i'm the design director for this project with gensler architecture. so this project is truly about retail in union square, and what a great opportunity to do such a project in our hometown, in our back yard, the city where we were founded. so we look at the existing building. it's a building that was built in a different era for a different use. it worked then, it doesn't work so well now. our goal is to turn this building inside out, so we want to move from a single tenant multilevel building to a mixed use multitenant building that brings new focus to the district. and a big focus for us is how the architecture can support viable upper level retail. the retail landscaping is changing and evolving. this project is about supporting and planning for that, so much so that the experts at gensler hosted a sort of interdisciplinary panel six monthsing with folks from across the city and industry to gain more insight into how to plan for this project. being in union square, the design team spent a lot of time in the area. we sought out inspirational example

at the same time, i hope -- and gensler has enough experience in large scale, that the construction of this building which will be disruptive to further add to some form of obstruction in that corridor will be done in a manner that it minimally impacts the rest of the functioning and the revitalization of the street. i believe we discussed it in our own deliberations that the decline of activity on that street had a lot to do with how the central subway was handled, which was highly disruptive and made it an extremely uncomfortable state to shop and despite the stores we all love to shop and support, such as neiman marcus, just to pick one name here. i think in -- that the interim controls that come from supervisor peskin's office are sensitive. i think they somehow build on the additional conditions that miss hester is asking us for, and i strongly support that we continue to understand projects like this in the context of interim controls and hopefully ultimately sense it before permanent controls. the one issue i would like to ask, and i do not have any metrics, and i do not even kn

gensler. tom -- chancellor. tom was telling us, a significant breakthrough for oil. barrel. with us is bloomberg's julian lee. what does it mean, at $80 for brent, does it hurt consumption? i think rising prices are starting to hurt consumption , especially in the places where the oil prices flow into gasoline and jet fuel prices. we are seeing that particularly in the united states, where retail gasoline prices are the highest they have been since 2014. we are moving toward the big driving season of the summer. these prices going up will hurt consumption. we have seen gasoline growth consumption slowing down. we are seeing some of the asian countries that previously had , thosezed fuel prices subsidies were taken off or reduced during the collapse in prices. those subsidies now either do not exist or much lower, so we are seeing price effects creep in where as in the past we did not. tom: have about 18 questions and we do not have time for that. let me throw up the chart on brent crude. julian has this in his kitchen at home. the answer should go down pretty hard --

is lara marrero, the global retail practice leader at the design, planning and consultancy firm, genslerdone wrong as much as they need to stay ahead of the pace of change and take a strategy about looking at the assets they can reposition to fit consumer need. there was a feeling that there we re need. there was a feeling that there were some things they could have done, and their online offering was not as good as it could have been in the face of competition. you have got to think of it as a cohesive journey throughout the entire customer experience and what has happened is it was bifurcated to some extent. now they are placing a focus on the online experience, getting back to the court, it gives them an opportunity to make the stores matter more and become more experiential and give people a reason to come back in. the other thing is squeezed incomes, and there was not much that the retailers can do about that. we have onlyjust seen wages do about that. we have onlyjust seen wages starting to overtake price rises on average. sure their offer is seen to be good value, that is one of t