The total costs, including construction and the fees and services that constitute "soft" costs, come to $130,000 a unit.
He said it takes $750 a square foot to build in Manhattan, including "soft" costs like insurance.
She said the Lincoln Center redevelopment's soft costs so far -- $18.8 million -- amounted to about 1percentt of the initial expected construction cost of $1.5 billion.
Typically the so-called soft costs for such projects -- pre-building expenses like design, legal fees and permits -- run 35percentto40percentcent of the total construction cost, Ms. Robertson said.
Even without it, Solar City has grown by a hundred per cent each year for the past seven years, in part by lowering the soft costs of installation.
Mr. Lawitts said leaving such "soft" costs out of a large project's construction budget was "common practice" among his and other city agencies.
But ministers must understand that they can't wait for solar energy costs to fall, because most of the costs are not the technology – they are grid connections, infrastructure, planning, skilled staff and other "soft" costs.
"Between hard and soft costs," he says, "most firms sink between a hundred thousand dollars and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on someone in their first three or four years," and in most cases, of course, that investment comes to naught.
The price of solar panels has dropped 75% in the past six years, and now the "soft costs" of putting them on your roof is falling just as fast – Deutschebank estimates they'll be 40% less expensive in the next two years.
Mr. Houghton said Related had offered the Signature a 10-year bridge loan of $10 million to "help us get started" with the "hard and soft" costs of the project.
