Forget Financial District. Lower Manhattan is quickly becoming the Silicon District.
Over the past two years, the area south of Chambers St. has been booming with bits as more than 100 new tech firms have opened shop in the past year alone, according to a new report provided to the Daily News by LaunchLM, an initiative of the Downtown Alliance working to expand tech firms downtown.
That’s 24% more than in 2012, for a total of 600.
“I don’t think any neighborhood’s seen the growth we have,” said Daria Siegel, director of LaunchLM.
As Lower Manhattan has struggled to maintain its role as a prime business district in recent years, tech firms are providing the geeky shot in the arm the area needs.
Tech office leasing has more than doubled, according to the report, to 351,000 square feet of new tech offices in just the first eight months of this year. That’s nearly double the tech leases for all of 2011 and 28% above last year’s total.
There are roughly 4.1 million square feet of tech office space office in Lower Manhattan, according to brokerage CBRE.
The fashion site Refinery29, e-greetings service Paperless Post and Nimbo, a cloud-computing company, join established outfits like Control Group, a tech support firm, and StackExchange, which runs 108 Q&A sites on general topics.
“It’s been amazing to watch the transformation,” said Scott Anderson, chief strategy officer at Control Group.
“It used to just be government workers, lawyers, bankers. Now there’s a whole other scene down here.”
That is thanks largely to cheaper rent, about two-thirds the price of Midtown and three-fourths that of Chelsea and Soho, where many techies had previously favored. The saturation of those areas, with almost no office vacancies, is helping to drive downtown’s growth.
“There’s a certain legitimacy to working in an office building, especially this office building, that you don’t get in a loft,” Anderson said. “We feel like we’ve arrived.”
That is exactly the vibe LaunchLM is trying to increase. Just because the area may not have loft buildings, it still has plenty of funky offices.
“The number of cool prewar buildings can’t be beat,” said John Wheeler, a managing director at office brokerage Jones Lang LasSalle and an advisor to LaunchLM.
The group is also expanding free public Wi-Fi throughout the neighborhood, organizing mixers and events, and promoting new shops and restaurants.
“We’ve got this great mix of history and cutting edge cool,” Siegel said.
For the first time, the community, not the cheap rents, might just be the biggest draw.
Look no further than 195 Broadway. Once the headquarters for AT&T, the early skyscraper is now home to all manner of tech firms.
“The building we are in has a lot of advertising agencies and other creative businesses,” said David Liu, CEO of XO Group, which publishes wedding site The Knot and pregnancy site The Bump.
“It’s just amazing how much energy there is down here.”
