Vornado Realty Trust, the developer hoping to remake the skyline around Pennsylvania Station with a bundle of new office towers, has put the brakes on the massive redevelopment plan for now as interest rates remain high and the real estate market struggles to recover from the pandemic.
Plans for the Penn site, a roughly 18 million-square-foot project that could include 10 new skyscrapers of mostly office space around the transit hub, could be delayed for at least two to three years.
— The New York Times
Despite her recent mum on the status of the $7 billion project, the Empire State Development agency said it remains confident in New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s commitment. Vornado, which owns half of the sites included in the scheme and in January was delisted from the S&P 500, reportedly considered high lending rates and the city’s lagging return-to-office crisis as a cause for the delay.
Right now, ten office towers are planned alongside only 1,800 units of housing in an area the state controversially declared blighted in December. “We should spend those once-in-a-lifetime dollars on a 2050-type vision as opposed to a 1970s vision,” State Senator Leroy Comrie said presciently at the last update. “We need to make sure that whatever happens aboveground is actually something that will help finance the project.”
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