The Steench of New York During the Heat Wave: Footsteps Towards Building Units for a New Downtown Office Building
Late on a hot and humid night this summer, I found myself walking east on 12th Street toward Fifth Avenue, which, despite its ranking as one of the most expensive stretches of residential real estate on earth, still felt redolent with neglect. Garbage, rats ambling around with their characteristic sense of ownership, the stench of New York in a heat wave — all there to remind you how much people will sacrifice to live in what was once the world’s singular cultural and financial nexus. Even though New York is a great place to live, it has become a lot less nice in the past couple of years due to its filthy reputation.
One way to quantify this is to look at the incidence of track fires in the subway system, nearly all of which are caused by debris tossed from train platforms. Despite a reduction in passengers, the M.T.A. recorded a 12 percent increase in fires compared to the previous year. Increased caution may have been brought in some places, but it also encouraged the disinhibition in others. Eight months ago, a Queens-bound E train was emptied at a stop in Midtown when someone threw a microwave onto the tracks.
There are also simply more of us. Over the past decade the city has grown by half a million people as the delivery economy grew in tandem with it.
The city is generating more garbage than it was five years ago, and is less likely to use recycling than it was before the de Blasio administration took office. The pilot program for curbside pickup of organic materials had money restored in the city’s budget, but it wasn’t fully restored.
In Chicago, Michael M. Edwards, who runs the Chicago Loop Alliance, a business organization, has been watching a halting return to downtown offices unfold. He recalled biking down the street past boarded up buildings and empty skyscrapers when he went back to work in the spring of 2020. He noticed the absence of the business people that used to commute alongside him when he took the train.
Mr.Edwards is excited that the city has begun making plans to convert office buildings into 1,000 housing units, which would be affordable and be located along a busy business thoroughfare called LaSalle Street. Mr.Edwards believes that more people could commute to downtown jobs.
He notes that this push to bring more housing downtown is part of a recent trend: Roughly 40,000 people live in the downtown Loop, up from just about 13,000 a decade ago. Apartments in the Loop are renting at higher rates than they were prepandemic, indicating that people are interested in living in that downtown bustle.
“You’re in the middle of everything,” said Mr. Edwards, who used to live in the Loop. “It’s a 10-minute walk to work, so all of a sudden you have two hours of commute time back.”
New Energy Codes: What the New York City wants to do with the New Buildings, and what they will tell us about the future of the City
“Some of these buildings are going to become ghost buildings,” said Bill Rudin, whose family business owns and operates commercial and residential properties. The marketplace is telling all of us to do something that is imaginative, out of the box, but has been proven successful.
Richard Leigh, a professor of physics at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, said the building is clearly a showpiece. What it is putting out in the way of emissions is what the question is.
Landlords such as SL Green say New York City’s new laws will force dramatic changes. Unlike energy codes of the past, one of the key laws, which restricts pollution, doesn’t merely apply to new construction: Existing buildings, no matter how small or how old, must gradually comply and retrofit as well, potentially at eye-watering cost.
Mr Wilcox said that it makes sense for the city to make buildings cleaner by making them all electric. New tenants have been welcomed at One Vanderbilt. Deep underground, an expanded transit hub rivaling an airport concourse recently opened next door. The building has a powerful turbine in the sky.