What will happen to New York if office workers never come back?
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What would we do with half a billion square feet of office space in Manhattan if most remained empty? It’s the loaded question of the city’s future that even our brightest and most optimistic minds don’t want to address.
We have been told that office buildings will not be vacant forever. Once Omicron retires, a trickling return to the workplace will turn into a mighty wave. The buildings may not be as full as they were before COVID, but they will be full enough to maintain the city’s excellent commercial tax base and prevent homeowners from going bankrupt.
That’s what real estate executives and business leaders say, so I’ve written in The Post several times.
But what if we are all wrong? What if the chilling prognoses of brilliant Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan come true?
Noonan wrote last February that the pandemic has caused “the collapse of the commuter model … over the past year, large business owners have discovered everything that can be done remotely.” They didn’t know it!
She added that âthey don’t have to pay that killer rent for office space anymore. People think it will all come back when the pandemic is completely over, but no, a human habit is broken; a new way of operating has started.
What if our office towers, the pride of our horizon, turned into towering white elephants?
We posed the problem to urban analysts normally eager to comment on everything from bike paths to endangered manatees. But even the Association du Plan Régional, often cited, would not touch it. Others we reached out answered questions we didn’t ask or changed the subject entirely.
Only the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s trade organization, has tackled the more limited question of how to speed up the conversion of older, second-class office buildings – which REBNY has estimated at 220 million square feet, or about 40 percent of the total office space. stock – for residential use.
The group noted that the phenomenon has long been underway in Lower Manhattan, where tens of millions of outdated office spaces have found new life in apartment form from the late 1990s to the present day.
The whirlwind saved magnificent but unused landmarks such as 70 Pine St. and One Wall Street as well as dozens of lesser properties. This made the downtown area a more cohesive and viable family neighborhood, which helped the region survive the effects of September 11 and Hurricane Sandy.
Noting the deep housing shortage in the city, REBNY has produced a package of proposals to facilitate large-scale office-to-housing conversions. But they would require wholesale zoning changes, state-city cooperation to provide tax subsidies, and cultural changes in municipal agencies such as the departments of preservation and development of housing, buildings, land. town planning and finance.
REBNY wants the city council to set up a working group to study the options. But until then, we’ll humbly suggest a few new possible future uses for some office buildings above the hill. Homeowners should roll up their sleeves now for a different future, even if that means replacing office workers with fantasy.
Take the “Garment District,” which once made most of America’s clothing and is now primarily home to tech, media, and small financial firms that can’t afford more sophisticated digs. Some buildings have been modernized for contemporary use, but a surprisingly large number of grimy pre-war structures remain stranded in the 1950s.
Let’s turn a few of them into something the city has long deserved: a spectacular museum where the once heavily unionized neighborhood’s role in New York City history and national politics is brought to life. Show how seamstresses lent sewing power to dress American women – and why union support was so important to generations of Democratic candidates.
Another option is to bring Hollywood here. Why should Queens monopolize the production of Big Apple movies? The Steiner, Kaufman Astoria and Silvercup studios are magnificent. But a full-scale Manhattan film and television complex would be the crown jewel in “Hollywood on the Hudson.”
Such a facility could be redeveloped inside one of the many âhorizontal skyscrapersâ of the Big Apple, once used as warehouses and shipping terminals. Of course, some of them are now home to companies like Google and Facebook. But with their CEOs repeatedly delaying plans to return to power, who knows what they’ll be good at in five years?
While we’re at it, let’s improve our architectural gems. More than a few office buildings from the 1950s and 1960s have only received modest revamps (eg new lobbies) and some not at all. Some properties on Third, Sixth, and even Park Avenues cannot compete with properties that owners have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on to bring them into the 21st century.
But their international-style curtain walls strongly evoke the corporate mystique of the Eisenhower and âMad Menâ years, when American power and prestige were undisputed around the world. They would be ideal repositories for the traditions and culture of their time in New York – when CBS, NBC and ABC ruled the airwaves, the Brooklyn Dodgers fought the Yankees and the Beatles took the nation by storm ” The Ed Sullivan Show. ”
Finally, we can all use a little fun. Wow, how much fun we need! How about a sprawling indoor amusement park, like the gated section of Coney Island’s legendary Steeplechase Park.
Of course, kids’ rides and other mellow indoor rides should give way to the thrilling, thrilling thrills of today’s Scream Zone and Phoenix roller coaster. And imagine a Cyclone that can stay open all year round!
The technology is there and the demand will never weaken. All it takes is vision to make it happen inside one of our gigantic 100-year-old brick-and-mortar Goliaths, where office tenants don’t make landlords rich with leases of $ 35 per square foot.
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