Linda Foggie
Linda Foggie
Senior Vice President, Head of East USA at Turner & Townsend
Turner & Townsend specializes in managing complex building, engineering and real estate maintenance projects all over the world. Linda Foggie’s senior position gives her a unique inside view and wide influence on construction taking place in much of the U.S., and especially in New York.
On Turner & Townsend’s roster of assignments is 175 Park Avenue, the 1,600-foot-tall skyscraper going up on the current site of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, just to the east of Grand Central Terminal. It will give Grand Central supertall towers both east and west of it, the other being One Vanderbilt, the 1,401-foot tower that SL Green Realty finished last year. (The nearby Chrysler Building is 1,046 feet.)
Though just about every New York developer is going ahead with their building plans, unconcerned that the lasting effect of the COVID crisis will be reduced office demand, Foggie said she thinks the new normal is still beyond the horizon.
“It’s hard to know what normal is going to be,” she said. “The pandemic and everything we’ve gone through has fundamentally changed us, as people and also as businesses.” While the debate over a post-COVID commercial real estate universe continues, “it’s encouraging to hear that the conversations are happening,” she added.
For its part, Foggie said that COVID taught Turner & Townsend to seek out a more diverse set of clients. Now, the company focuses on the industrial sector, where e-commerce has driven demand for warehouse space and data centers. At the same time, it has “pivoted” from helping hotels expand to instead finding ways to help them renovate amid lower occupancy due to the pandemic.
Turner & Townsend is also working on helping clients go carbon neutral as well as further diversify their workforces, including through finding and selecting minority contractors.
“We try to stay relevant to what is happening in the world,” Foggie said.—D.M.L.
