A Preview
APreview
School of Public Affairs
Baruch College
17 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Properties
Properties
The Steven L.Newman Real Estate Institute Review
Baruch College City University of New York
Properties
A PREVIEW
The Steven L.Newman
Real Estate Institute Review
School of Public Affairs
Baruch College
The City University of New York
17 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10010
212. 802. 5940
Lois Cronholm
Interim President, Baruch College
Carroll Seron
Acting Dean, School of Public Affairs
The Steven L.Newman Real Estate Institute
William Newman
Chair, Newman Institute Advisory Board
Henry Wollman
Director
© 1998 The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute
Properties
A PREVIEW
REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT EDITOR
Henry Wollman
REAL ESTATE FINANCE EDITOR
Willard McIntosh
URBAN AFFAIRS EDITOR
Ellen Posner
DESIGN
Judy Reiser
PHOTOGRAPHY
Leif Carlsson
MANAGING EDITOR
Sara Hilska
ADVISORY BOARD
William Newman
Chair, Board of Advisors, The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute
Carroll Seron
Acting Dean, Baruch School of Public Affairs
Sidney Lirtzman
Dean, Baruch School of Business
Patricia Barrera
Assistant Director, The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute
EDITORIAL BOARD
IN FORMATION
Philip Aarons
Millennium Partners
Jonathan Barnett
The University of Pennsylvania
Eugennia Birch
The University of Pennsylvania
Max Bond
Davis Brody Bond Architects
Douglas Durst
The Durst Organization
Desmond Emanuel
President, Santa Fe Construction Co.
Barbara J. Fife
Baruch College School of Public Affairs
Robert Geddes
Geddes Architects, Princeton, New Jersey
Stephen Lefkowitz, Esq.
Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
President, Cityscape Institute
Peter Salins
Provost, State University of New York
Fred Siegel
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Steven Spinola
President, Real Estate Board of New York
Alair Townsend
Publisher, “Crain’s New York Business”
Opinions expressed in articles appearing in Properties are those of the authors or
persons quoted, and are not necesarily those of Properties, its advisory and editorial
boards, the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Insititue, Baruch College or the City
University of New York.
Properties A PREVIEW 2
Contents
A PREVIEW
From the Editors: 5
An Introduction to Properties
Guidelines for Contributors
Publication Schedule: Volume One, Issues 1 and 2
New York Real Estate Forum Excerpts: 11
The City Roundtable 1997
New York Real Estate: 2000
Private Realities/Public Visions
COMMERCIAL MANHATTAN 15
Considering the Future of Manhattan’s Offices
Participants and Excerpts
RESIDENTIAL MANHATTAN 57
Examining Manhattan’s Housing Alternatives
Participants and Excerpts
RETAIL MANHATTAN 85
Evaluating Manhattan’s New Scale of Retail Marketplaces
Participants and Excerpts
The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute 115
The School of Public Affairs
Baruch College, City University of New York
The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute Review 3
Warner Bros. Studio Store
New York City Flagship
Fifth Avenue & 57th Street.
Photo by Scott Francis.
An Introduction to Properties
FROM THE EDITORS
You hold a preview of Properties, the new review of
the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute at
Baruch College, City University of New York. It
reflects the diverse aspirations of the Institute itself.
It is a vehicle to further serious education for New
York’s real estate leadership. It is a forum for the
identification and discussion of key real estate issues
confronting New York City and its metropolitan
region. And it is a meeting ground for industry and
government professionals. Properties will be both
catalyst and recorder.
A Comprehensive Approach
The distinguishing characteristic of this publication will
be its focus on the full range of real estate investment,
finance, development, and design concerns
facing both industry and government in New York.
Properties argues that these concerns are an interrelated
system. Their consequences affect all New
York’s businesses and citizens: capitalists who invest,
developers who build, bankers who finance, officials
who legislate, planners who zone, architects who
design, bureaucrats who regulate, and the individuals
who use and encounter the industry’s products.
Industry and Government
Properties will review the important emerging real
estate conditions facing both the private and public
sectors. Its editors will explore the diverse, sometimes
conflicting, points of views of the industry and
the government agencies that regulate development.
Development
Properties intends to examine emerging building-type
needs and their demographic and business-plan
bases. It will discuss ownership alternatives, the availability
of public subsidies, and tax policy issues. It will
also review those regulatory structures over land and
construction that sometimes propel and sometimes
inhibit developers’ effective organization of their key
twin resources: technical knowledge and capital.
Finance
Properties intends to examine the range of existing
The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute Review 5
and new sources and structures of real estate
finance, and the emergence and growth of securitization
of real estate in New York through public and
private real estate investment trusts. It will address
the remaining utility of traditional forms of equity and
debt financing. And it will examine the influence of
foreign capital on ownership and development of
metropolitan region property and the roles of investment
banks, commercial banks, and pension funds
for both investment and development tracks.
Design
Properties intends to examine the planning and architectural
professions. Why are so many of the very
expensively produced master plans—by both private
planning firms and public agencies—irrelevant? Why
is so much of the civic architecture in New York
unable to respond to the most basic of New York’s
functional and social needs? And why has most
urban and architectural criticism over the past thirty
years failed to mount an effective charge to the
design professions to “do better” for the
businesses and government agencies that employ
them—and for the citizenry of this greatest of metropolitan
regions who use and inhabit their creations?
Regulation
Properties intends to examine government capacities
to shape wisely by incentive and mandate, and
to regulate effectively, the key private industry
resources and skills for the benefit of citizenry of this
region. We intend to explore, and to advocate forcefully
for, new structures of public-private partnerships,
for implementable, pragmatic-scale, long-term
planning for the development of the city and region.
