NY AG Letitia James should not take over Trump’s 40 Wall Street

Steve Cuozzo

Property

from Steve Cuozzo

If state Attorney General Leticia James seizes Donald Trump’s 40 Wall Street — his largest real estate asset to date — the worse damage will be for New York.

The troubled but functional landmark office building will become a vacant white elephant in Lower Manhattan, already reeling from the hemorrhaging of uptown tenants.

“If 40 Wall goes into obscurity, no one in their right mind — renters or buyers — will go near it,” said a real estate broker who has done business there. “Wealth is needed in the work, and the uncertainty would be too great.”

It’s important to remember that a previous government takeover plunged the cursed tower into a decade of chaos. The stakes are higher now as the center struggles with a 30 percent vacancy rate, the highest in its history.

The feds seized the building in 1986 when it turned out to be secretly owned by Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt dictator of the Philippines. The action started a series of failed auctions, foreclosures, lawsuits and meltdowns that cast a long, dark shadow over the financial district for a decade.

One tenant after another left, until the mid-1990s the building was 80% empty. The turnaround began when Trump bought the leasehold at a low price — exactly how much is disputed — in 1995.

He restored it and attracted new tenants. But his real estate company later neglected her as his interests turned to television and politics.

Dwayne Reed, the store’s largest tenant at more than 20,000 square feet, moved out last fall — a crushing blow to declining rents.

The once-proud tower is worth about $200 million today, realtors say — less than half its estimated value a decade ago.

Of course, James and her colleagues from Albany sure know how to fix it!

Building seizures are the way they do things in China, where the Xi government has been snapping up real estate businesses whose owners have either bribed the bosses in Beijing or made too much money for their own good.

God save 40 Wall Street — and the city — from our domestic commissars.