Writing by Michael Stern, a Bibliography

Michael Stern publishes essays on Medium, WordPress and Blogger about the rules and physical limits that decide what can be built on a city lot, and this bibliography gathers every one of them. The essays return to a few subjects. One is the movement of unused floor area from one lot to another; the Municipal Art Society’s primer on development rights explains that a lot built below its allowance may pass the remainder on, usually through a zoning lot merger that needs no public review.¹ Another is preservation review, which the Landmarks Preservation Commission runs from survey through a calendaring vote to a hearing open to testimony from any member of the public.² A third is the zoning text itself, which the Department of City Planning’s handbook describes as a set of limits on use and bulk, in force in its current form since 1961 when it replaced the 1916 resolution.³

Each item below gives the title, platform and date of a post and links to an entry that retells what the piece argues, attributed to the author, with a link to the original. The entries summarize and never reprint, and none adds a claim the post does not make. New essays join the list as they are published.