W. Franc Perry and Steven Pozycki
W. Franc Perry and Steven Pozycki
Judge at State Supreme Court; Founder and CEO at SJP Properties
It’s a power move to tell an already-built development to chop off roughly 20 floors from its top, but that’s exactly what State Supreme Court Judge W. Franc Perry did in February.
The judge sided with community groups who argued that developers SJP Properties and Mitsui Fudosan America skirted the law to cobble together a 39-sided lot so it could build the 52-story 200 Amsterdam Avenue condominium tower — the tallest structure on the Upper West Side — higher than the neighborhood’s zoning allows. And despite the developers’ argument that cutting off the tower would be a hardship, Perry scoffed at the notion and wrote: “It has been aware of the challenges to its permit from the start.”
But the developers have one powerful ally in its case to overturn Judge Perry’s decision, the city itself.
City Hall stepped in to file an appeal on the developers’ behalf, saying in a statement that “it is the City’s responsibility to fix flawed policy — not the court — and we must appeal this decision because of its far-reaching implications for how policy is shaped.”
For now, landlords are watching with bated breath to see how the legal tussle plays out.
The Steven Pozycki-led SJP said work on 200 Amsterdam continues, and it had a fairly good year despite the ruling and pandemic.
The developer, which has built more than 25 million square feet of space since 1981, is still set to break ground on its 330,000-square-foot development in Morristown, N.J., this summer, where SJP already leased 110,000 square feet to Deloitte in January.
It also continued building out its SJP Project Solutions business to provide construction management to institutional investors and signed a slew of deals across its New York City portfolio this past year.
In November it signed a 28,089-square-foot lease with Ducera Partners at 11 Times Square, and law firm Chiesa Shahinian & Giantomasi nearly doubled its presence in the building by taking another 8,191 square feet in January.
Also in January, SJP inked a deal with Creative Office Pavilion for 9,936 square feet at its 470 Park Avenue South, which it started a renovation of to attract creative and tech tenants.—N.R.
