Office Space for 50 People in Union Square

What the 175 feet per person absorbs

The 8,750 is a planning allowance rather than a furniture order, and the desks are the smaller half of it. Fifty workstations and their aisles take a little over 3,000 usable feet, which leaves meeting rooms, phone rooms, a pantry, reception, storage and corridor slack to come out of what remains, and a team that counts only desks discovers the boardroom has nowhere to go.

836 Broadway's own rating shows how far the allowance travels with layout: the same 13,754 feet hold 79 desks at 175 per person, 98 dense, and 61 with private offices along the perimeter.

• Shared benched desks, about 140 feet a head, put fifty people inside 7,000 square feet.
• The 175-foot allowance, 8,750 feet, carries a full room program on a floor that still breathes.
• Private offices, about 225 feet a head, push fifty people to 11,250, which is where client-facing firms land.

What fifty people cost here, and against the city

Union Square's one matching floor quotes rent on request, so this page has no median of its own. The anchor is the submarket median of $87.50 per square foot per year, the midpoint of the only two published rents here, $60 at 29 West 17th Street and $115 at 900 Broadway.

Run the allowance against it and 8,750 square feet models at $765,625 a year, $63,802 a month, $1,276 per person per month. The same footprint at $65, the median across our current New York availability, costs $568,750 a year and $47,396 a month, $948 a head. Fifty people at 14th Street therefore run about $196,875 a year above the citywide midpoint, roughly a third, bought against the widest transit catchment below 42nd Street.

You rent the floor, not the allowance. Priced at that same $87.50, the 13,754 feet at 836 Broadway model to $1,203,475 a year and $100,290 a month. Electricity is billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot, another $27,508 to $55,016 here, and taxes arrive through a base-year escalation that compounds. Free rent and an improvement allowance move a five-year number further than a dollar off the face.

What a floor for fifty has to hold

Every foot quoted in New York is rentable and carries its share of the lobby, the corridors and the mechanical rooms. Usable lands 15-25% below, so 8,750 rentable becomes 6,563 to 7,438 drawable feet, or 131 to 149 per person. Ask for the usable figure before the letter of intent.

Room count follows concurrency rather than headcount. Fifty people want four or five rooms at the same moment: one seating twelve to fourteen, three or four sized for four to six, and a phone room per eight to ten people. The all-hands fits none of them, so the pantry has to hold the company standing.

Fifty people belong on one plate, and 836 Broadway is the entire second floor, so nothing splits across levels. The problem runs the other way: a floor rated for 79 desks feels wrong with fifty spread evenly across it, so draw the team into a defined zone and leave the balance demised.

Seventy-five people, and what to write into the lease now

Half again this headcount is 75 people and 13,125 square feet, which 836 Broadway covers with its 79-desk rating intact. The floor that looks 57% oversized today is the right floor one strong hiring year out. A full-floor deal leaves no expansion right to negotiate, so you are prepaying for headroom, about $437,850 a year of it at the submarket median.

Term length prices that risk. A direct full-floor lease this size runs five to seven years, because the landlord amortizes free rent, improvement money and brokerage across the term and will not fund a fit-out on three. The shorter term costs you the allowance, the longer one has you forecasting 2033.

Buy the remaining flexibility in the clauses. Sublease language makes the surplus survivable: consent not unreasonably withheld, a fixed landlord response window, no recapture right, profit split rather than surrendered, so part of the floor can be sublet and taken back as the team fills it.

What Union Square has for fifty people right now

• 836 Broadway, entire second floor. 13,754 square feet rated for 79 desks, rent quoted on request, floor plan and photographs on the listing. Across fifty people that is 275 rentable feet a head.
• Nothing else here reaches this headcount. 900 Broadway [Suite 202] is 4,000 feet at $115, about 23 desks, and 29 West 17th Street [Partial 7th Floor] is 2,500 at $60, about 14.

Well-priced floors go in weeks in a submarket this small, so a team that has to be at 14th Street should tour it the same week it decides. Otherwise we search Flatiron, NoMad and Greenwich Village alongside.