New York City Could Create New Real Estate

The Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) at Columbia University is taking a page from Dubai’s book of real estate with its latest proposal for creating more real estate in New York. CURE would like to fill in the area between Lower Manhattan and Governors Island with millions of cubic yards of landfill, thereby creating “LoLo,” or Lower Lower Manhattan and, in the process, 88 million square feet of development and $16.7 billion in revenue for New York City[1].

Although one of the axioms of real estate is that it is valuable because you simply cannot make more of it, NYC would not be the first to try its hand at “island-building.” Dubai developer Nakheel has been doing it for years, creating palm-tree-shaped islands, a mass of private islands and now, in his latest project, a string of artificial reefs to attract more aquatic life[2]. While some of these projects have been more successful than others – his “World” creation of private islands is currently sinking back into the sea[3] – Nakheel’s work shows exactly how profitable building new real estate out of nothing can be. LoLo is being characterized as “the kind of big thinking that New York needs” by director of CURE Vishaan Chakrabarti. An alternative and far less-glamorous proposal involves altering zoning to better utilize the nearly four billion square feet of unused development rights already in the city.

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[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/realestate/commercial/visions-of-lolo-a-neighborhood-rising-from-landfill.html

[2] http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hzSC-mX0HomcU6D9AjTIb-S3WtKA?docId=40663af4f326441ea3e6ef9eddb154f4

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/8271643/The-World-is-sinking-Dubai-islands-falling-into-the-sea.html

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