The Adams administration’s botched plans for a seawall along a stretch of the East River waterfront cost the city a prized new life sciences facility when it was most needed — and cost its would-be developer at least 50 million dollars, a bombshell lawsuit claims.
Alexandria Real Estate Equities (ARE), a NYSE-traded developer, said it has been trying for years to build a third tower to complete its life sciences campus on First Avenue between East 28th and East 30th streets. adjacent to Bellevue Hospital, according to a lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.
The company has already erected two Alexandria Life Sciences buildings on the southern part of the site. Its 1 million square feet of laboratory and research space is 95% occupied, with leases held by leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The popular waterfront restaurant Riverpark is also located in the east tower.
But the Economic Development Corporation. and Health + Hospitals Corp. repeatedly stalled ARE’s efforts to build a North Tower between East 29th and East 30th Streets, despite the firm’s right to build there under a binding option it exercised to do so in 2019, according to the lawsuit.
In a statement to The Post, Alexandria founder and executive chairman Joel Marcus said his firm has invested more than $1.5 billion in the project, which “led the growth of the city’s commercial life sciences sector from two commercial companies in 2010 in more than 100 local biotech companies today.”
But he said EDC and H+H “deceptively led us for years with false assurances and withheld essential facts as part of an insidious scheme” to force ARE to pay for the seawall and “deliberately blocked us from developing in time of our third tower.”
The alleged “fraudulent scheme” leaves ARE “with a contractual option severely impaired, it … cannot be enforced in the face of the flood defendants’ claims, which are impossible to satisfy,” the suit says.
EDC and H+H officials could not immediately be reached.
The saga dates back to 2007, when Michael Bloomberg’s administration tapped ARE subsidiary ARE-East River Science Park to develop the Big Apple’s first commercial life sciences campus under a land lease with the city.
The first two towers were developed quickly. When Superstorm Sandy hit in 2012, the city realized the need to build a seawall on the site.
The agencies assured ARE in 2015 that FEMA would pay for the wall in full and that it would not “materially affect the development, construction or operation of the North Tower,” the newly filed lawsuit states.
But EDC and H+H allegedly couldn’t come up with a final design for the wall. In 2019, they told ARE that they wanted part of the wall to be integrated with the foundation of the North Tower. The developer says it agreed to cooperate, although it was not required to do so, when the agencies again assured them that the flood protection plan would not affect the construction of the new building.
But the city kept changing the design again and again, frustrating ARE’s efforts to build. The city also wants ARE to pay for future design changes even though the company was not asked to shoulder the costs, the suit says.
ARE says the city knew as early as 2020 that plans were underway and that FEMA approval could take years.
The delays, the suit says, “have caused Alexandria to miss out on the life science bull market … which has now softened significantly nationally.
“At the same time,” the lawsuit says, EDC “encouraged and induced other developers to build life science projects … based on false and exaggerated information about demand.”
Although the lawsuit doesn’t mention it, the city plans two major life sciences projects near the ARE site. A so-called Science Park and Research Campus spanning two million square feet in the Kips Bay neighborhood is currently going through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.
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Fonte da imagem: nypost.com
