It's official! Gilbert locks up redevelopment of old Hudson's site

[Bham1982]

IMO, projects like 432 Park are uniquely Manhattan-esque, and would be difficult to imagine as commercially viable in a city like Detroit---where land is so inexpensive & plentiful, it's basically at a surplus. "Skinny skyscrapers" like 432 are expensive to engineer/construct and can serve only one purpose: residential. The square footage on each floor is too small for more profitable mass commercial leases. Allegedly, some wealthy potential owners even passed on 432, because [[despite the view), the square footage of one floor was far too small to meet their needs.

The required pricing for each residence in order to pay for such a costly project would be a tough sell in the Detroit real estate market---actually in any market outside of a handful of US cities.

Another footnote regarding 432 Park is that it is currently the tallest building in the US. Like many other skyscrapers, One World Trade & Willis [[former Sears) "cheat" by including the spire [[non occupy-able space) in the total height of the building. Willis is 1,354 to the top floor, 432 Park is 1,396.

Yes. The economics of the skinny supertall residentials only really makes sense in Manhattan. You need tremendous psf sales prices to justify the massive engineering costs and lost common/elevator space on the higher floors.

Just to illustrate, these supertall towers can justify up to 8,000-9,000 psf in sales prices. That's insanely expensive. The most prime parts of Chicago get maybe 1,000 psf. If Chicago is nowhere in the universe of where the supertall economics work out, you can see that smaller cities won't be getting such buildings anytime soon.

432 Park is about to be surpassed by two taller residential supertalls- 111 W.57 and Central Park Tower. CPT will be the tallest residential tower on earth.

Technically not a supertall, but these are the types of prices on the extreme high end of new construction- a $250 million condo at 220 Central Park South.

http://therealdeal.com/2016/05/05/22...he-sky-photos/

To compare, the best office building in Michigan, One Detroit Center, recently sold to Gilbert for around $100 million. So that's a million square foot trophy office tower for less than half the price of a Manhattan apartment.