urbanSTL

St.Louis1764 wrote:This is why it's time for the city to in act now on a new commercial office building companies will begin to go else where and that's starting to show. Waiting hasn't gotten downtown anywhere i am believer if you build it they will come. Todays Business's are always looking for new high tech space whether thats historic or new but in the cities case it's time to build something new. 1989 is a long time.

Building a shiny new Class A+ tower wouldn't have kept NW Mutual Downtown. The whole "The City needs to heavily subsidize (or even build?) Downtown office space" idea seems a bit silly to me. Isn't that already what's been going on? There's been plenty of Class A added since 1989. Cannon Design wanted a cool contemporary space, so they built it in an old power station. HOK just built a brand new office in the Equitable Building. Laclede wanted 120,000+ sq. ft. of brand spanking office space, so they teamed up with Koman on a $47 million redevelopment of the American General Building. Stifel was looking for new space, and decided to buy their building so that they could use it as they saw fit. Cupples 9 (another Koman project) opened after a complete gut reno two years ago, with 99% of its space leased, and other Cupples buildings with contemporary offices opened a few years prior.

If a company wants to stay Downtown in cutting edge contemporary office space, there's nothing stopping them, and there is a lot of $$$ encouraging them. Lusting after some big new tower on spec - which would be likely to cannibalize tenants from other DT buildings - seems like the wrong way to go.

As for "if you build it they will come." Check out the AT&T Building, Railroad Exchange, Jefferson Arms, Millenium Hotel Center, and Globe-Democrat Buildings.

downtown2007 wrote:Note: the reason NW Mutual moved is to be closer to clients. This is why we need more people living downtown.

And the city, in general.

To be fair, there's an argument to be made that Centene's first priority was never to move downtown, and that they were instead merely trying to extort a better incentive deal by attaching their name to BPV.

That's a lot of empty space!

WaPo - The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

There are 71.5 million square feet of vacant office space in the Washington region, much of it piled in office parks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle ... story.html

Dose any one know why the corporate leadership so committed to the suburbs?
seem like newer / start up companies seem more open to be downtown just look at the few that moved to the landing this year.
while the older ones prefer the suburbs.

STLEnginerd wrote:Because that's where they live

But that's largely the case in most cities, right?

True_dope wrote:Dose any one know why the corporate leadership so committed to the suburbs?
seem like newer / start up companies seem more open to be downtown just look at the few that moved to the landing this year.
while the older ones prefer the suburbs.

It's cheap.

Taxes are lower.

Their employee base is largely county and St Chuck residents who would throw a shitfit about driving into the city.

They are not interested in employees who rely on transportation.

^ I think what everyone is trying to say is that those factors are the case for many cities. Companies can do more to tout their downtown locations.

^ the unusual thing for Saint Louis is that the downtown market offers Class A space at significantly less rates than the Clayton and West County submarkets. In most other places the reverse is true, where you can at least see the attraction of lower leasing costs in the burbs

I just think it is equal parts our corporate community sucking as a whole and our downtown leadership sucking. The former needs to get out of their country club comfort levels and the latter need to actively hustle and demonstrate a better value proposition for companies to be here.

roger wyoming II wrote:Downtown STL is now touting "close to 90,000 jobs", which is up from I believe 80,000. I'd like to see how they got to that number.

edit... the 2014 State of Downtown Report claims 86,500 downtown workers.

They have varying definitions of "Downtown". At the Spring CID open meeting I asked what their definition of downtown was for the number worker statistic in their Powerpoint presentation (88,000 workers).... They said the area extends to Jefferson on the West, Chouteau on the South, the river on the East, and I think it was Cass on the North....One heck of a big "core" in my opinion. In fact I think of you gerrymandered a contiguous area with the same number of acres somewhere else in the region, you might be able to tout that area as having about the same number of workers.

roger wyoming II wrote:Downtown STL is now touting "close to 90,000 jobs", which is up from I believe 80,000. I'd like to see how they got to that number.

edit... the 2014 State of Downtown Report claims 86,500 downtown workers.

Doug Woodruff, CEO and President of Downtown STL says employment downtown 20 years ago was 120k and it's 83k today.
http://nextstl.com/2015/07/st-louis-on- ... ble-audio/

HOK is now across the street from the Old Courthouse in the Equitable building. Here is a story from the HOK website. It includes this statement about hosting local Architects next month.

"On Sept. 17, HOK’s office will host 200 members of the local design and construction community for the American Institute of Architects (AIA) St. Louis chapter’s 2015 Design Awards."

HOK’s St. Louis Office Moves to a New Vibrant, High-Performance Workplace
http://www.hok.com/about/news/2015/08/1 ... workplace/

^ their new space looks really nice. i wish something like this could be done with that horrible terrarium thing attached to front of the Bank of America Bldg on the other side of the courthouse.

A small office deal, but a top engineer from Parsons (located at 501 Broadway) moved over to an Iowa based engineering firm, McClure, which is setting up a local shop at 500 N. Broadway.

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news ... -firm.html

Is this business related to Landshire?