Port Authority considers selling $3B Freedom Tower.

It seems that Governor Spitzer isn't going to prompt the reexamination that he was rumored to be considering for the Freedom Tower. But now it seems he might not have had to. The Port Authority is said to be considering a sale of the tower, whose cost has grown to $3 billion.

While hundreds of thousand of square feet of leasing commitments with government tenants have assuaged Port Authority concerns that the building will be economically feasible, they haven't dimmed criticism that the 2.6 million s/f building is ill designed to lure big financial firms--who have shown a willingness to occupy the WTC site but can't squeeze onto the Freedom Tower's undersized floors. According to published reports, a sale of the building would come with a requirement that its new owner meet the tower's existing timetable for construction.

With the Port Authority so obviously eager to unburden itself from financing the costly tower, what government authorities may be willing to bend on is the tower's design.

If the building is in fact sold, a new owner would undoubtedly want the kind of redesign that Spitzer had been hinting for months so that its floorplates could be somehow expanded to accommodate the kind of trading floors that most financial firms wish to install in their spaces.

The tower's reconfiguration to become more attractive to financial firms instead of just state and federal office tenants, would perhaps ameliorate the irritation among downtown landlords, some of whom have been angered that the building will likely lure away big government tenants who might otherwise occupy their space. Fiscal watchdogs have also directed criticism at those government leases because they compel the tenants to occupy the building at rents that are well above what they would pay for space downtown. The Port Authority has signed tentative leasing commitments with rents that start at around $65 per s/f.