“To me, you’re going to want to come here,” Douglas Jemal said of Seneca One Tower. “That’s why everybody is here because you want to come here. We’re all dying to interact again. We’re sick and tired of sitting in the four rooms of a house. I think if you make a sense of place and a sense of being, people are going to want to be here.”
Hessam Nadji, the CEO of Marcus & Millichap President and CEO, told CNBC he expects an “exodus” of from city centers to last up to two years.
The developer remains optimistic about the future of the Boulevard Mall and his goal to turn it into a new community.
“You have to change with the times,” Jemal said of one of his other projects. “It’s an adaptive re-use. Just like (Seneca One), an adaptive reuse. It was a long, tall, tower that had 5,000 employees that went to work every day. Now, with urbanites moving into every major city…we have to be in a position to receive them.”
The company’s Chief Information Officer, Michael Wisler, said their company expects to use Buffalo’s tallest building to attract professionals into Buffalo. However, they also acknowledged that more people are starting to work from home now than before.
“I think about it less binary than is it remote or is it office,” Wisler said. “When you think about modern teams and modern talents, you think about mobility and flexibility and make sure teams have the tools and place to rally when they need to rally and have the tools when they need to be productive when they can’t be in the same space.”
Seneca One Tower is expected to open in the next two or three months. M&T Bank will operate there in the weeks following the completed renovation.