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[UTEPman]

The city will charge $250 per sq/ft!!??

That seems a little steep, does it not? Will developers even want to go higher with more air rights at that cost?

[Design-mind]

Originally Posted by UTEPman

The city will charge $250 per sq/ft!!??

That seems a little steep, does it not? Will developers even want to go higher with more air rights at that cost?

As long as the developer can recuperate those costs with the tenants.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by UTEPman

The city will charge $250 per sq/ft!!??

That seems a little steep, does it not? Will developers even want to go higher with more air rights at that cost?

The City will be charging less than the privately owned air rights that will also be available. That leads to both critics of the plan and developers who own air rights in the area to complain that the City is "giving away" those air rights and undermining those who want to sell air rights for development.



http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...TATE/130229846

The planning department also revealed that the city wants to sell air rights at $250 a square foot as part of an infrastructure-funding tool known as the District Improvement Bonus, or DIB. Currently, most buildings in Midtown can only be built to a certain size, but in many case, properties will be able to grow considerably under the rezoning, in some cases to double or triple their current size, as large as the Empire State Building in places.

In order to facilitate this development, though, developers must buy air rights from either the city or private property owners. The city is selling its air rights not only to encourage new office development—the entire argument for the rezoning is to keep the city's business core competitive—but also to fund public space and transportation improvements that would offset the new density being added to the neighborhood. The city has also decided that any project buying into the DIB cannot contain residential development, since that would undercut the commercially-oriented purpose of the rezoning.

Even factoring in the sale of private air rights, the department calculates that the city will generate as much as $750 million in DIB funds. The first two projects: improving the subway platforms at Grand Central along the Lexington Avenue line and creating a set of new public plazas along a Vanderbilt Avenue closed to car and truck traffic.

The department used a private appraiser, Landauer Valuation & Advisory, to come up with the $250 a foot number, which it calls a fair market value for commercial air rights. Many in the crowd, both from the community board and local property holders, worried that this would not be enough to cover the costs of the infrastructure improvements. Property owners looking to sell their air rights are concerned the city's price might undercut their own.

[NYguy]

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...TATE/306029976

Grand Central owner Andrew Penson lawyers up
Reclusive investor to fight City Hall over who gets air-rights windfall.



The unused air rights above Grand Central Terminal are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the station's private owner hopes.


By Daniel Geiger
June 2, 2013

Seven years ago, Andrew Penson, head of an obscure investment firm called Argent Ventures, quietly snapped up ownership of one of the most famous train stations in the world, Grand Central Terminal, with dreams of minting hundreds of millions of dollars by selling off the landmark's more than 1 million square feet of unused development rights.

Now—almost a year after his plan was broadsided by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to create out of whole cloth millions of square feet of development rights in midtown east and sell them off to jump-start a new generation of bigger, smarter office towers—Mr. Penson is fighting back. He's accusing the city of violating his constitutional property rights and has hired one of the nation's foremost constitutional lawyers, David Boies of Bush v. Gore fame, to press his case in court if need be.

Mr. Penson claims the mayor's air-rights proposal leaves him no choice. The city aims to charge $250 per square foot for development rights that would allow property owners to build larger towers than current zoning allows. In return, the city hopes to use the proceeds from the sales to fund hundreds of millions of dollars in public transit and other infrastructure improvements.

The problem for Mr. Penson is that the city's target price of $250 per square foot is roughly half of what he hoped to get for his 1.3 million square feet of hard-earned development rights back when he was the only game in the area.

"The air rights are going to be providing space that will be added to the top of the buildings," Mr. Penson said. "If this is going to be the best space in the best new buildings, shouldn't it be priced accordingly?"

At this point, Mr. Penson hopes he can keep his battle with City Hall out of court. Indeed, he is arguing to all who will listen that his interests and those of the city are perfectly aligned. His point is simply that the city is selling its air rights far too cheaply, to its own detriment. After all, a higher price would mean, as he put it, "more money available to fund infrastructure and neighborhood improvements."

Others think he may have a point. It appears that Community Board 5 is leaning toward raising the price of air rights when it weighs in with its opinion on the rezoning on June 13.

