Office rents have been slashed at One World Trade Center, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that no private office tenants have entered a leasing agreement in nearly three years.

It will now cost larger tenants $69 per square foot for space on the skyscraper’s middle floors. This represents a nearly 10 per cent decrease from the previous price of $75 per square foot.

“The market’s not there,” Douglas Durst, who owns a stake in the tower through Dust Organization, told the Wall Street Journal. “When we started in 2011, everybody expected the economy to take off, and obviously that hasn’t happened.”

He added: “We have a lot of people looking at the space, but because of the asking rent, we are not able to really put anything over the finish line.”

Durst told the WSJ that he doesn’t think security concerns are impacting the slowdown, adding that it’s “the safest building in the U.S.”

So far, about 55 per cent of the building’s space has been leased, with tenants including Condé Nast Publications and China Center New York.

The skyscraper — the tallest building in the western hemisphere — is scheduled to open later this year.