Glittering condos have gone up, wealthy young families have moved in, and a new World Trade Center towers over a changed landscape.
The corner of Manhattan where a man killed eight people in a pickup-truck rampage on Tuesday has been transformed in the past two decades, and particularly since the September 11 attack 16 years ago.
Real estate there is some of the priciest in New York. The median sale price of a condo in the Tribeca neighborhood is $3.75 million, according to Jonathan Miller, president of the New York appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Taylor Swift moved into a $20 million penthouse three years ago.
In Lower Manhattan, which encompasses the Financial District and Battery Park City, Miller said the median sale price of a condo is $1.5 million. That figure has increased sixfold since 2001.
The neighborhoods that surround Tuesday’s attack site have rebuilt and reinvented themselves since the 2001 attack, attracting businesses and wealthier people.
“It started with devastation and became a thriving submarket. It’s kind of incredible,” Miller said.
More than three-quarters of the population of Lower Manhattan is younger than 45, and a third of families have household incomes of at least $200,000. Citywide, only 7% of families fall in that income bracket, according to state figures.
Young families enjoy a neighborhood of walkable streets and destination restaurants, stroll through a park that hugs the Hudson River, and ride on bike paths that have sprouted all over Manhattan in the past two decades.
On Tuesday, one of those bike paths became a scene of terror. Authorities say a 29-year-old man driving a rented pickup truck plowed into a crowd of bicyclists and pedestrians and crashed the truck into a school bus, killing six people instantly and two who died later.
The suspect is Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, according to two law enforcement sources. Police shot him in the abdomen. A law enforcement official said he was linked to social media accounts that contain ISIS-related material.
It was the deadliest, but not the first, terror attack in New York after 9/11. Just over a year ago, 30 people were hurt when a pressure cooker bomb went off in the nearby Chelsea neighborhood. A federal jury found Ahmad Rahimi guilty of those bombings last month.
In Lower Manhattan, the mayor’s office estimates that private and public entities have invested $30 billion over the past two decades.
Condo developers moved in as financial companies relocated uptown after 9/11. The population more than doubled from 2000 to 2014, according to a report from the state comptroller.
And though the Financial District, home to Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, has been rebuilt, it’s no longer the hub it once was. The number of finance jobs in Lower Manhattan has been cut nearly in half, according to the comptroller.
Still, according to research by Downtown Alliance, CBRE and CoStar, five of the 10 largest tenants in Lower Manhattan are in the finance, insurance and real estate industries. Goldman Sachs alone occupies 2.1 million square feet in the area.
Blocks from Tuesday’s carnage, a entire office complex has gone up where the towers of the original World Trade Center stood.
Seven World Trade opened in May 2006, and Four World Trade in November 2013. Two and Three World Trade are works in progress.
One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the western hemisphere, opened in October 2014. More than half the space has been leased to high-profile tenants, including magazine publisher Condé Nast and real estate broker Cushman & Wakefield.
The other World Trade office buildings also boast well-known tenants. Early next year, Spotify is set to relocate its New York offices from Midtown to Four World Trade Center. In the last 10 years, almost 700 companies have moved downtown, Janno Lieber, then the president of World Trade Center Properties, said in February.
— CNNMoney’s Chris Isidore contributed to this report.
