Report Leasing an issue at One World Trade Center

According to a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday, companies aren’t exactly flocking to lease space at the $3.9 billion One World Trade Center, formerly dubbed the Freedom Tower, in Lower Manhattan.Though the 1,776-foot skyscraper is scheduled to open later this year, just 55 percent of its 3.1 million square feet is currently being leased and no new private office tenants have signed a lease in roughly three years, the Journal reports.

In a move to attract more tenants, the building’s owners are lowering office rents for bigger spaces on its middle floors by approximately 10 percent, from $75 per square foot down to $69 per square foot, according to the Journal.

Developer Douglas Durst told the Journal that the slow lease rate had nothing to do with safety concerns near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and everything to do with the office-leasing market in the area.

“The market’s not there,” Durst told the newspaper. “When we started in 2011, everybody expected the economy to take off, and obviously that hasn’t happened.”

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