Downtown Manhattan so empty an artist can afford it

Metro International reports:

In a corner office in Lower Manhattan once occupied by Goldman Sachs, Kymia Nawabi was working on a sculpture yesterday as part of a program capitalizing on the struggling financial sector by turning boardrooms into artist studios.

“It’s probably the only time I’ll have my own office,” she said.

As Goldman leaves behind buildings to move into new headquarters, and AIG, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others shed office space, a ghost town is growing. One in 5 Lower Manhattan offices will be empty next year, real estate experts at Jones Lang LaSalle predict, while the current downtown vacancy rate is 10.8 percent.

“We don’t want to lose people who work on Wall Street,” Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday. “We need the tax base. Our teachers need to get paid.”

Despite the vacancies, commercial space keeps coming on the market, with millions of square feet planned at the World Trade Center. Developers hope new businesses will replace finance.

Square footage is square footage.The laws of supply and demand working.