"Even if $250 is the right number now, the city's [sale of development rights] will not kick in until 2017," said Raju Mann, chair of Community Board 5's land-use committee. "So why the hell are we setting the price now?"

[NYguy]

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...oreUserAgent=1

City bends to rezoning pressure

By DANIEL GEIGER
Jul 18, 2013

The city's planning department released an amended version of its sweeping midtown east rezoning plan on Thursday in an effort to address some of the concerns of a growing number of critics.

Prominent among the changes, is a proposal to allow residential units to take up to 20% of the space in the new generation of state-of-the-art office skyscrapers that the rezoning plan is designed to entice developers to erect. Developers could add even more residential units to a project, up to 40% of the new space that is built on a site, if they receive a special permit. The opportunity to build housing units will likely be an alluring option for developers of a new wave of major mixed-use towers on what have been predominantly commercial avenues.

That amendment would allow developers to put those apartments atop their new buildings along the area's major arteries including Park and Madison avenues. Given the current robust strength of the city's housing market, the existence of a residential option will likely add considerable fuel to developers' willingness to build new towers. City Planning officials said the new residential allowance would come with its own class of air rights whose price will be set in the coming months.

The inclusion of reidential space could net more money for the city, which plans to sell the development rights that would allow developers to build bigger in order to pay for infrastructure and transit improvements in and around Grand Central Terminal. The city announced in the spring that it will aim to charge $250 per square foot for commercial development rights it sells. But residential space is far more valuable currently, and City Planning staff said those development rights would be priced at a higher number in the coming months.

[NYguy]

We're getting to the heart of the process...


http://www.amny.com/urbanite-1.81203...plan-1.5828772

City reaches for sky in midtown rezoning plan





8/4/2013

East Midtown could be flush with a dozen modern skyscrapers and Grand Central Terminal could be even more packed with people if Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to remake the area near the transit hub gets the go-ahead.

The mayor Sunday devoted his radio address to touting the plan, which would rezone 73 blocks near Grand Central, allowing developers to build higher as long as they pay for pedestrian open spaces and projects to ease congestion in the packed terminal. “Without the funding our proposal will generate, these improvements to east midtown may never happen,” Bloomberg said. To allay community groups’ skepticism about waiting for developer cash to roll in, Bloomberg in a Daily News op-ed last week said the city will front the money for the projects.

Still, officials are far from sold. “We have some serious infrastructure problems in the Grand Central area today, with or without any rezoning,” said Councilman Dan Garodnick, an East Side lawmaker who remains undecided on the plan.

The City Planning Commission will hold a hearing on the rezoning Wednesday. As part of the public review process, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer gave his conditional support Thursday, but ultimately, it’s in the City Council’s hands.

The plan would allow for more commercial space on qualifying sites — sites that are at least 25,000 square feet and have 200 feet of frontage on a wide street. Developers can also devote 20% of a building’s floor area to housing or a hotel.

To build bigger, developers would put $250 a square foot into a fund for infrastructure projects aimed at easing congestion in corridors inside Grand Central Terminal and on the narrow sidewalks outside. Further, developers that contributed to the fund could buy air rights from surrounding landmarks to go even higher.

[hunser]

In a decade New York will be a forest of supertalls, including at least three 1300 footers, one 1400 footer and one 1600 footer. By 2020 the city will have its first serious megatall proposal.

[UTEPman]

Originally Posted by hunser

In a decade New York will be a forest of supertalls, including at least three 1300 footers, one 1400 footer and one 1600 footer. By 2020 the city will have its first serious megatall proposal.

At the rate things are going, a megatall may not even be a big deal by 2020...

[chris08876]

Originally Posted by hunser

In a decade New York will be a forest of supertalls, including at least three 1300 footers, one 1400 footer and one 1600 footer. By 2020 the city will have its first serious megatall proposal.

The nice thing is it will all look fluid and natural. The heights seem to slowly build up to a megatall and so it wont look too too out of place if one does go up in the future.

