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Originally Posted by cardeza
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There's been a few articles like this lately, one recently in the inquirer as well. Both commenting on the fact that office towers set to rise will be the first non-comcast commercial towers to be built since the early 90s.
Obviously this is great news, but I think that statistic is a bit misleading.
First of all, the Comcast Towers are both enormous. Each was the tallest in the city at the time of their completion and between them they've got almost 3 MILLION square feet of space. When both buildings were completed, comcast workers from buildings across center city were moved into their namesake towers, freeing up a ton of space throughout the city's existing buildings.
Then factor in all the rehabs since then and mixed used buildings like 1919 market street and you can see that even though these will be the first non comcast office towers to rise in center city in decades, Philly still has added office space in other ways.
Then again, a number of office buildings went residential, so determining how much office space Philly has actually added in the past 20 or so years would probably be a challenge.