NYC-WTC_000230575

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Gambling: Are you concerned that there aren’t - that there’s not a marketplace for this commercial space?

Mayor: There’s some differences of opinion. Some elected officials say we must go build ten million square feet of office space and if we don’t we won’t have a future. I’m not a believer in that. I think if you take a look at how long it took to fill the World Trade Center when it was built. I think it was 13 years before we filled the space and then it wasn’t filled with market rate customers, it was filled with State employees that were there for other reasons. There’s two things going on. One, you want to have office space, we need a lot, but the market - you don’t want to get so much built in advance that it destroys other kinds of construction. And World Trade Center, when it was built, stopped construction for the whole area. Because it was just so much space, nobody built anything else. Number two, I think city planners today feel differently than they did 20 years ago, you want to build mixed use. You want- companies want to rent office space where there are cabs and restaurants and bars and stores and that sort of thing and to do that you have to have residential and a lot of retail space. Mixed use is the way you’re building in this day and age and those cities...

Gambling: Also gives you a hedge, if you’re the building owner.

Mayor: Well, yeah. I mean but...

Gambling: Cause you’re working with two different profits.

Mayor: Absolutely but if you take a look at cities around this country that built these big, barren commercial areas, in retrospect it’s not - they’ve not done well. There’s a reason why midtown, for example, is so attractive, because you go out on the street and there’s a lot of other things to do. People want to be able to live, for example, near where they work, so we need that. Now some people say, oh there’s plenty of other places for residential. Yes, that is also true, but you want to spread around all of this and mix it. You don’t want one area that’s just one and one area that’s just another. That’s not as good, most city planners would say, and I happen to be a big believer in that. And the other thing is. I’m very strong on getting a lot of these things going simultaneously rather than consecutively because it’s harder to rent space when people say, this is going to be a building site for the next 15 years. If it’s only going to be for the next five years, seven years, they’ll commit to a lease now because by the time they move in there will only be a couple years left to go and they can see the end. So it’s important that we do these things at the same time which, maybe one developer can do it all or maybe different developers can do simultaneously. And the buildings that I’ve been focusing on are number three and four which sort of connect the World Trade Center site to the rest of the downtown and I want to make sure those get going at the same time as the others. We should go ahead with the Freedom Tower, we should go ahead with the memorial. We’ve got big challenges ahead of us There’s design, there’s construction, there’s fundraising, but that’s what the...

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