ON REAL ESTATE Landlords should no longer view tech firms as sure bets for sprawling office campuses

tiatives including a plan to upzone the suburbs, build out a light-rail project in Brooklyn and Queens, and index the minimum wage to inflation. Expending so much political capital on one judge who does not have the support of the Senate is political malpractice.

ROSS BARKAN

Hochul, meanwhile, elevated LaSalle, who is more of a moderate and drew the ire of the left and organized labor for several rulings he made pertaining to abortion rights, labor unions ,and smaller consumer protection and civil liberties cases. Although Hochul garnered support from prominent members of Congress including Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez—because LaSalle would have been New York’s first Latino chief judge—she failed to line up the necessary votes among Democrats in the state Senate. It was striking how little work ahead of time Hochul put in to win goodwill from state lawmakers.

If Hochul wasn’t willing to whip votes, she could have simply put forth a judge who had the support of the broad Democratic conference. Hochul, a center-left Democrat, didn’t merely alienate progressives; she also drew the ire of large labor unions, which supported more moderate Democrats against LaSalle. In the end, Hochul found little support for her pick where it counted.

Now she wants a floor vote, but even if she gets one, it’s unclear the full Senate would confirm LaSalle. Hochul could hope to win the vote of all 21 Senate Republicans—the GOP lawmakers, largely, have been warm to LaSalle—but would still need to secure 11 Democratic votes.

The LaSalle battle has been a strange detour for Hochul, who recently announced in her State of the State address some worthy ini- should not expect to see the types of sprawling work campuses these firms made famous before the pandemic bounce back anytime soon. building seems like a much likelier ceiling for their plans following almost three years of remote work.

Early on in the pandemic, one of the best pieces of news for the city’s real estate industry came when Facebook officially signed its lease for 730,000 square feet at Vornado’s Farley Building near Penn Station. This was back in August 2020, when New York’s very survival was still up for debate; the massive deal was broadly viewed as a vote of confidence in Manhattan and a sign that the tech giants would continue to be reliable tenants for the city’s landlords amid so much upheaval in other sectors.

Suffice it to say, things haven’t exactly panned out that way.

LaSalle’s defenders are right that his fiercest critics have misrepresented him—he’s not a rightwing judge, by any means—but they must understand the environment has shifted since the fall of Roe v. Wade

Now state senators are behaving like U.S. senators, who have long applied ideological litmus tests to Supreme Court nominees and tried to confirm judges who agree with them on policy. Democrats in the state Senate might not hold ill will toward LaSalle, but they aren’t convinced he would be much different from DiFiore.

Hochul would be wise to retreat and move on. She can consult with Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Senate majority leader, about another nominee who could pass muster in the conference. If Hochul instead continues down her current path, she might only strengthen the Legislature’s resolve to oppose her.

Moderate and socialist Democrats united against LaSalle. If that was Hochul’s real goal—convincing ideologically disparate lawmakers that she’s the problem—then she succeeded.

Quick takes

● Mayor Eric Adams was livid at mild criticism lobbed at him from Brad Lander, the city comptroller, over how he’s handling the migrant crisis. Adams has gotten relatively soft treatment from Lander so far. If this is how he reacts now, imagine when Lander decides—if he ever does—to get aggressive.

● Is there a reason Adams wants to cut library funding? Public libraries are a relatively small part of the city budget. If Adams wants to save money, he should look elsewhere. He should not trim crucial resources for the working class and the poor. ■

Major tech firms including Alphabet, Amazon, Twitter and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) have all recently laid off or announced plans to lay off thousands of employees. The impact this will have on their local real estate holdings remains unclear, but with Meta already closing its office at 225 Park Ave. S. and Amazon letting go of 243 workers in its office at 1440 Broadway, it seems unlikely to spell good news. At the very least, landlords

To be clear, layoffs and more general upheaval at many of the large tech companies does not mean the entire sector is in a doom spiral. Smaller firms such as hospitality-focused ResortPass, whose CEO is committed to in-person work, and QR codemaker Beaconstac have both raised more than $20 million in funding recently. And health-tech firm Progyny is opening another floor in its Midtown South office, indicating that growth and an accompanying appetite for office space have not totally vanished in the city.

But companies at this stage of development still may be years away from needing the amount of office space necessitated by corporations like Meta. In fact, given that they are raising this money in an environment where hybrid work has become the norm, it seems unlikely that they will ever seek to amass a real estate portfolio the size of that of the current tech giants. Simply becoming an anchor tenant in an

A reasonable proposition

In other words, the future of office space for tech firms is starting to look a lot like the future of office space for pretty much any type of company. Given the recent cycle of tech firms’ rapid growth followed by large-scale layoffs, targeting a firm to take a few floors at a property on a 10-year lease is a much more reasonable proposition for landlords than waiting for one to, say, announce ambitious plans to build a large second headquarters somewhere in the U.S. and choose Long Island City, only to then back out amid fierce pushback over the deal it received, to pick just one totally random and hypothetical scenario. The major tech companies are facing challenges that go far beyond how much they can or can’t help New York’s office market, and the size of their footprints in the city is likely not among their top concerns. The pipeline of new office leases in the sector is unlikely to dry up completely, but anticipating more deals where tech takes on hundreds of thousands of square feet is no longer a smart bet. ■