[NYguy]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...614091094.html

Midtown Rights Appraisal Is Up in Air
Owner of Grand Central Terminal Puts Higher Figure on Development Rights




The owner of Grand Central Terminal wants a higher price tag on development rights under a proposed district rezoning.



By LAURA KUSISTOCONNECT
August 13, 2013

A Bloomberg administration plan to create funding for Midtown East transit improvements quite literally out of the air is proving contentious as a proposed rezoning for the district heads for a City Council vote.

The city is proposing to allow about a dozen new, primarily office towers larger than are permitted under current zoning in the area, saying that charging developers about $250 a square foot for those additional rights will pay for improvements to Grand Central Terminal and public spaces. But a new appraisal commissioned by Argent Ventures, a real-estate company that owns air rights above Grand Central Terminal, argues that the city is undercharging and that air rights in the district could command more than $400 a square foot.

New York City property owners have long been able to sell unused air rights above their buildings to a developer seeking to build a larger new tower nearby. Those development rights typically sell for much less than the price of land because owners usually can transfer those rights to immediately adjacent sites.

In the case of Midtown East, however, qualifying sites are sprinkled through a roughly 50-block district around Grand Central Terminal, meaning more developers can take advantage of them by paying into the transit fund. Appraisers at Jerome Haims Realty Inc. hired by Argent said those more flexible air rights are worth 80% of the value of the land itself, which helped them reach a higher figure than calculated by an appraisal firm hired by the city.

"Air rights are worth just as much as the underlying land—in fact, they represent the best part of the building, so they're worth even more," said Andrew Penson, the president and founder of Argent.

Robert Von Ancken, chairman of Landauer Valuation & Advisory, which did the assessment for the city, valued the air rights as 65% of the value of the land—a ratio that reflects current market conditions and has been used frequently in the past. The firm also only took into account office development, while the city has recently allowed new buildings to also have a small residential or hotel component.

"Some people are saying that our numbers are too low, some people say they are too high," he said.

Meanwhile, as the rezoning works its way through approvals, there are some modifications to the plan, and more ideas thrown in.


http://www.mbpo.org/uploads/ULURP_EastMidtown.pdf

[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/ny...says.html?_r=0

Bloomberg’s Plan for Bigger East Midtown Towers Is ‘Zoning for Dollars,’ Group Says

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
August 27, 2013

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to encourage construction of large new office towers around Grand Central Terminal as a way of keeping East Midtown commercially competitive amounts to an illegal game of “zoning for dollars,” the City Club of New York has asserted.

Under the plan, developers seeking to build towers larger than zoning rules ordinarily allow would pay $250 for every extra square foot. This money would go into a fund that would finance pedestrian and transit improvements in East Midtown, and the mayor has said it could reach $500 million.

The City Club likened this mechanism to extortion, and said it would not survive judicial scrutiny.

The club’s critique said the key issue is not the dollar amount of the fee but the fact that the city is creating a system in which developers would pay cash to enlarge their buildings.

Zoning rules in East Midtown generally limit the floor area of new buildings on the avenues to 15 times the lot size. Under the Bloomberg administration plan, the developer of a qualifying lot could “earn” as much as a 24-to-1 floor-area ratio by paying millions of dollars into the improvement fund. At certain sites, a developer could be granted a ratio of 30-to-1 by persuading the City Planning Commission that the proposed tower was of “superior” design, and by paying additional millions.

I think what's lost in the noise over the rezoning is that that in order to build the largest towers, they would have to be of quality design. Forget about scare tactics like the rendering below.
I expect nothing less than a high quality design here.



• Video Link




http://mas.org/urbanplanning/east-midtown/

[scalziand]

I don't see what's so scary about those massing models. Although, they do make it clear how the potential increase of FAR from 24 to the max of 30 will really make the height pop. I also think that the proposals on the west side of the avenue are unrealistically fat, and a developer would probably make them slightly skinnier and taller.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by scalziand

I don't see what's so scary about those massing models. Although, they do make it clear how the potential increase of FAR from 24 to the max of 30 will really make the height pop. I also think that the proposals on the west side of the avenue are unrealistically fat, and a developer would probably make them slightly skinnier and taller.

