A onetime "hot sheet" motel turned migrant shelter in the Bronx will soon start a new chapter as an educational facility after a city agency scooped up the Riverdale parcel for just above $9 million.
The New York City School Construction Authority — an entity separate from the Department of Education that manages the design, construction and renovation of school facilities in the five boroughs — purchased the commercial lot at 6393 Broadway from the Loewy family for $9.2 million, according to a deed that appeared in the city register this week. The size of the lot was not immediately known.
For years what was called the Van Cortlandt Motel at the corner of West 256th Street was patronized by sex workers before it was used as a homeless shelter and then to house migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., according to local Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who said that migrants are no longer staying there and have been moved elsewhere.
Dinowitz told Crain's that the site, which also includes the parcel at 6389 Broadway and sits across from the sprawling Van Cortlandt Park, has long been an eyesore and will do well as a center for education, especially in a neighborhood that's struggling for classroom capacity.
"Having a school there will be a huge improvement," he said.
The former owner of the property, Jeffrey Loewy, told Crain's that he had purchased it in the mid-1950s, though he doesn't remember how much he paid, and that the motel was operated by a private group before being used by the city as a shelter. Several decades later, it was finally time to sell it, he said.
The authority plans to demolish the two vacant buildings currently occupying the roughly 32,675-square-foot commercial lot to make way for the new pre-kindergarten-through-fifth-grade primary school, which will add about 23 classrooms and 547 seats to the district, as part of the city's capital plan to bring 15 new school buildings and 7,000 seats to the borough. Available real estate is hard to come by in the city, according to the authority, which must seek out sites that check off certain general requirements, such as having at least 25,000 square feet of land.
The future school building is scheduled to include two special education classrooms; reading, speech, music and art rooms; as well as a cafeteria, library and gym. Plans for the site also include an 11,800-square-foot play area, according to authority spokesman Kevin Ortiz.
Ortiz could not provide a cost estimate for construction of the new classrooms, as the authority has just begun its design process, but said it has an anticipated opening date of September 2028.
NEW CLINIC: The executive board of New York City Health + Hospitals voted Thursday to execute a $30 million contract with Gilbane Building Company to build a new Gotham Health community clinic in Far Rockaway. According to Dr. Theodore Long, H+H’s senior vice president of ambulatory care, the neighborhood needs more medical resources to treat chronic diseases and mental health concerns, and the clinic would fill a void in the community. The clinic, which will be located across from the Beach 36th Street subway station, will offer adult and pediatric primary care, obstetrics and gynecology and behavioral health services. Gilbane is based in the Financial District and won the contract based on its experience constructing similar health care facilities in projects worth more than $15 million.
MENTAL HEALTH IN PRISON: About 20% of people incarcerated in the city’s jails and prisons in March had a serious mental illness, according to the latest Department of Correction data released by Comptroller Brad Lander Thursday. The statistic has stayed flat for four months in a row. About 11,000 incarcerated individuals missed medical appointments in February due to court appointments or refusing to go, the data also shows, a slight drop from January.
Investments in drug research and development are paying dividends while the cost to do so stays flat, a trend that appears to be benefitting local firms.
Large pharmaceutical companies’ returns on research and development investments rebounded in 2023, according to the latest report from Deloitte released today. The report measures returns on investments for the 20 companies that spend the most on R&D for drugs globally and found that projected returns on investment climbed to 4% in 2023, a 3 percentage point increase over 2022’s record-low of 1.2%. The 20 firms, which include Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer, spent a total of almost $146 billion on R&D in 2023.
While 2022’s record-low returns didn’t necessarily spell trouble for firms in New York and New Jersey, Kevin Dondarski, Deloitte’s life sciences R&D strategy leader, said the report’s results suggest an even brighter future for the metropolitan area’s pharmaceutical companies. He added that the increase is one of the larger ones since Deloitte began publishing the report more than a decade ago.
The positive performance was driven by companies bringing more drug candidates into the later stages of development as their value grew, Dondarski added. This includes Merck, which is based in Rahway, New Jersey, and New Brunswick-based Johnson & Johnson.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, Merck received multiple Food and Drug Administration approvals for its cancer drugs, such as a green light for its blockbuster Keytruda to be used with Padcev for adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer. The firm also began phase 3 trials for four investigational oncology medicines. Keytruda brought in $25 billion in 2023, a 19% jump from 2022.
Johnson & Johnson gained FDA approval for its cancer drug Balversa to treat certain locally advanced or metastatic bladder cancer in the fourth quarter of 2023. The firm also submitted applications to the European Medicines Agency for Rybrevant to be used, in combination with chemotherapy, to treat adults with a certain type of non-small cell lung cancer who don’t respond to prior medicines.
Cancer continues to pique large companies’ interest, according to the report. Oncology medicines made up about 30% of the cohort’s overall late-stage portfolios, holding steady from 2022. Infectious disease drugs represent a growing area of interest, making up about 10% of the pipeline, a slight increase over the prior year. Cardiovascular therapies also held steady while central nervous system therapies comprised slightly less of the companies’ overall portfolios in 2023.
The report also shows that the average cost of taking a medicine from discovery to launch stayed flat at just over $2 billion. Dondarski said that’s a positive development because, among other factors, it signifies that fewer drugs are failing to launch.
