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rynlingThis post is not actually about nanotechnology. It's about real estate (sort of).
In my nanotech novel-in-progress, the scientist character works at a biotechnology research lab in NYC. In real life, there are at least two dozen such firms in the city, and most of them are clustered in the corridor of highrises between Bryant Park and Madison Square in Midtown Manhattan.
Based on what I know of investment banking, types of investments are graded according to how stable they are and how well they're expected to perform. Investment grades are officially determined by an outside agency (I think Standard & Poor is the big one), but a large investment bank will send its own analyst to do research on an incorporated company before passing the portfolio to an investment rating agency.
In the novel, the investment banker character does a tour of the biotech research firm and goes through the documents included in previous reports. He finds that the finances all check out, but there's a discrepancy in how much space the firm is supposed to occupy in its highrise. This is because it has a secret hidden basement filled with horrors!
Anyway, I had to figure out how much rentable space a floorplate of a NYC highrise would have. This was actually really tricky, because there are different types of contracts. For example, if you rent an entire floor of a highrise, are you also renting the bathrooms next to the elevator, or is that maintained by the building management? If you rent multiple floors, do you have your own internal elevator and stairwell, and is that included in the net rentable space?
Given that this story basically has magic, I decided not to worry too much about the numbers. This is what I came up with: If you're renting one floor of a Midtown highrise, that's about 20k-23k square feet. If you're renting multiple contiguous floors, the net rentable space can go up to around 25k square feet per floorplate. (This is an enormous amount of space, by the way; it's easily the size of several houses.)
ETA: That amount of floorspace seemed sus to me, so I checked with a friend who knows more about this sort of thing. She said 20k sqft is what you'd get in one of the seventy-story big boys that sit on an entire city block and have a shopping mall on the first few floors. In that particular corridor of Midtown, 8-10k sqft is much more reasonable. Granted, that's still more than I would have expected, but I guess city blocks in NYC are significantly larger than they are in Philadelphia.
I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to make much use of this in the novel, but here's something interesting I found:
Once a building gets into high rise territory (which means "over twenty stories" in NYC), it's going to need to have several half-floors that are basically access rooms for electricity and other utilities. I found some pictures of these utility floors, and they look so cool.
So the investment banker initially thinks that the discrepancy on the biotech firm's rental contract has to do with it somehow being responsible for the utility floor under its labs, but no! It is definitely a secret hidden basement of horrors!!
Anyway. My own office tower is right next to the Wistar Institute, a biomedical research organization specializing in cancer and immunology. Based on what I can see from my window, it seems their building is divided between lab floors and office floors. You'd think I would get to see cool experiments from my office window, but alas. Mostly it's just people in white labcoats sitting in front of the desktop computers in their offices. The only interesting thing I've noticed is that, while everything is very neat and tidy, there are labcoats everywhere. Like, if there is any available chair anywhere in the building, someone has slung at least one labcoat over it. Maybe that's the real conspiracy: Where are all these labcoats coming from?????
If you're wondering how it makes me feel to watch people literally curing cancer while I drink tea and write novels that are never going to be published, the answer is: I try not to think about it too hard.
In my nanotech novel-in-progress, the scientist character works at a biotechnology research lab in NYC. In real life, there are at least two dozen such firms in the city, and most of them are clustered in the corridor of highrises between Bryant Park and Madison Square in Midtown Manhattan.
Based on what I know of investment banking, types of investments are graded according to how stable they are and how well they're expected to perform. Investment grades are officially determined by an outside agency (I think Standard & Poor is the big one), but a large investment bank will send its own analyst to do research on an incorporated company before passing the portfolio to an investment rating agency.
In the novel, the investment banker character does a tour of the biotech research firm and goes through the documents included in previous reports. He finds that the finances all check out, but there's a discrepancy in how much space the firm is supposed to occupy in its highrise. This is because it has a secret hidden basement filled with horrors!
Anyway, I had to figure out how much rentable space a floorplate of a NYC highrise would have. This was actually really tricky, because there are different types of contracts. For example, if you rent an entire floor of a highrise, are you also renting the bathrooms next to the elevator, or is that maintained by the building management? If you rent multiple floors, do you have your own internal elevator and stairwell, and is that included in the net rentable space?
Given that this story basically has magic, I decided not to worry too much about the numbers. This is what I came up with: If you're renting one floor of a Midtown highrise, that's about 20k-23k square feet. If you're renting multiple contiguous floors, the net rentable space can go up to around 25k square feet per floorplate. (This is an enormous amount of space, by the way; it's easily the size of several houses.)
ETA: That amount of floorspace seemed sus to me, so I checked with a friend who knows more about this sort of thing. She said 20k sqft is what you'd get in one of the seventy-story big boys that sit on an entire city block and have a shopping mall on the first few floors. In that particular corridor of Midtown, 8-10k sqft is much more reasonable. Granted, that's still more than I would have expected, but I guess city blocks in NYC are significantly larger than they are in Philadelphia.
I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to make much use of this in the novel, but here's something interesting I found:
Once a building gets into high rise territory (which means "over twenty stories" in NYC), it's going to need to have several half-floors that are basically access rooms for electricity and other utilities. I found some pictures of these utility floors, and they look so cool.
So the investment banker initially thinks that the discrepancy on the biotech firm's rental contract has to do with it somehow being responsible for the utility floor under its labs, but no! It is definitely a secret hidden basement of horrors!!
Anyway. My own office tower is right next to the Wistar Institute, a biomedical research organization specializing in cancer and immunology. Based on what I can see from my window, it seems their building is divided between lab floors and office floors. You'd think I would get to see cool experiments from my office window, but alas. Mostly it's just people in white labcoats sitting in front of the desktop computers in their offices. The only interesting thing I've noticed is that, while everything is very neat and tidy, there are labcoats everywhere. Like, if there is any available chair anywhere in the building, someone has slung at least one labcoat over it. Maybe that's the real conspiracy: Where are all these labcoats coming from?????
If you're wondering how it makes me feel to watch people literally curing cancer while I drink tea and write novels that are never going to be published, the answer is: I try not to think about it too hard.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-12 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-12 05:24 pm (UTC)Right? I have a modest two-story rowhouse in Philadelphia that's about 1k square feet even, and I think 2k square feet is normal for a modest two-story house in the suburbs.
I don't go to that part of New York often, so I haven't really thought about it, but I guess those buildings are just genuinely enormous.