One World Trade Center has opened for business over 13 years after the original towers were destroyed on 9/11. Costing $3.8 billion the 104 storey tower stand 541 metres tall. This chart shows how it compares with the tallest buildings worldwide.
You will find more statistics at Statista
Office Rents at One World Trade Center Cut due to Slow Leasing Activity
Rents at the famous One World Trade Center in New York City have been cut by about 10 percent as office space leasing activity is still slow in the tallest building of America.
One WTC has remained half vacant for the past three years. Only 55 percent of the building is leased and no private tenant has signed a lease agreement in the last three years.
“The market’s not there,” said Douglas Durst, owner of WTC who bought stakes in the building from Port Authority in 2011, to The Wall Street Journal.
“When we started in 2011, everybody expected the economy to take off, and obviously that hasn’t happened.”
Durst also added that a lot of tenants have looked for space in the building but the asking rents dampened their leasing spirits. Some also speculate that security concerns may be barring prospective tenants from occupying space in the building. However, Durst denied “security” being a problem.
More recently, it was reported that Hugo Boss – the fashion brand – was looking to move its Big Apple headquarters to the building. However, a source close to Hugo Boss told the Commercial Observer that the deal wasn’t happening “anytime soon” and the reports doing the rounds are largely exaggerated.
But, experts had foreseen the fate of One WTC long back. Citing real estate sources, Businessweek wrote in November 2014 feature that the owners would eventually have to settle for lower asking rents.
“At the end of the day, supply and demand will determine what that space trades for,” said Michael Cohen, tri-state regional president of Colliers International, to Bloomberg News.
For now, the One World Trade Center has some prestigious tenants like Conde Nast, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. It was also recently named the tallest building of America by the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
Is it just me or does it seem odd that it took us 13 years to build a single building? I mean, China connected all its major cities by high speed rail faster than we could put up a single building using Chinese and German parts as the steel and glass were supplied by those guys. That it took us this long to create a building that no one wants seems to highlight our failure of will.
This failure clearly demonstrates to me that we are nearly paralyzed when it comes to big projects. I doubt our aging infrastructure is going to be replaced any time soon.
@Nickel – Construction started April 27, 2006
I don’t know any details about the financing or who made major money from construction of the Trade Center but I suspect that it was almost if not all public money. I also suspect that politically connected made huge profits developing and building it. From real estate developers to unions the contracts for the favored were probably really good. The fascists will share in any profits till the end of time if there are any profits. They will be protected fom any losses as well. Taxpayers beware. Same scam in every city building everything from schools to sports stadiums.
If these projects are so great why don’t the elite finance these things themselves?
One World Trade Center brought to you by the Empire of US …clever
Sounds like the question isn’t why it took so long to build but why they built it at all.
Physical contruction may have started in 2006 but there was never any doubt that something would be built there and the four years prior to physical construction were spent trying to figure out what was gonna go there and how they were going to do it. That time must be considered as well. We can’t just overlook all the time they spent playing grab-ass.
Skyscraper index:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
It took 13 years because they had to wait for the radiation from the nukes which brought down WTC 1 & 2 to die down. Some people think it was jetliners, but that’s the government’s “conspiracy theory”.