Larry Silverstein’s epic quest to rebuild the World Trade Center complex remains incomplete — and in a market like this one, it may be in limbo for years.
“The New York City skyline is a graveyard of broken projects, projects that never happened,” The Real Deal Associate Publisher Hiten Samtani told filmmakers on the B1M, YouTube’s largest construction-focused channel.
The B1M took a deep dive into the challenges facing what is perhaps the country’s most-scrutinized development site, looking at everything from architectural and engineering constraints to issues surrounding financing and demand for office space.
Samtani noted that already, major companies are reevaluating their office footprints, in many cases opting for smaller spaces or going remote altogether . That environment has made it difficult to score the necessary funding for a new office skyscraper, and rising interest rates make it even harder.
Since Silverstein lost Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. as an anchor tenant in 2016, his 2 World Trade Center dreams have been in limbo. And the developer may need to think of slicing and dicing the property in unconventional ways, Samtani said.
“Maybe this is a food court type of situation,” Samtani said, where different companies come together to fill the space that would traditionally be taken by an anchor tenant. He also noted that several grand projects of 2 WTC’s ilk never made it to the finish line, such as Charlie and Jared Kushner’s vision for 666 Fifth Avenue, or the Chetrit Group’s condo-conversion idea for the Sony Building at 550 Madison Avenue. He also noted that doing a major ground-up project involves all sorts of machinations that can throw off even the most savvy builder.
“Development is not a very clean sport,” he said. “It’s a blood sport — it gets messy.”
Watch the B1M’s documentary above.