WPCNR MR. & MRS. & MS. WHITE PLAINS VOICE. May 11, 2006: Aaron Woodin replies to Paul Wood's account of the Mayor's office vacancy initiatives with a different perspective:
John,
Perhaps I underestimated the extent of our City's initatives to attract and retain commercial
tenants in our city. So I do apologize to Mr. Wood and your readers for what may have appeared
to be an attempt to say that the City stood by and did nothing at all. Far from it, but...
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I honestly don't see how any initatives or incentives could have prevented IBM from
vacating 360 Hamilton completely, as they underwent wrenching changes (and a dramatic
paring down) during the early 1990s. I personally toured that building in 1996, and saw just
how unsuitable it was for future occupancy before it was sold to new owners and beautifully
renovated inside and out.
Or how they could have prevented Prodigy from undergoing the annual bloodlettings that I
witnessed? The layoffs led to them vacating all of 445 Hamilton (a 15-story building) for four floors
of Westchester One. Prodigy, which was profitable for perhaps one fiscal quarter, eventually
uprooted all White Plains employees for their datacenter in Yorktown Heights.
That building too, lay dormant, until a lot of expensive work went into it.
To more directly answer Mr. Wood's question, having lived and worked in White Plains all of my
life, and reading a steady diet of business publications, and having worked with people
responsible for decisions vis a vis where to locate their companies, it's become clear to me
that general economic conditions, market forces and privately funded building improvements
govern the amount of available office space and levels of tenancy.
Let's return to the purpose of my pendantic rant about vacancy rates. I felt that your reader's
original question was unfairly put, because I never felt we needed to feel "embarassment" over them.
I felt the reader needed a bit of a reminder of how bad the economy got at the end of the 90s,
and how keenly White Plains felt the loss of large tenants like IBM and Prodigy.
Here is a story in the Westchester County Business Journal that
neatly summarizes IBM's situation in White Plains,
and their decisions to vacate space...
Aaron Woodin
