Signs of hope in New York City's downtrodden life sciences market are starting to emerge.

After four years of uncertainty, life sciences real estate activity has started to pick up across the U.S. While local players don't expect that growth to translate to significant lab demand in the city for some time, landlords have signed a smattering of fresh leasing deals over the past year.

But that isn’t the case in Harlem corridors, where developers built hundreds of thousands of square feet of lab space in the years that followed the pandemic, all of which is sitting empty.

NYC’s life sciences buildings had the highest availability rate of any market in the country at the end of the first quarter, at 37%, according to JLL. It is also far more expensive than any other market, with asking rents at $99.17 per SF, compared to Boston, the largest life sciences real estate market in the country, where lab owners ask for $76.72 per SF.

“In New York, it's definitely slower,” said Brianna Friedman, a senior research analyst for life sciences at Savills. “There's little activity. There's not much at all.”

The high rents and overall uncertainty mean that even though industry players expect to see more activity slowly coming back to the life sciences real estate sector in NYC, they don’t expect to see it soon.

“That growth that we're going to see is going to continue to be focused on more of those hub markets, like San Francisco, San Diego, Boston,” Cushman & Wakefield Head of Life Sciences and Healthcare Insights Sandy Romero said. “After demand resumes in those hub markets, we can expect to see some additional interest in New York.”

Some of NYC’s life sciences clusters are seeing commercial success.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ 728K SF of NYC properties are 95.5% occupied, according to the company’s Q2 earnings report, with a tenant roster that includes Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Pfizer's Center for Therapeutic Innovation.

In Long Island City, GFP Real Estate and King Street Capital’s Innolabs is fully leased after signing deals with NYU Langone that have totaled more than 150K SF, plus landing robotics company Rover for 16K SF earlier this year. 

But that activity hasn’t reached Harlem, where new life sciences buildings went up in the aftermath of the pandemic that community members had hoped would be the dawn of a transformative new era for the neighborhood.

Janus Property Co.'s $700M conversion of a former bakery property at 450 W. 126th St. into the Taystee Lab Building has been empty since it opened in 2022 and is now facing a foreclosure suit.

Nearby, a 10-story, 193K SF building known as The Labs On 121, developed by Brandon Miller’s Real Estate Equities Corp. in partnership with Nightingale Properties, was delivered in 2024. But it is unclear how much progress brokers made with leasing up the property before separate scandals surrounding Nightingale CEO Elie Schwartz and Miller erupted into the public eye. 

Schwartz was sentenced to seven years in prison last year after pleading guilty to a $63M crowdfunding fraud that first came to light in 2023, leading to multiple Nightingale assets going to their lenders. Miller died by suicide in 2024 amid multiple lawsuits that alleged missed mortgage payments, forged signatures and fraudulent transfers to prevent a lender from collecting a $2.1M judgment. 

The Labs On 121 is still empty and expected to be leased as office space, brokerages confirmed to Bisnow. It is unclear who is managing the property.

The neighborhood lost one of its life sciences companies this summer when Volastra Therapeutics announced plans to vacate an 11K SF lab inside Janus’ mixed-use Mink Building at 1361 Amsterdam Ave. and move to 18K SF in Alexandria’s Kips Bay campus. Harlem Biospace still operates an 11K SF startup incubator at the Mink Building.

There is no single factor that industry sources pointed to holding Harlem back. Scott Metzner, founder and principal of Janus, which developed and owns the Taystee, Mink and Malt buildings, denied that Harlem’s commercial real estate market is struggling more than other pockets of the city, despite its dearth of activity.

“We had an international pandemic, and it was difficult to fill any building in New York City until recently,” he said. “The world is obviously still unbelievably volatile, and so decision-making is still very difficult, and interest rates are up and everybody's afraid of inflation and insurance is insane, and so we're balancing all this.”

In addition to the expense of renting NYC labs, one researcher attributed the Harlem life sciences hub’s difficulties to its longer commute from where many workers may live, in New York City’s other boroughs and in New Jersey. 

“The ecosystem in Harlem is very different,” Romero said. “In Kips Bay, you have strong transit, you have a lot of retail and that live-work environment feeling. I'm wondering if that's part of what's missing up in the Harlem area.”

Brokers also said federal research cuts may have hurt Harlem’s life sciences potential because of its dependence on research institutions, such as Columbia’s Jerome L. Greene Science Center and the City University of New York’s Advanced Science Research Center. 

“The No. 1 reason why anybody would want to be in Harlem, in particular West Harlem, is because of Columbia and the entire presence up there,” said John Cahill, a senior vice president at JLL. 

The National Institutes of Health issued $35.3B in grants in fiscal year 2025, down from $44.9B the prior year. Nationally, that translated to disruptions to more than 1 in 5 NIH grants during the second Trump administration, according to Grant Witness, an independent organization that tracks science-related federal grant disruptions. 

In New York, while the majority of NIH grants have been restored, $2.1B of the $4B allocated by the federal government for projects in the state hasn’t yet been distributed. That has harmed academic institutions’ ability to spin out into the private sector, said Mark Hauber, executive director of CUNY’s ASRC.

“We had a startup company that typically gets small-business grants at this stage from the federal government,” he said. “Some of those companies did not get their funding, so that stopped the startup company from further developing.”

That instability has left the city’s life sciences landlords in limbo, Cahill said.

“One of the biggest challenges that our city faces is that we are so reliant on the hospitals and the universities to anchor projects,” Cahill said. “The effect of [the federal funding cuts] has been cataclysmic on life science real estate in the city, not just in Harlem but throughout.”

Venture capital funding totaled $29.8B in the U.S. last year, according to Cushman & Wakefield data, with activity picking up speed in the second half of the year. But companies are keeping staffing numbers tight to net future investments, rather than expanding into larger spaces. 

Venture capital in this cycle is chasing mature companies rather than early-stage startups, said Maria Gotsch, president and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City.

Whether life sciences landlords struggling with vacancy can survive depends on “the status of the pockets of the owners,” she said.

Some inventory has been removed from the market as owners look to offload properties that have struggled to attract tenants.

This month, Bill Ackman bought the 400K SF 125 West End Ave., a lab building developed by Taconic Partners company Elevate Research Properties that had long struggled with vacancy, for a brain research institute helmed by his family foundation.

Within the same week, Longfellow Real Estate Partners sold the Hatch Life Sciences Building, a 215K SF Long Island City life sciences building at 43-10 23rd St. It sold the property for $6M less than it paid, even though it poured $120M into a lab conversion. 

Metzner said he isn't giving up on the Harlem properties Janus developed, but he admitted he needs a capital infusion to hang on.

“We had a maturity, and Wells Fargo wanted to get paid back, and we were not able to pay them back,” he said. “There was no capital markets available to take out a 3-year-old institutional commercial loan, regardless of the fact that it's paid every month currently in interest. If you can find someone or your readers have someone, we'd welcome a phone call.”

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