Freedom Tower

This week's Easter and Passover holidays are a natural breaking point for us to take a quick look back at some of the articles we've presented here at gbNYC over the course of the first quarter of 2009. Those that we selected represent a pretty wide cross-section of what we've been tracking; affordable housing, green homes, and even some commercial real estate transactions, including retail, were all topics that we've touched on thus far in 2009. Not surprisingly, given the state of the economy, there were very few green leases that we identified; the recent Beijing Vantone deal at the Freedom Tower was the only lease in a green building that we wrote about during the first quarter. We've seen an uptick in smaller green condominium projects, particularly in Brooklyn, where we wrote about 100 Gold Street in Vinegar Hill and 580 Sterling Place in Prospect Heights. We also featured two much longer posts about BIM and green building project site location issues and continued to follow numerous green affordable housing projects across the five boroughs.

Chinese real estate investment firm Beijing Vantone Industrial Co., Ltd. formally signed its 20-year, 190,000-square-foot lease with the Port Authority at 1 World Trade Center yesterday. Numerous media outlets are reporting that the Port Authority has decided to drop the "Freedom Tower" moniker for the project, but GlobeSt.com quotes Port Authority spokesperson Steve Colman as confirming that "Freedom Tower" will still be retained somehow as the second half of 1 World Trade Center’s name. Vantone will pay $80 per square foot to start, with escalations during years 7, 11, and 16 of the lease; the firm has an option to add an additional two contiguous floors to its lease by December 31 of this year. At the lease signing, the firm gave the Port Authority a $10 million letter of credit; total aggregate rent over the lifetime of the lease is estimated to be approximately $333 million.

• Developer: buyers attracted to Brooklyn's Toren for LEED Gold application; no plans to turn condo rental.
• Green car wash called Geowash set to open in Manhattan next month.
• LEED Gold hopeful Freedom Tower appears to be for sale; Port Authority has reportedly approached Related and Brookfield.
• Litigation over stop work order, shoring work, and placement of crane at Neil Denari's HL23 continues.

The New York Observer reported yesterday that the Port Authority has reached a tentative agreement with China's Beijing Vantone Real Estate Company for 190,000 square feet of space in the LEED Gold hopeful Freedom Tower across its 64th and 69 floors. The firm will pay approximately $80 per square foot for a 22-year lease and create a "China Center" designed to be a cultural and educational portal for Chinese firms looking to do business in the U.S. and American firms interested in similar efforts in China. The China Center will involve a $90 million interior fitout, $5 million of which will come from local business policy and advocacy group Partnership for New York City. Kathryn S. Wylde, head of the group, told the New York Times that she sees the China Center as "a way of assuring that New York City businesses develop a primary relationship with the emerging economy of China. This has been an area of competition with other world cities. We want to nail it down for New York.”