EDC

The Association Center, the office building at 120 Wall Street once dedicated to nonprofit organizations, is getting more profit-oriented.

Two of the roughly 40 nonprofit tenants have announced that they are leaving in part because the building's tax breaks, and the one-time cheap rents of the Financial District, are disappearing.

The 78-year-old, 600,000-square-foot office building, owned by Larry Silverstein, was designated the Association Center 14 years ago when the Dinkins administration was trying to revive Wall Street real estate. The city agreed to forgive nonprofit tenants real estate taxes, worth about $4 a square foot, but those original leases, and the tax breaks, are now expiring. The Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive research think tank, bought an office condo at 125 Maiden Lane this month, while the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions moved to John Street in February. Together they rented about 23,000 square feet.

"We found that the prices for leasing were much more than we could bear," said Robert D. Rosendale, the vice president for administration and finance at the Guttmacher Institute. "We were paying right around $23 [a square foot], and that was going to go to $35."

He added that the institute needed more space because of a growing staff and that staying in 120 Wall would have required renting on non-contiguous floors.

Both Mr. Rosendale and the credit union association said that there were rumors that the building would eventually be converted to residential condominiums. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, said, "There are no present plans to operate 120 Wall as anything other than an office building."

He added that the company had been renewing leases for as far ahead as 2017 or 2018, and the building's 100 percent leased.

"The project was developed to stop the exodus of associations from New York and it did that," said Joel Dolci, the president of the New York Society of Association Executives, which helped secure the tax breaks. "We are hoping that that does not recur. We are trying to make every effort to assist the organizations with other space."

The city Economic Development Corporation, which last year established a separate desk to serve nonprofits, is talking with other priced-out tenants and encouraging them to consider places like Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn--which also happen to be areas where great hopes for satellite office districts have so far floundered.

"The Bloomberg administration is committed to helping New York City's not-for-profits locate and expand in all five boroughs," said EDC spokeswoman Yonit Golub.

- Matthew Schuerman

More bad news for American Stevedoring Inc., the cargo shipper threatened with eviction from Red Hook. Part of the Sunset Park waterfront where cargo shipping was supposed to move just got sold off to the Axis Group, a company that ships and stores cars and car parts, the Economic Development Corporation announced this week.

The long-anticipated deal will net the city $32 million in revenue over the next 15 years, and is supposed to create 167 full-time jobs (though, for 74 acres, that number pales in comparison to ASI). It will also make it easier for the city to tell port-booster Congressman Jerrold Nadler that it hasn't given up on a blue-collar waterfront--even if it never finds space to move Red Hook's container-port operation down there.

Of course, it's not a great sign when the first press release to come up on the Axis Group Web site is "ALLIED HOLDINGS, INC. TO CUT JOBS."

Full release (the EDC's, not Axis') after the jump.  read more »

- Matthew Schuerman

Asked whether he wanted to move forward with the plan to hand over the Red Hook piers to the city Economic Development Corporation, the new executive director of the Port Authority, Anthony Shorris, said, in essence, he wants to think about it:

Right now, we are having conversations and are doing a lot of looking at what should happen at each of the piers. The thing that is most important is to make sure that they remain active, job generating, supporting the economic growth of the city and the port. That is a complicated set of decisions that we are in discussions that I am just catching up on.

This sounds like bureaucratic blather, but it also gives Shorris enough breathing space in case he wants to upset the EDC's plan to replace the container port with another cruise-ship terminal, of which The Observer wrote last week. It also distinctly sends a message that the Port Authority, which has perennially toggled between being an economic development agency and a transportation agency, wants to be the former.

- Matthew Schuerman

Despite last month's stormy City Council hearing on the future of the Brooklyn waterfront, the city's Economic Development Corporation is pushing part of its Red Hook plan forward--the part it can push forward without engendering further controversy.

A request for proposals issued on Tuesday asks for bidders to submit plans for a marina and marina repair shop in the Atlantic Basin and Pier 10, which the city has been leasing from the Port Authority since early 2005. The request (PDF) only very slightly mentions Pier 10, which is where the EDC has met resistance in its effort to replace the cargo-container port with Brooklyn's second cruise-ship terminal.

- Matthew Schuerman

Crain's is reporting that Robert Lieber, a managing director of Lehman Brothers, has accepted the presidency of the city's Economic Development Corporation. Mr. Lieber would take over from Andrew Alper, a former COO of Goldman Sachs, who left the EDC post in June after four years. - Tom Acitelli

The Economic Development Corporation says tomorrow’s hearing on $3.345 billion in triple tax-free Liberty Bonds for rebuilding the World Trade Center is still on for tomorrow morning—despite hefty speculation that the city will somehow convince developer Larry Silverstein to relinquish his claim on at least some of the 10 million square feet of office space—and get someone else (the impeccably well-connected Steve Ross, perhaps?) to build condos. The EDC, which runs the Industrial Development Agency, which distributes the bonds, has also put the issue on January’s agenda, suggesting that the question will not be answered any time soon. Good Jobs New York has posted Silverstein’s application online. -Matthew Schuerman  read more »