarine" in action -
PR people trying to hype up demand for the building.

~~~
krschultz
In addition to that, the firms have all moved away and figured out a solution
for their office space in the past _14 years_. It's not like the financial
firms were waiting in hotels all that time for them to build a new tower. The
demand will have to come from companies looking for new office spaces, so
generally growing or shrinking companies.

~~~
epc
This…many of the major firms either moved to midtown, or to Jersey City.

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joosters
While the article tries to make the point that the tower is filling slowly, it
fails to do any useful analysis to demonstrate this. Is it filling slower than
the original towers? Is it filling slower than comparable office space, in NY
or elsewhere? The writer never bothers to find out or inform us.

~~~
krschultz
That's a very good point. The Hudson Yard office towers are similar in size
and amenties, with a bit worse transit access than the WTC. They are also
having a hard time filling the space.

In general NYC construction is mostly residential (especially luxury), it
seems like there is more demand for that at the moment. Most of the tech
companies and startups are housed in the space above downtown but below proper
midtown, in interesting older buildings. I generally think of the "startup"
zone as Madison Square Park down to Soho.

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gk1
> The building -- still known to many by its former name, the Freedom Tower --
> has faced criticism in recent months, including a negative architecture
> review in the New York Times by Michael Kimmelman, who wrote that the
> skyscraper “looks as if it could be anywhere, which New York isn’t.”
> Comedian Chris Rock, in a Saturday Night Live opening monologue, called it
> the “never-going-in-there-tower, ’cause I’m never going in there.”

Both of those criticisms are so weak that I wonder how they made it into a
Bloomberg article.

~~~
k-mcgrady
The second one isn't even a criticism really - it's a joke. Sure it could be a
real critique (still not a great one) but it's more likely he thought, "this
sounds funny" and said it because _he 's a comedian_.

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jgalt212
> At that pace, the towers wouldn’t reach 95 percent occupancy until 2019,
> almost two decades after the 9/11 attacks leveled the first twin towers.

How is it that Manhattan residential and Manhattan commercial are so out of
whack? As an example, Lincoln Towers, which from the outside looks like a
public housing project. That being said, it sells for $1,400 square foot.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Towers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Towers)

And we have these nice new commercial buildings that will take years to fill.

~~~
potatolicious
There are a lot more residential buyers and renters than commercial renters.

Take the crazy supertalls going up on 57th St right now - those homes are
actually surprisingly hard to sell, and those buildings also take years to
fill purely by virtue of the fact that the number of qualified/interested
buyers in the world is so low you can fit them all in the same conference
room.

Commercial space is in high demand in Manhattan, but companies also have
relatively narrow parameters in the spaces they're able to rent (company size,
location, nearby facilities, etc), which limits the number of potential
renters.

~~~
jgalt212
> There are a lot more residential buyers and renters than commercial renters.

That's my point. If this is the case, why do they keep building office
buildings when the city actually needs apartment buildings?

~~~
potatolicious
Because the space is needed. The speed at which a market moves is not a
measure of its size nor its supply/demand balance.

Commercial real estate vacancy rate in Manhattan right now is quite low
compared to historical trends - don't let the stories of megatall commercial
projects fool you. Cost per square foot has been rising steadily throughout
Manhattan and is now actually quite high.

New buildings always take a lot of time to fully lease out due to structural
inefficiencies and the more constricted customer base - the Empire State
Building wasn't profitable for decades after it opened. This doesn't mean that
the office space isn't needed.

There are a lot fewer commercial renters, but they occupy a lot more space for
a lot more time. Your typical New Yorker isn't, for example, renting a 30,000
square foot space on a 10-year lease.

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bfwi
This seems to insinuate that financial firms are not as numerous or maybe not
as big as before. Does anyone know whether the financial sector has
significantly grown or diminished from 2001 to now?

~~~
epc
Finance is still a dominant sector in NYC but has been dropping since the late
1990s (accelerated post 9/11, but there's been a long term trend of back-
office jobs being eliminated or moved out of the metro area).

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solomania9
I've been working in the building for about a month. Working at Conde, I'd
love to see more tech / publishing companies move in.