It may not be scary to you and I, but to those concerned about such developments? It's a hulking mass of sky-blocking, street darkening, congestion inducing horror. The won't show you a rendering of striking towers the city would be proud to own or anything even remotely attractive on the skyline. And the rezoning itself won't produce that cluster. For the area the rezoning covers, there are relatively few sites that will produce towers. Enough to bring new construction to east Midtown, but we're not talking mass demolition.

[NYguy]

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...ate=smartphone


Developers press plans before mayor dparts

By MATT CHABAN
Sep 06, 2013

.....Some developers are going so far as to throw together provisional plans for upcoming projects and then try to get preliminary approvals for these pruoject outlines.

Among those developers are the city's largest office landlord, SL Green Realty Corp., and its partner, Hines. They are hoping to build a tower known as 1 Vanderbilt on Grand Central Terminal's western flank that would rival the Empire State Building in size.

It would be one of the first projects to take advantage of the proposed midtown east
rezoning.

To achieve such densities, the project would have to be approved through a special permit by the commission and deemed a "superior development." Even though the tower will not be certified until later, by doing some of the pre-certification work under the Bloomberg administration, such as environmental reviews, the hope is that future administrations will have less room to alter it.

[NYguy]

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-styl...icle-1.1460959

Report: Midtown East zoning to encourage more skyscrapers won’t cause overdevelopment of office space
Critics say massive towers in midtown will reduce demand for other office buildings under development. But Independent Budget Office disagrees.
Comments


By Matt Chaban
September 19, 2013

Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious plan to rezone a wide swath of midtown for new office towers will not undermine growth in other parts of the city, a new report shows.

“The rezoning could help satisfy a pent-up demand for new office space in the area," IBO budget and policy analyst Sean Campion wrote in his report released Thursday morning, which rebutted some critics’ complaints about adding more office space to Manhattan

There has been very little new construction around Grand Central and on Park Ave. since the first big development boom from the 1950s to 1970s. The average age of office buildings in midtown east is 70 years, and many buildings in the zone are small by modern Manhattan standards.

The Bloomberg Administration hopes the zoning will encourage the development of modern office towers in an area rich with transit in the form of four major subway lines, MetroNorth commuter rail trains and, in 2018, Long Island Rail Road service.

[aquablue]

Originally Posted by NYguy

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-styl...icle-1.1460959

Report: Midtown East zoning to encourage more skyscrapers won’t cause overdevelopment of office space
Critics say massive towers in midtown will reduce demand for other office buildings under development. But Independent Budget Office disagrees.
Comments


By Matt Chaban
September 19, 2013

70 years is very old for office space. How many buildings are being renovated to modern standards?

[supertallchaser]

I think this building should be a centerpiece to the skyline.If Nordstrom tower is at 1550ft im thinking 1800ft

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by supertallchaser

I think this building should be a centerpiece to the skyline.If Nordstrom tower is at 1550ft im thinking 1800ft

It won't be that unless it's just a giant spire like the Burj khalifah.

Some developers are going so far as to throw together provisional plans for upcoming projects and then try to get preliminary approvals for these project outlines.

Among those developers are the city's largest office landlord, SL Green Realty Corp., and its partner, Hines. They are hoping to build a tower known as 1 Vanderbilt on Grand Central Terminal's western flank that would rival the Empire State Building in size.

Even though the tower will not be certified until later, by doing some of the pre-certification work under the Bloomberg administration, such as environmental reviews, the hope is that future administrations will have less room to alter it.

The Midtown East rezoning should be in place by November. We could also see the approvals process (these towers won't really be as-of-right) for this one kick off before the end of the year since they want to get a jump on it. That means we will have some idea of what they plan to build, even if work can't begin for another 3 or 4 years.

According to the latest rezoning plans:

- first permits can't be issued until July 1, 2017
- final City Planning vote is Sept 30, then then it's off to the Council for approval.

[King DenCity]

^progress

[chris08876]

Given those massing models and the potential space that we may get, the width*length of whatever gets build will be massive. Knowing the demand for quality office space, I'm sure we will get something ridiculously large. The question is will it look iconic, and not an eye sore? The suspense .....