3. The $500 Million Budget Was Hard To Keep

When it came time to start allocating money and creating a budget for the memorial, nothing was considered too much. After all the grief, sadness, and anger surrounding the attacks, everyone wanted there to be a proper memorial, no matter the cost. But in 2005, the project price was approaching $1 billion. That’s almost as much as it cost to build the original World Trade Center towers in the 1970s.
The project was stalled for another year, until Mayor Bloomberg took over as Chairman of the memorial’s board. After donating $10 million himself, he set out to cut that $1 billion budget in half to $500 million. According to the New York Post, Bloomberg explained that “There’s just not an unlimited amount of money we can spend on a memorial […] Any figure higher than $500 million would be inappropriate.”
In 2012, just one year after the memorial opened, although many costs were cut, the delays and design changes reworked the budget to be $700 million, and at the time, the Port Authority claimed they were still $300 million short of finishing the job. But after the museum opened, costs are now aimed at maintenance. And now, we can compare it to the $5 billion of the World Trade Center Transportation hub.