The hotel is on a prime cut of the Midtown East business district near Grand Central that the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations upzoned in the 2010s. That change was meant to spur projects like this one, replacing older mid-rise buildings with newer taller ones, and we're seeing the results now.
The New York Real Estate Board recently confirmed what every New Yorker feels: we are in a housing free-fall. With a staggering shortfall of up to 540,000 units and a vacancy rate of just 1.4 percent, the pace of new construction is glacially slow. But the solution might be hiding in plain sight, tucked away behind the chain-link fences of our city's woefully underutilized golf courses.