Business Sense?

Mention of Sullivan Square here by a rival developer. Sullivan Square is of course the development involving Harcourt in Las Vegas.

http://www.inbusinesslasvegas.com/2008/10/31/qanda.html

This is a heck of a time to sell condos. How is the slowdown affecting you?

We didn't expect the depth of the downturn, but we did expect the downturn, and we made a lot of design decisions early on from that point of view. That is one of the reasons why we succeeded. Sullivan Square, for example, was designed pre-downturn and was designed around a $600 square-foot price point. We said from the beginning that we have to assume they are going to be much harder to sell when they are done, so we have to make sure ... we can sell these for $300 per square foot and $400 per square foot.

What about your competitors?

I think most of our competition didn't build sufficiently compelling products and attractive products to get enough buyers to get the financing they needed to build. Sullivan Square is an interesting case. You can argue it took the wrong lessons away from why people like to live in cities. The lessons that ManhattanWest took away are people like to live in cities where they can walk to a lot of convenient services and where there are great public resources that are free like parks where they can meet a lot of interesting people. Sullivan Square took away incredibly high density, not much green space and very high price points. Those are some of the characteristics of a New York City. But the problem is that first of all, there weren't very many people who could afford Sullivan Square, and second of all, you are not going to get that diverse social strata.

Jersey's waterfront? How much green space is there really there amidst the glass lego buildings? Outside of the pretty architect's drawings, that it.