To Pimp The Future:

Of all the miracles of hypercapitalism — credit-default swaps, 99￠Pineapples, multiple individuals flying to the moon in their own private rocketships — perhaps none wears its occult glory with more mysterious restraint than that of Air Rights in New York City.

Air Rights, for those unfamiliar with the term, are the fictitious evaluations of columns of air located directly above grid-bound properties spread across the city, available to be bought and sold in real time on the real-estate market. Which is to say, they are alchemy, pure and simple. They valorize quasi-legal assets (air, space, time) defined only in the minds of their creators, and then use that imagined value to manipulate the real world of things and people. At once lucrative and non-existent, they are temporal parasites sent from the future to scour the swamps of the present for some new terra firma to colonize by the application of power and money (In a word: Capital). Intangible, invisible, fictitious, and realized only through exchange—typically with developers intent on skirting or downright eschewing the rules of engagement—Air Rights are like the Emperor’s new clothes: pure and utter nonsense, such that even a child could recognize the idiocy. And if you think that is too harsh, the reality is worse.

GRAB ‘EM BY THE AIR RIGHTS
It begins, as many tragedies do, with Donald Trump. It is both predictable and repugnant to learn that the destructive harnessing of these quasi-legal confections found an early champion in none other than he. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

First, let’s define our terms: Take a typical building in Manhattan, erected in 1908 under the prevailing 3-story maximum height limit of the day, anchored to the NYC Grid ever since; and topped out at 3 stories, 55 feet up. As built a century ago, this edifice occupied its entire development envelope, and had no air rights to spare.

However, at some point in the intervening 116 years, our building’s place in the grid benefited from a change in zoning laws, so that in theory, a building on that same lot could now go up 13 stories; to 155 feet. Our building has, by simply existing through time, come into 10 floors, 100 vertical feet, of prime, free, fictional New York City Real Estate.

And New York being its mercantilist self, it has long-since figured out how to buy and sell these pixie-dust creations of fantasy floors and fairy feet, and in so doing compel returns on Real Estate Capital such that the city grows up, wallets grow fat, and the common weal is dragged along by these forces mustered in the name of development.

It is not far-fetched to cite Donald Trump as the progenitor of this method, with Trump Tower standing monolith to its occult philosophy. The 1984 building was supersized by buying up fictitious columns of air from unsuspecting neighbors, then stacking these fantasy vertical feet one atop the other to create a magical tear in the supposed fabric of Fifth Avenue’s legally-controlled skyline, such that an architectural shaft might pierce through and thrust skyward, flaunting zoning limits. He would later prefect his technique with Trump World Tower, an even more rapey monument to non-consensual architecture.

But as shit runs downhill, so over the last 50 years, the cynical, lucrative lessons of Air Rights have slowly swamped all low-lying real-estate markets, in this city and beyond, with the result that developers now pan the skies for phantom gold while Bodega owners dream of riches raining down from thin air.

GETTING TO THE POINT
And here is where Air Rights take a truly manic turn, right in our backyard, in the form of a current waterfront development called “Monitor Point,” in Greenpoint.

Monitor Point is a proposal by a developer, the Gotham Organization, in response to a request for proposals (RFP) issued by the MTA, who, sensing a sudden uptick in the value of their Greenpoint mobile wash facility — a one-story industrial building on a lot on Quay St, adjacent to North Brooklyn’s long-aborning Bushwick Inlet Park — now seeks to develop it.

The plan calls for Gotham to lease this land for 99 years (we’ll come back to that…), and then place two 550’ towers on the lot, in the process delivering the usual smorgasbord of low-income housing, retail “amenities”, ersatz public space, and high-end luxury rentals. These would be among the tallest buildings on the waterfront, directly fronting onto the neighborhood’s proposed Bushwick Inlet Park (itself a subject of intense obfuscation), guaranteeing a waterfront premium.

There is only one problem. Currently, the land being floated for lease and development by the MTA is less than ideal as regards supertall waterfront towers. For one, current zoning is R-6 with a maximum base height of just 65'; for another, the parcel itself is not technically on the waterfront.

Enter future air rights.

Now, the lot adjacent to the MTA’s development parcel is actually on the waterfront, and controlled by a local non-profit organization, the Greenpoint Monitor Museum, which is dedicated to one day opening a museum on this plot of land, which was donated to them by the previous industrialist owner. And with this donated land came any speculative or possible air-rights that may one day materialize in the column of air above that land—rights which, as of this moment, have no value because the area is zoned as a park, with no applicable building codes.

But suppose that the Monitor Museum’s lot was re-zoned, to, say, allow for 8 stories, going up 135 feet or more. If this rezoning were to happen, then this property would suddenly come into the possession of magical columns of possible air that might be quite lucrative, were there something like a real-estate developer on the property next door with big designs on luxury waterfront towers. In that case, these utterly speculative waterfront air rights—remember, zoning has to radically change for them to even come into (non?)-existence—might be sold to this developer, as in his hands, they would be worth a good deal.

