The Infinite Elasticity of Air: New York City’s Financialization of Transferable Development Rights

Elliott Sclar

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2021, vol. 80, issue 2, 353-380

Abstract: Zoning operates within institutional policy norms. Current neoliberal norms encourage land use policy aimed at attaining highest achievable real estate values. As a result, a public policy tool originally intended to protect urban society from the negative impacts of excessive intense real estate development now facilitates such development. This transformation is most clearly seen in the evolution of transferable development rights (TDRs) from a device intended to facilitate adjustment of unique site‐specific regulatory matters into one widely used to privately appropriate socially created site values. TDRs detach zoned development rights from site‐specific locations. So, their use over ever‐widening districts implies that socially created area‐wide value can be privately appropriated by property owners at specific sites, property owners who typically played little or no role in the creation of such value. In the process, these rights become financialized. This financialization encourages developers to seek further expansion in the size of the district within which these rights are fungible. In a global era of extremely low interest rates, real estate assets, which hold the promise of capital safety and above‐average returns, have become exceptionally attractive portfolio holdings. This investment environment encourages urban planners and real estate developers to further rationalize and hence financialize the ever‐wider use of these rights in some of the densest urban environments in the world. The historic experience of evolving zoning policy in New York City’s central business district, Manhattan below West 59th Street, serves as an illustration of the way TDRs as a land use regulatory device have evolved to facilitate this financialization.

Date: 2021
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