Submitted by Larry Littlefield, Mar 19, 2008 09:20

My father, during the latter stages of his career, worked for a firm that was not based in New York City, but often had to do business here. Rather than establish a New York office with permanent staff, it rented a suite of hotel rooms, office and conference rooms in Midtown, for the use of whatever employees needed to be posted here, doing whatever they needed to do.

The best use of the WTC site is buildings that provide similar facilities -- long-stay hotel/apartment suites, office space, and conference facilities -- for businesses from elsewhere in the world.

A soaring share of the world's wealth and business activity is now outside the United States. For the next few years, foreigners may be the only people with money that is worth anything, and the only people inclined to pay more to be in New York than in Toledo.

People temporarily posted to New York for a period of months or years are more likely to want to live in the city, not the suburbs, so Downtown's inferior access tothe suburbs relative to Midtown would not be a problem for facilities targeted to them. For the minority with school age children, a private school could be located within the development to insulate those posted here from the upcoming re-de-funding and re-collapse of the city's public schools, in favor of richer pensions for city teachers and ongoing extravagence in the rest of the state.

Note: Comments are screened, and in some cases edited, before posting. We reserve the right to reject anything we find objectionable.