A Midtown Rebuttal
Leave it to Midtown Alliance to rebut our story from yesterday. We heard from Midtown Alliance CEO Kevin Green (here with his 12-year-old daughter Maris on a recent trip to NYC) after we called Midtown "the new bedroom community" of the Intown area. He says that headline "gave me a double-take." "When I think 'bedroom community' I don't think of a place with more than 20M SF of office, 80,000 daytime workers, 25,000 students, 4,000 hotel rooms and six million annual visitors." (Wilt Chamberlain's bedroom?) Bedroom communities are usually reserved for suburban cities where people live, and who often commute to work elsewhere. While Kevin says, yes, Midtown does have a burgeoning residential component, it instead has become the poster child for live-work-play urban environments.
His response comes at a great time because Midtown Alliance COO Shannon Powell is a featured panelist at Tuesday's 2nd Annual Future of Midtown event at TWELVE Hotels Atlantic Station (get your tickets here). Kevin says with more than 750 new rooftops underway and another 4,400 announced in Midtown, retail will be the next significant product in demand. So far, developers will include 250k SF of new retail space as part of many of these projects. "But it won't get built overnight, and we'll see exactly what the mix will be," he says.
