Joel Marcus and John Cunningham
Joel Marcus and John Cunningham
Executive Chairman and Founder; Executive VP and Regional Market Director at Alexandria Real Estate Equities
“We like to quote [business author] Jim Collins in saying developing a life science cluster in New York City is a 20-mile march every day,” John Cunningham said. “It’s not about the big real estate wins that you have in typical New York fashion. It’s a long-term commitment to sift through the one- to five-person companies and make educated decisions on who may turn into a 20- to 50-person company.”
Alexandria Real Estate Equities has underscored its commitment to New York City and is marching straight ahead.
“We have a 10-year portfolio already assembled in New York,” Cunningham said. “We’ve been advancing our North Tower design —the third building here at the Alexandria Center for Life Science — and that will be 550,000 square feet. Then, we’re redeveloping two buildings in Long Island City; Alexandria Center Long Island City buildings one and two.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Alexandria received an essential construction designation for its Long Island City project, the first building on track to be completed by December. Its New York City campus remained open 24/7.
“The life science sector has been given the charge to find the solution for the COVID-19 global pandemic,” Joel Marcus said. “By maintaining essential business operations across our campuses and properties throughout COVID-19, we have enabled over 80 tenants to focus on mission-critical diagnostics, testing, therapies, and vaccines for COVID-19.” All of the REIT’s clusters — which include Cambridge, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle — are busy. Cambridge has a 4 million-square-foot waiting line in terms of tenants looking for space, while New York, a nascent market, has a 100,000-square-foot one. “It takes 25 years to develop a vibrant life science cluster, and we’re 10 years into occupancy [in New York City],” Cunningham said. “It’s a bit like pushing a glacier up the hill; it takes a long-term commitment. We’ve been at it for a long time, and we’ll continue to go at it.”
In New York, Alexandria also owns 219 East 42nd Street, where Pfizer has a sale-leaseback agreement. And after launching its LaunchLabs concept — a 50/50 lab-office space aimed at encouraging innovation from students and seed-stage life science companies — at its New York campus in 2016, Alexandria is now implementing the concept at other locations as well as Columbia University.
Alexandria Center for Life Science is sandwiched between NYU Langone and Bellevue Hospital on Manhattan’s East Side, and when COVID-19 hit, Alexandria helped. “We work very closely with the academic and medical centers, and they’re pivotal to what’s going on,” Cunningham said. “We provided 25,000 masks to hospitals around the country and 10,000 here in New York City.”—C.C.
