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Patrick Curtin remembers the horror of Sept. 11 and always will. But he just rented a new office six blocks from Ground Zero, committing his law firm to a 10-year stint in disaster-scarred downtown.
Rents are cheap at newly renovated 48 Wall St. The landlord is handling the construction of the 18,000-square-foot space, which will spare Conway Farrell Curtin & Kelly a huge capital expenditure.
The city and state incentives, Mr. Curtin is applying for will cut costs even further. He finds these compelling reasons to make a deal downtown-and so do scores of other small business owners.
"What drives it is the numbers," he says.
Nearly a year after the destruction of the World Trade Center, big companies are shying away from signing leases downtown. But small tenants have become surprisingly active dealmakers since the city and state pulled together a generous package of grants, tax credits and tax abatements. They've signed 239 office leases since the beginning of the year, which was all but eight of the deals done in the neighborhood, says real estate brokerage Insignia/ESG Inc. Most were the size of Mr. Curtin's transaction or smaller, yet added up to 2 million square feet, enough to nearly fill the Empire State Building.
Busy as they were, the small firms haven't made much of a dent in the area's inventory of empty space, which currently totals 11.6 million square feet, creating a 14% vacancy rate. They haven't achieved the critical mass needed to restore lower Manhattan's office market to full health. Nor are they...