City offers up valuable real estate for new graduate engineering school

The city is seeking to lure a “top caliber academic institution” to open a new graduate engineering school campus with the promise of as much as $100 million in real estate and other public contributions, Robert Steel, deputy mayor for economic development, said yesterday. According to the New York Times, the city is concerned that it is falling behind its peers in attracting technology start-ups and may offer up properties like the former hospital sites at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Roosevelt Island. Fittingly, Steel spoke with the current Manhattan offices of Google as a backdrop. Both Cooper Union and the New York Institute of Technology have already expressed interest in the project. [NYT]