Together
Properties intends to examine the gears of the real
estate machine in a comprehensive manner—looking
at each issue not in its financial, technical, or
operational isolation, but as a confluence of interaction.
The editors intend for Properties to become an
important source for examining the investment,
development, finance, management and design
forces driving real estate in New York.
The Editors
The editors of Properties reflect this diversity themselves.
To organize and comment adequately on this
range of concerns, the editorship has been divided
into three parts: development, finance, and urban
impacts.
Properties A PREVIEW 6
Henry Wollman, the director of the Newman
Institute, is the founder of Union Equities Ltd., a real
estate development company that has pioneered
public-private partnerships for mixed-income, subsidy-free
housing developments in Westchester. He
serves as the overall journal editor, focusing on private-
and public-sector development issues.
Willard McIntosh serves as Properties’ real estate
finance editor. The immediate past president of the
American Real Estate Society, Mr. McIntosh is
the Managing Director, Research for Prudential Real
Estate Investors, and a professor of real estate
finance with a Ph.D. from the University of North
Texas.
Ellen Posner serves as Properties’ urban affairs editor.
The former architectural and urban critic for the
Wall Street Journal, and a writer on urban issues for
publications ranging from the Atlantic Monthly and
ARTnews to Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme
and the journal of the United Nations Development
Programme, Ms. Posner wrote the introduction to
Cities in our Future (Island Press, 1997).
Contributing Editors and the Editorial Board
Additional editorial comment is shared with the exofficio
Contributing Editors, and with the Editorial
Board.
The four Advisory Board members include the chair
of the Newman Institute Board, the respective
deans of the School of Public Affairs and the Zicklin
School of Business at Baruch College, City University
of New York, and the assistant director of the
Newman Institute..
The Editorial Board, still in formation, serves as both
an additional resource for ideas and for review of particular
articles and features. This Board will be divided
proportionately among real estate professionals in
industry and government, and academicians. The City
University of New York, with its enormous depth of
faculty engaged in research and teaching in matters
related to real estate and urban development in the
New York metropolitan region, forms a core of the
academic component of the Board. Properties
intends that other professional and academic institutions
be represented.
The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute Review 7
Schedule and Themes
Properties will be published three times per year, following
the cycle of the three annual public events
sponsored by the New York Real Estate Forum, the
conference arm of the Newman Institute. The Forum
sponsors, each fall, the Finance Conference, dealing
with a key issue in real estate finance; each winter,
the City Roundtable, a venue for bringing together
senior real estate professionals from the private and
public sectors; and each spring, the Development
Conference, concerned with an emerging important
arena in real estate development. All three events,
while not focused exclusively on the New York metropolitan
region, will use New York as the prism
through which other local, national, and even international
real estate issues are better understood and
evaluated.
Properties will carry an edited transcript of the proceedings
of each conference. The transcripts will
appear in close congruence to each real estate
forum, creating both an ongoing working document
for immediate discussion among industry and government
policy makers and citizens at large, and a
longer-term record of real estate issues and policy
viewpoints.
Properties will also include two additional sections as
standard features. The first, entitled Research Notes,
presents applied academic research-in-progress in
real estate and related urban issues, some especially
commissioned by the Institute. The second, entitled
Public Notices, is a source for primary information on
new private- and public-sector-generated development
initiatives, finance issues, and public policies,
and their effect on metropolitan New York real
estate.
For this preview issue, the editors present significant
excerpts from the 1997 City Roundtable, which
focused on the future of the central business district
of the city—Manhattan south of 96th Street, assessing
it from commercial, residential and retail perspectives.
Guidelines for Contributors
The editors will solicit manuscripts from real estate
development, finance and design professionals in
both the private and public sectors, and from academics
engaged in research on relevant aspects of real
estate. Prospective contributors in forwarding manuscripts
should be mindful of the rhythm of a year’s
Properties A PREVIEW 8
issues—finance concerns in the fall, public-policy/
urban concerns in the winter, and development concerns
in the spring. Additional details, including stylistic
rules for submission, may be obtained by writing
to the managing editor. The editors intend to establish,
in time, a significant letters column, enabling
readers to comment on issues raised in the journal.
Publication Schedule:Year One Issues 1 and 2
WINTER 1999–Vol I No. 1
ESSAYS
•Do REITs have a future in New York?
•New York REITs 1998:
What Happened Since the Finance Conference
•New York REITs 1999:
Prospects and Structural Changes
•New York Stasis/Opportunity
•Surgically Removing the Element of Surprise
REGULAR FEATURES
•PUBLIC NOTICES:
West Side Story: Private Projects and Public Goals
Toward a Midtown West Plan
•RESEARCH NOTES:
Is government assisted housing for the poor
achieving its goal?
•THE NEW YORK REAL ESTATE FORUM:
The 1998 Finance Conference:
REITs in the New York Regional Marketplace
SPRING 1999–Vol I No. 2
ESSAYS
•How Shall the Upper Manhattan Empowerment
Zone Succeed?
•Alternative Strategies for Upper Manhattan: Three
Sites and Three Scales for Future Development
•Community Development in Harlem:
Past, Present and Pipeline
REGULAR FEATURES
•PUBLIC NOTICES:
Current Public Investment in Upper Manhattan
•RESEARCH NOTES:
The Quagmire of Measuring Urban Land Values
•THE NEW YORK REAL ESTATE FORUM:
The 1998 City Roundtable:
Development and Preservation Alternatives
for Upper Manhattan
The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute Review 9
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