The cost of those lab conversions in NYC are pretty eye watering but the cost of the construction isn’t the biggest driver of organization looking at new buildings. It’s all these new energy laws for New York. Labs require a ton of energy to run for gases, fume hoods, air exchanges, computing etc.. The building energy use ratings for converted labs are hanging heavy on these organizations. It’s all happening pretty fast with Local Law 97. Even if you built a new building that opened last year, if you have natural gas or a cogen unit your outdated.

Not to mention the compromises that New York labs make when converting old spaces. It’s not the same as most labs in the country. You have serious coordination issues with all the services and you pretty much reduce the average space design of a lab by 30% compared to the global benchmark. So you end up building a $2-4k/sqft lab with 30% less space than your experts told you it should be. Or you address the renewable energy issues, build the right floor heights, design the building for labs with have a proper utility core and make the spaces 20% smaller than recommended, all while building for around $1800/sqft when you include all the nonlab spaces of a new building.

Its a complex issue that a lot of folks are trying to address. So while lab conversions are thing, everyone complains about them, they are expensive, and they cost even more to run because of the cities energy conservation requirements.

The city has some fairly strict regulations around research labs because the city is so densely populated. Newer buildings can, for example, store more flammable solvents safely under the fire code (which is more strict than EPA regulations).

Ventilation in the buildings, especially one doing heavy research in a city, must also be extensive. The building I did my graduate research in was updating ventilation for the entire duration of my degree and it still wasn’t working well.