An unlikely player has entered Midtown’s Roosevelt Hotel redevelopment: President Donald Trump and the federal government. As first reported by Reuters last week, the United States government’s General Services Administration (GSA) signed an agreement with Pakistan, which owns the iconic but shuttered hotel at 45 East 45th Street, to jointly redevelop, renovate, operate, and maintain the property. The pact, negotiated by New York real estate developer and Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff, marks a surprising turnaround for the project, which returned to the drawing board last week after Pakistan restarted its search for a broker and financial advisor, according to The Real Deal.
Named after President Theodore Roosevelt, the hotel opened in 1924 and was designed by Beaux-Arts architect George Post. The building has a rich history, housing the campaigns of Fiorello LaGuardia when he ran for mayor, and for Thomas E. Dewey and Dwight D. Eisenhower when they ran for president, as 6sqft previously reported.
In 2020, the hotel’s owner, Pakistan International Airlines, shuttered the building due to “very low demand” because of the pandemic. By May 2023, the hotel had become the city’s first arrival center for asylum seekers as its shelter system was overwhelmed by an influx of migrants.
According to the New York Times, the city made a $220 million, three-year deal to convert the hotel into a shelter, agreeing to pay a nightly rate of $202 per room.
After the shelter closed last February, Crain’s reported that the hotel could be demolished and replaced with an office tower. The broker, JLL, which resigned in July, had marketed the building for sale for more than a year.
In November, reports indicated that a team of CBRE and Morgan Stanley was the frontrunner to secure the marketing assignment. The Pakistani government said interest in the site had increased after NYC terminated its contract to use the hotel as a migrant shelter.
However, last month, the privatization commission announced it had restarted the hiring process after rejecting five of seven proposals under consideration for non-compliance. Around the same time, Pakistan also ruled out a sale of the property, according to The Real Deal.
Restructuring and privatization of state assets are central to Pakistan’s $7 billion economic program with the International Monetary Fund. The country is recovering from a severe economic crisis and faces a cash shortage, and with the hotel’s projected price around $1 billion, its redevelopment could be extremely lucrative, as Curbed reported.
“The objective remains to secure maximum value for this property in alignment with the government’s privatization strategy while strengthening Pakistan-United States economic ties,” Pakistan’s finance division told Reuters.
The role of the GSA, which typically only manages federal properties, in the deal remains unclear.
Trump is comfortable overseeing development projects, especially in New York, so with the Midtown hotel project, he’s falling back on his real estate roots, as Christopher Bonanos of Curbed put so well:
“He also has begun to recede, as his poll numbers continue to drop, into doing things he knows how to do from his previous career: the East Wing demolition and ballroom project, the Kennedy Center renovation, that ridiculous golf-course upscaling, now this. The one thing he was ever okay at was building stuff and then fluffing it in the press, and as his tariff plan implodes and his deportation plan continues to meet mass resistance, he’s gone back to his comfort zone.”
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