This very scenario drives the occult mechanics of the Monitor Point proposal. In essence, this indecent proposal says that the developer — Gotham — will pay millions of dollars to the Monitor Museum for the purchase of these speculative Air Rights, contingent upon them being realized (in fantasy) by the future rezoning of both MTA’s and Monitor Museums Parcels, to variously R-8 and R-7x categories. Gotham will then use these newly-minted air rights, precipitated out of thin air by this zoning change, to create a magical column of air 550 feet tall, allowing them to thrust a little slice of Miami up into the sky, right here on the floodplains of Greenpoint:

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AND HERE THE FUCKERY BEGINS
The Monitor Point development is shot through with so many logical and moral inconsistencies it could only live in the venal, hallucinatory world of New York City real estate development—a world which, it is worth noting, always always moves public realms into positions of private service.

First, let’s consider the Monitor Museum’s position: here is a well-intentioned but by all accounts impoverished non-profit — its budget for FY2020 was $15,000 — persuaded that they sit upon a gold mine, if only they will relinquish their claim to it, for which they will be paid handsomely. Said differently, they are being told that they can prostitute their air rights away for real money just as soon as the client succeeds in legalizing prostitution. The money on the dresser; $30 Million Dollars—much of which then presumably goes back to the developer to build the museum itself, tidily art-washing the whole deal.

Vulgarity notwithstanding, this deal is a mean trick no matter how you slice it. The ruse is this: Developers with power, money, and connections can work the system to their favor, thereby realizing gains invisible to the citizen. In this case, Gotham is operating with the surety that they can get the law changed, get the zoning raised, get the requirements waived, and ignore the rules. In short, they move forwards on the conviction that the game can be rigged in their favor, and with this knowledge as currency, set out to pimp the future.

The collateral damage in this situation is borne, of course, by the public, who in the end are tricked out of not one but two parcels of public land, as the Monitor Museum is recast as rights-giver and collaborator to Gotham, which will then bundle it together with the publicly-owned MTA parcel next door and rent it for the next 99 years. Which, as promised, brings us back...

DEAD RECKONING
Perhaps it’s just me, but I see something deeply creepy in people making deals they know they won’t be alive to see the consequences of. When these deals affect all future generations’ ability to access open space and water, the trick takes on a maniacal aspect, an evident lie to all but those who utter it. Clearly the MTA is savvy to the fact that selling this parcel outright—it being a quasi-public, waterfront parcel owned by a public entity abutting the one new public park on offer in North Brooklyn in over 50 years — might raise more questions than would be comfortable to answer. If the land is simply leased, however, with the cash-strapped MTA reaping the rewards, than don’t the contradictions simply disappear? At least, for 99 years?

Then take the whole speed with which these money-driven proposals race through our neighborhoods, our communities, our lives, seeking to bamboozle and dazzle us into submission on fantasies like Monitor Point and River Ring, when even the most cursory examination of the project at hand — in this case, erecting a 550-foot building on a coastal floodplain at a time of ever intensifying global warming disasters against the wishes of the community and at the expense of a public park — shows it to be a turd: a literal waste product of the digestive power of Real Estate Capital, extracted from the peristaltic gastritis of a roomful of smug, greedy developers talking drunkenly about how they might game the future and make a mint. No wonder those guys take Tums.

But the worst part of this whole deal by far is the horrifying, compassion-deadening, zombified expectation that it is all somehow inevitable; that money, that universal solvent, will loosen enough bolts and grease enough palms to allow its own slimy passage, while we sit by helpless to watch, struck dumb in the name of disbelief. The worst part of this whole deal is that we let it happen to us over and over again; Charlie Brown once again tricked into kicking Lucy's football.

THE PERFECT KISS
But perhaps this time we can keep it simple (stupid!), and make it different. Perhaps there is an uncomplicated way to change this narrative. The city needs to approve the rezoning plan that the Gotham organization has gotten the Monitor Museum and other local partner orgs hooked on. And that rezoning process (part of what is known as a ULURP in city parlance) has various inputs for local communities to voice their sentiments along the way. And while in the end it boils down to the capricious and opaque whims of politicos, still voices carry. Stated loudly enough, Greenpoint might hope that a unified cry would be enough to delay or halt such a bone-headed and cruel plan.

But we should make no mistake: we live in an age where everything we give up is something we never get back again, ever, here in this only life any of us will ever know. This is doubly true of the Waterfront, which faces predation both by land (Developers!) and by sea (Sea-Level Rise!). The Monitor Point project is one more example of pimping a whole community’s future for a bankrupt vision privatizing public space, justified in the name of “Affordable Housing” by the very people who drive that market ever more punishingly skywards.

Just say no.