I was a part of the 25 strong Opportunity London delegation to New York on 23-25 July, which just happened to coincide with the hottest three days in the city since 1888!  Yes, the air-con was good when indoors, but this is an Opportunity London city visit – which means at least 15,000 steps a day inside and out.  We packed a lot in.  

 

We started being hosted by Jamestown, who have got some the big calls very right, both in advance of the financial crash on 2007/8 and handling the post-COVID recovery.  Their hands-on approach to the curation and direct management of spaces was something we later saw replicated by Related Argent.  There are no management companies here – all staff are direct employees, clearly able to take a long-term view and continue to make investments up front.  Pier 57 and Chelsea Market were great examples of this.

 

The New York City Housing Authority presented challenges we are all extremely familiar with.  It provides and manages affordable housing to over 520,000 residents but would require tens of £ billions to bring all those homes up to modern standards.  It is therefore starting major estate renewal programmes with private and other partners on a site-by-site basis to bring forward new housing stock.  New York doesn’t have a ballot requirement, but the engagement plans we were talked through looked comprehensive.

 

After a roasting hot tour of the High Line, we were then taken around the development of Moynihan Penn Station by Vornado Realty Trust.  Clearly infrastructure development in NY is every bit as complex as in London, but the result was spectacular.

At Governors Island the next morning (via a beautiful ferry ride), we saw the work underway to create a hub for climate tech with the Trust for Governors Island and The New York Climate Exchange.  It was a topic we heard a lot about from others also and was reassuring to see how seriously the ambition of climate resilience was being taken despite the current Trump rhetoric. 

 

Next stop was a roundtable lunch with New York City Economic Development Corporation, which has a portfolio of 66m square feet of commercial space and develops assets and infrastructure across all five Boroughs.  It presented five major long-term developments, all of them on a scale that we would call Opportunity Areas, including the delivery of substantial new affordable housing.

 

On that theme, we then met Nuveen, a TIAA company, who took us on a tour of their Archer Green affordable housing project in Queens.  The affordable homes crisis is every bit as bad in NY as it is in London.  A new development project of 200 apartments might have 100,000 applicants to live there and deciding who is allocated them is a highly complex and regulated process.  Nuveen also spoke about their Green Capital financing project to enable developers to access cheap long-term funding to support the retrofit of out-of-date commercial space, an innovation they are hoping to bring to the UK too.

 

We ended the second day at the UK Deputy Consul General’s residence for a reception with investors and senior officials, and very welcome high-functioning air-con to go along with the spectacular views.  

 

Our final day started with an education theme, visiting the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech on the stunning Roosevelt Island, before a later round table with the NYC’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.  In both cases they are developing closer relationships between the University and business to forge stronger outcomes from the application of research. 

 

In between, and via the brilliant cable car back to mid-town, we toured Hudson Yards with Related Argent.  We saw spectacular top notch residential and commercial development before a fascinating group discussion around the challenges of development across both cities and the different funding models which apply.

 

It was a complete treat to end the formal programme 100 floors up on The Edge on the most perfect night for a sunset views, before later ending the informal programme in a gin-bar singing and dancing the night away (thank you for that recommendation, Emily Wilson!).

So what were my key take-aways?

 

 

 

The best anecdote of the trip really highlighted this as one project explained how difficult it was to deliver and said, without a hint of irony, “we only received three things from the Mayor – the land, planning and $100m”.  Our collective mouths were left somewhat gaping.

 

 

There is much we can learn from each-other and we only scratched the surface in three days.  However, the ability to genuinely bring together all tiers of Government and the private sector – as we do through the NLA and now through Opportunity London – is something where London is clearly more advanced that New York, or anywhere else to my knowledge.