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“This is higher than what it was in the Great Recession and higher than what it was in the 2001 recession,” said Collier’s Franklin Wallach.Ĭhristiana Riley, the chief executive of Deutsche in the Americas, said she was “optimistic that New York remains, to a degree, a hub” and institutional capital there would make it “meaningful for there to be a centralised presence” in the city, but it would not be “relevant for everyone” working in the industry. The estate agent Colliers International painted a bleaker picture, reporting that leasing was down by nearly 80% comparedwith a year ago and down by 55% from October. When this Covid business is over, the buildings are going to come back half-full. It’s all 50-inch TVs, staying home and having a few friends over for a takeout.
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Moran said: “The new crowd, the millennials, are a totally different animal.
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Cobblers and barbers are starved for custom. LVMH-owned Tiffany was on Monday empty of pre-holiday shoppers. China Chalet, a popular restaurant turned nightclub, has closed for good. Businesses that had survived the exodus of bankers have been hit hard by the pandemic. Street-level “for lease” signs are everywhere. It’s a different type of employee – for one thing they wear hoodies and sneakers, they keep different hours and they bring a different kind of vibrancy to the area.”īut that vibrancy can be hard to detect. “While that’s not welcome news, it’s been exciting to see large, household names move in. “Finance firms have been downsizing for quite sometime,” she said. The figures are now 26% and 22% respectively, according to Jessica Lappin, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York. In 2008, financial and insurance firms made up 54% of office occupiers, with media and tech at 5%. According to The Alliance for Downtown New York, commercial leasing in lower Manhattan set an all-time low at 455,000 sq ft in the third quarter, with leasing activity 64% below the five-year quarterly average and only 11% of office-occupying workers in Manhattan returned to their desks through September. Manhattan now has the most office space available since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Credit Suisse, Barclays, UBS and others have established hubs in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina and Utah. If Goldman leaves its Wall Street-adjacent HQ, it will follow Morgan Stanley, which relocated in the mid-1990s, and JP Morgan, which quit in 2000. Last week Bloomberg reported that Goldman Sachs was weighing plans for a new Florida hub to house its key asset management division, in part to cut $1.3bn in costs.īut it’s one thing to relocate administrative, technology and business operations jobs, and another to move client-facing operations – a move that could diminish New York’s prestige as home of the US financial industry and exacerbate its projected $9bn budget deficit over the next two years. JP Morgan, which was headquartered at 23 Wall Street from 1869, is following a plan to move jobs out of Manhattan after the mayor, Bill de Blasio, denied the bank $1bn in tax incentives to keep employees in New York. As soon as that happened, it was like: let’s get out,’” Moran said.ĭeutsche’s plan, which is to move some staff to Columbus Circle near Central Park, resembles a pattern: leave Wall Street for other areas in the city and then begin to decentralise operations away from Manhattan entirely. People were scared because Wall Street was a target. New York’s financial district has been transforming into a residential zone – with a smattering of media and tech firms including Condé Nast, Time Inc, Group M and Spotify – for years. This week Deutsche Bank, the last major bank on the storied block, announced it would accelerate its departure from its offices at 60 Wall Street and could move as many as half of its 4,600 Manhattan staff to regional offices in the next five years.ĭeutsche’s move comes as no surprise to Moran. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are still located here, but dozens of financial institutions have emptied out from New York’s financial district in an exodus that started in the wake of 9/11 and has been hastened by Covid. The world’s pre-eminent financial thoroughfare – at least throughout the 20th century – is a ghost of what it once was. “T hey used to stand at the bar three deep,” says John Moran, surveying the long, empty counter at Killarney Rose, a Wall Street bar that would, in another era, have been stuffed with early-shift construction workers and, at lunch and late into the evening, suited bankers.