How exactly is not building taller than WTC a sign of respect? To me it sounds like a monument to propaganda. Many questions remain as to who was behind the WTC attack. Further, I'd like a monument to free enterprise, i.e,. a building taller than WTC, which sticks a finger in the eye of those who want to limit growth and development for ever more absurd reasons.New design drawings of the planned Nordstrom Tower were leaked on Monday, showing the residential high-rise plans have shot past 1 World Trade Center’s 1,776-foot height — which would make it the tallest building in New York.A report on the New York YIMBY blog said the building at 217 W. 57th St. had added 19 feet — topping off at 1,795 feet tall, despite the developer’s vow to stop a foot short of the so-called Freedom Tower’s symbolic height, out of respect.But Gary Barnett, who heads Extell Development, said the developer was absolutely keeping its word about not building higher than 1 WTC.“The Nordstrom Tower will categorically not be taller than 1 World Trade Center,” Barnett told The Post late Monday.The height of 1 WTC was set as a patriotic message to terrorists who took down the Twin Towers on 9/11. Barnett has said the Nordstrom Tower would top out at 1,775 feet, including its spire.“When we were planning the building, we decided that we were going to make it less tall out of respect,” Barnett said last month. “I can’t comment on what other developers plan to do or what our final building will be, but that was the plan.”The new tower will be anchored by a 200,000-square-foot Nordstrom store.
-RW
Nordstrom's statist propaganda tower is destined to be a victim of what Mark Hanson is calling housing bubble 2.0, and now that we are cascading quickly into a recession it may become a skyscraper cherry on the top of the current economic cycle. Mark and I were on the same page in 2006-7 and we were both considered nuts, but the demographics, MERS, fraudulent Alonges, and title tranches sold to multiple banks while the two year window was ignored, will seem trivial when the mushroom cloud rises above the chaos on the ground.
ReplyDeleteWhen things are going good the level of hubris in the air is palpable, and yet where I live you can still see the battered ruins of the last bubbles implosion littered across the landscape in various parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area. I remember taking a grand tour of the far flung boundaries of the last bubble right before it imploded, and reporting back to someone I knew who was very well connected here in town, and she told me none of her advisors saw any downturn on the horizon. As Frank Lloyd Wright's youngest apprentice noted at the time, the only thing people in the housing industry talked about in 2006 was momentum, and margin, how sad and myopic.
One of the keys to understanding what is going to happen is to realize that the Baby-boomer's reached their peak earning year, and peak of the Baby-boomer spending bell curve in 2006. Since 2000 household spending has been falling because the highest percentage of people within the top range of the consumer spending bell curve reached its peak in 2000. The rise of the millennial's spending will not begin to really replace that of the former spendthrift Baby-boomer's until the next rise in the consumer spending bell curve kicks in around 2024.
Well put Bob.
ReplyDelete