World Trade Center Towers Fill Slowly in Shift to Tech | Hacker News Reader

World Trade Center Towers Fill Slowly in Shift to Tech

bloomberg.com

43 pointssvtrent30 comments

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.

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.

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.

Wow. Great post.

"When you have to start your own bus company to get your employees in and out of work something is amiss." - hits the nail on the head.

I lived in NYC for three years and desperately miss my time there. I've forged some strong friendships and had some great experiences.

I'd say the biggest resurgence in tech on the west coast is not actually in "The Valley," where you spend your time on the 101 between Palo Alto and Mountain View, but rather in San Francisco.

Much of the criticism still applies - if you want to cap your commute at, say, 30 minutes door to door, the range of places you can live in SF is vastly smaller than the NYC equivalent (with easy access to Midtown or downtown).

There is a reason, after all, that the Mission is priced higher than even the most expensive neighborhoods of Manhattan.

You can get between any two places in SF in less than 30 minutes by hopping into an Uber/Lyft. And the distances are small enough that that trip will never be unreasonably priced.

Plus, everything that matters in tech is located in either SoMa/FiDi, Mid-Market, or the Mission, which is rarely ever further than 15min away and easily bikable / Uber-able / often walkable.

Taking a taxi everywhere seems like it would be expensive: how much would taking an Uber/Lyft 30 minutes each way to and from work actually cost?

(For reference, my commute is 30 minutes in NYC and costs me $112/month pre-tax for an unlimited MetroCard, which I can also use for non-commuting trips too)

I sometimes take Uber/Lyft or UberPool/LyftLine to and from work, which costs me ~$4-7 without surge pricing. Most of the time I walk. I probably spend ~$40/month on commute to work via Uber/Lyft, walking the rest.

That said, I'm not suggesting that as a commute option. I'm suggesting it as an option when you have to get to and from meetings at various startup offices / cafes. For commuting, most people have a good option that's cheaper than that. If you live on the other side of the city, driving or riding a scooter is not a bad option. If you live a little closer, which is likely, many people bike. There are also quite a few bus lines. There are also privately run commuter busses that connect the Marina / North Beach with downtown.

New York tech is already pretty heavily ensconced in the mixed-use neighborhoods around Union Square— a lot of tech seems to be moving to the Financial District because big players have leased out a lot of the spaces in the area & prices have jumped. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all used to be in Midtown but moved to the Union Square neighborhood in the last couple years.

If you want to live near most tech employers, they're already all 'downtown'. Just not all the way downtown in the Financial District.

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

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.

Also a lot of financial firms have way downsized since 2008 for obvious reasons.

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.

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

I hear that. I worked across the street from the Towers on 9/11, and there's no way I'd got and work in those new buildings. Too many bad memories, and I think the terrorists still have those buildings in their sights.

The new towers aren't where the old towers were, so I don't buy the "graveyard" argument. But I would not feel comfortable working there mostly because the old WTC was targeted for attack multiple times, and the new one almost surely will be as well.

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.

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.

>Is it filling slower than comparable office space, in NY or elsewhere? The writer never bothers to find out or inform us.

I wonder if 42Floors would have any data on this that they could share, in general, as they ramped up a NYC office.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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

One reason is probably because residential leases are generally one year while commercial leases are multiple years, and it takes a lot of time and effort to move an office compared to an apartment. Companies are somewhat more locked into where they are currently.

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.

> 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?

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.

Lincoln Towers is a co-op (well, each building consists of co-op units in a condominium).

The new super-tall residential buildings are being marketed almost entirely to foreign investors, at very high valuations, $3000-5000 per square foot.

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?

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).

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.

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