Securities firms employ a record 209,000 workers in New York City, and the landlords who serve them aren’t waiting for the political climate to settle down.

Earlier this month, RXR and its partner TF Cornerstone filed a permit to demolish the Grand Hyatt Hotel on East 42nd Street and replace it with a 95-story office tower costing $6.5 billion. The project cleared City Council in 2021. It’s moving now.

That filing tells you everything about where Wall Street’s head is.

The headlines during the pandemic were brutal for New York boosters. A parade of financial firms relocated to Miami. Critics of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations ran with predictions of a corporate exodus, pointing to every lease signed south of the Mason-Dixon line as proof New York was finished. Real estate money poured into opposition campaigns. Lobbyists worked overtime in Albany.

The numbers didn’t cooperate.

Securities industry employment in the city hit 209,000 jobs, a record, according to the final 2025 job count released this month by the New York State Department of Labor. Wall Street profits and bonuses also set records last year, pumping billions in unexpected income tax revenue into state and city coffers. The state pulls 20% of all its tax revenue from the financial sector alone, a dependence that cuts both ways politically but right now is producing a windfall.

“The demand is there,” RXR CEO Scott Rechler said. “I had a meeting Thursday with brokers who work with financial service companies and they told me their clients are growing so fast that when their leases are nearing an end they always need more space than they currently occupy.”

Park Avenue is the stress test. Vacancy across the corridor sits at just 7%, and the most modern buildings are running at 96% occupied, per research from real estate firm JLL. Developers aren’t waiting to see what happens next. Three new towers are in planning stages along Park, with developers betting hard that financial firms will fill them as fast as they go up.

“There is really only one driver of the decisions financial companies make and that is where the people they want to work for them are and where those people want to live and work,” said Mary Ann Tighe, CEO of CBRE’s Tri-State region and a broker who has worked on scores of major office deals over recent decades. “And New York is still a magnet for those young people.”

That’s the argument that keeps crashing the exodus narrative. Firms don’t pick cities by reading op-eds about tax policy. They follow talent. And the talent pipeline flowing into New York, fed by Columbia, NYU, Fordham, and a dozen other schools within the five boroughs, hasn’t dried up.

It’s fair to note the city’s share of securities industry employment nationally keeps shrinking. Firms are building out operations in Dallas, Charlotte, and yes, Miami. That’s real capacity growth outside New York. But adding a trading desk in Brickell doesn’t mean closing the one on Sixth Avenue, and the job counts here bear that out plainly.

This reporting draws on analysis published by The City, which spoke with Rechler and Tighe directly.

The political fight isn’t going away. Mamdani’s tax agenda has real support in the Council and among a Democratic base that doesn’t feel much sympathy for hedge fund managers paying lower effective rates than their assistants. Opponents of those proposals, many of them backed by real estate and finance money, will keep pushing the flight-risk argument because it works rhetorically even when it doesn’t match the data.

Back at 42nd Street, the wrecking crews for the Grand Hyatt aren’t scheduled yet. Permits take time. But RXR and TF Cornerstone didn’t spend money filing for one because they’re nervous about New York’s future.

Rechler’s brokers meeting Thursday says the rest. His clients don’t need convincing. They need square footage.