Ken Ficara

The fourth and last part of The Death and Life Of Great American Cities discusses possible tactics to solve some of the problems she discusses. She opens by noting that city planning does not lack for tactics that are “aimed at carrying out strategic lunacies. Unfortunately, they are quite effective.” [321]

Obvious solutions and an inevitable conclusion

As the plans to build the so-called Freedom Tower get clearer, so does the fact that we’re repeating the terrible mistakes we made when the World Trade Center was built originally. WHen completed in the mid-seventies, the Trade Center dumped millions of square feet of unneeded office space into an already stressed downtown real estate market, depressing it for years. The buildings would have remained largely vacant if not for the state renting almost all of one tower for government offices, adding billions to the public money already wasted on the project. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the WTC was finally rented out fully to private tenants.

And this week, Pataki announced that we’re going to do it again. Nobody wants to rent the Freedom Tower; it’s not only unnecessary in the current market place, as the original WTC was, it’s a scary place to locate your company. So, government agencies will spend millions of unnecessary dollars propping it up.

On Sunday, Gov. George E. Pataki and other officials announced that federal and state agencies would be the anchor tenants in the planned Freedom Tower, occupying a million of the 2.6 million square feet, at a rate of $59 a square foot. As of last month, the average rent for office space was $35 in Lower Manhattan and $58 in Midtown, according to Newmark Knight Frank, a Manhattan real estate advisory firm. (The New York Times)

And, unsurprisingly, state employees aren’t too happy about locating there.

“It was there in 1995 and it will be there when the Freedom Tower is completed,” Pataki said of the state government, failing to mention that it was not in 1996, 1997 and through 2001, since the Trade Center had finally been rented to private tenants.

The history we’re repeating