News
TIME TO RENAME FiDi
November 7, 2011
| Financial services firms no longer form the dominant office tenant pool Downtown. Media and ad firms have picked up the slack (Conde Nast, anyone?), but residential has also staked its claim. |
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| CBRE's Brad Gerla tells us financial services have slid from 57% of Downtown office tenants in '05 to 46% this year. Meanwhile the residential population has tripled since '95 to 60,000. In fact, of the 23 buildings on Wall Street, eight are now residential. Gone are the days you could roll a bowling ball down Wall Street at night, Brad says. It's just evolution, as the older buildings aren't suited for office and Giuliani's administration used tax incentives to get 6M SF of office converted to residential (and cracked down on rogue street-bowling leagues). Not to mention the 14M SF of office wiped out on9/11. That rebalancing from financial firms, by the way, actually makes Jersey less a competitior than it used to be. |
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| The coming Fulton Street transit hub, about a block to the right of Zuccotti Park, along Broadway, doesn't hurt. Brad, with Downtown CBRE office senior managing director Shelly Cohen, calls it theDowntown Grand Central, considering 12 subway lines will meet there. Brad would have showed us around down there, but he's got a bum knee after someone landed on it in a football game a few Sundays ago. Always asking the important questions, we found out he did, however, come down with the interception. |
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| Shelly's office is around the corner, looking down over the relatively quiet Liberty Street. He may not be watching the occupation of Wall Street, as Brad does, but the late afternoon reflection of the sun off the new 870-foot-tall Frank Gehry 8 Spruce St affords him his first ever taste of "direct" sunlight into his office. |