While there are signs of success, company leaders surveyed in the report said there are still challenges to be wary of. Although the average cost of developing a drug stayed flat from 2022 to 2023, it has still grown overall, and about a third of executives said they are very concerned about the impact that could have on their firms. A quarter said they’re most concerned about the country’s regulatory environment; the federal Inflation Reduction Act sparked the most worry.
However, Dondarski emphasized that New York and New Jersey’s buzzing pharma ecosystem is well-positioned to continue a rebound.
More drug startups are popping up around the metropolitan area, he said, which he called “fertile ground” for partnerships and innovation. Although the influx of new firms could create competition, he described it as an opportunity for positive change, particularly with more companies beginning to use artificial intelligence to drive drug development.
“There's so much activity and interest and investment in everything, every single domain of data,” he said. “The sky’s the limit.”
Deloitte is headquartered in Midtown and has published reports on pharmaceutical R&D returns since 2010.
Tarrytown-based Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has struck a $100 million deal with Mammoth Biosciences, a California-based biotechnology company, to develop and commercialize gene editing therapies for multiple tissues and cell types, the firms announced Thursday.
Regeneron’s $100 million upfront payment includes a $95 million equity investment, according to the company. Mammoth could receive a total of $370 million per target in development and commercial milestone payments.
The firms aim to produce CRISPR-based drugs that can be directly infused into patients' bodies. CRISPR is a technology that scientists use to modify the DNA of living organisms; it has the potential to cure genetic diseases by cutting out targeted parts of DNA sequences.
According to Christos Kyratsous, Regeneron’s senior vice president and co-head of Regeneron Genetic Medicines, the firm chose to partner with Mammoth because the companies are working on aspects of gene editing technology that complement each other.
Regeneron has developed a virus platform that targets tissues and cells outside the liver, Kyratsous told Crain’s, whereas most gene editing therapies are currently limited to the liver. In turn Mammoth has created relatively small CRISPR editing systems that fit Regeneron’s platform, which could help the drugs reach tissues around the body and unlock treatments for diseases. Scientists at Regeneron will lead development and commercialization.
The deal also gives Mammoth the right to opt into co-funding and profiting from collaboration programs with Regeneron, instead of receiving milestone payments. Meanwhile, Regeneron will have access to some of Mammoth’s gene editing technologies for 5.5 years. It can extend access for another two years if it pays an undisclosed research extension fee.
The two firms will pick and research which sequences to target, Kyratsous added, declining to share specifics about which are being considered. The companies seek to begin developing therapies as soon as possible.
Regeneron earned just under $3.5 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023, a 1% increase over the same quarter of 2022, and is working on drugs to treat genetic diseases including ALS and hemophilia. Its financial results for the first quarter of 2024 will be released on May 2.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a $6 billion to-do list to adapt the region’s transit to climate change — now it must get state lawmakers and federal officials to agree to fund it.
Transit officials unveiled a Climate Resilience Roadmap Thursday aimed at addressing the increasingly dire threat extreme storms, sea-level rise, heat waves and other weather hazards pose to New York transit. Since Superstorm Sandy walloped the region in 2012, the MTA says it has invested $7.6 billion in repairs and flood protections, but transit officials project that over the next decade at least $6 billion-worth of resilience projects will be needed to comprehensively safeguard the transit networks commuters rely on.
“This is something we have got to do now,” said Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chair and chief executive, during a Thursday news conference alongside rail tracks in the Bronx. “As I always say, for New Yorkers, transit is like air and water, we need it to survive and it will not survive unless we plan to protect the system from climate change.”
The 131-page report is the first by the MTA’s new climate planning division since it formed last year and prioritizes an estimated investment of as much as $2.5 billion into the subway system. Transit officials say those dollars would go toward shielding subway stations from stormwater, protecting trainyards from downpours and preventing open subway infrastructure from being flooded, including the 272 miles of track that run on or above ground.
Cash to fund much of the work outlined in the climate roadmap is expected to come from the bundle of infrastructure upgrades that is the MTA’s upcoming 2025-2029 five-year capital plan, which is anticipated to be released in the fall and is financed through a mix of state, federal and other sources.
In the meantime, the MTA is in the midst of carrying out its $54.8 billion-2020-2024 five-year capital program — work for which transit officials have been forced to stall because of lawsuits that threaten the expected June launch of congestion pricing. Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA construction and development, said the authority is also working to create resilience design guidelines to ensure new projects are built with the climate crisis in mind.
“It's much more practical to make something more resilient when we’re first building it or rehabilitating it then going back and doing a whole retrofit project,” said Springer. “So we're integrating resilience into everything that we do.”
Ask a subway rider and chances are they’ll tell you they’ve already felt the effects of a changing climate on their commutes. Flood waters from heavy rains routinely inundate the subway; since 2007 at least 200 subway stations out of 472 have been impacted by torrential rain events, according to the MTA. That translates to treacherous conditions including underground waterfalls, flooded tracks, and overloaded storm sewers backing up into stations.
Even on sunny, dry days the MTA pumps out roughly 10 million gallons of groundwater from the subway each day. This occurs at infrastructure called deep wells located along lines, such as the G, where the water table is above the subway’s tracks and requires constant pumping to keep groundwater out of the system.
Those systems, along with the 254 pumping stations peppered throughout the subway, become overtaxed during major floods and backup into stations, stalling service. Without broader upgrades, transit officials say sea-level rise and increasingly frequent major storms only promise to direct more of the MTA’s resources and manpower into bailing out water over ensuring the system can withstand the long-term effects of climate change.