Why Floor Area Moves Only Between Lots That Touch

Michael Stern, the founder and chief executive officer of JDS Development Group, dated his Blogger essay Why Floor Area Moves Only Between Lots That Touch 7 September 2026, and its thesis is that a site is decided by a map of shared boundaries long before anyone tallies spare allowance.

The piece begins with a thought experiment: two parcels on a block hold unbuilt allowance and a third lies between them. That middle parcel controls the outcome, in his reading, because unbuilt allowance ordinarily travels only inside one zoning lot, which must be unbroken ground. Deeds settle ownership; the zoning map tells you what is permitted; a zoning lot, possibly gathering several tax parcels, connects the two. Unused allowance, in his telling, is simply the district total minus whatever already stands, the remainder people call air rights.

From there the essay describes the usual vehicle, a merger declared in a filed instrument, after which the combined parcel is measured as one while separate deeds survive. The city’s Zoning Handbook allows neighbouring lots within a block to combine, provided everything that results still conforms.⁴ Stern stresses that the filing binds later owners of every parcel and outlives any design revision. A parcel on the far side of a street is not adjacent in his reading, and neither is a parcel cut off by one thin intervening lot, which contributes nothing until that sliver joins too. So an assemblage, he writes, grows as a chain of unbroken lot lines rather than a pool, settled before an architect is hired. He also cites the case of 111 West 57th Street, built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall.

The Municipal Art Society’s explainer on transfer mechanisms names three channels: mergers among adjoining parcels, landmark transfers that need planning commission approval, and special district rules.¹

A 1989 Christian Science Monitor report shows how contested adjacency can become: developers hoping to move Grand Central’s unused allowance several blocks argued that a string of underground rail parcels qualified; officials were unpersuaded.²

The essay grants those exceptions. Preservation law gives a designated building its own route to nearby parcels, across a street included, and certain special districts set out separate transfer provisions in the resolution itself. StreetEasy’s explainer likewise notes that special district transfers can reach parcels that do not touch.³ In West Chelsea, CityLand reported, owners of lots beneath the High Line gained a corridor for selling rights to sites away from the structure.⁵ Landmark rights usually stay close to home, amNY noted, which is why the Midtown East plan proposed letting them travel across a 73 block district.⁶ Which route applies he leaves to counsel reading the current text.

His contested position is a preference: a modest parcel with well placed neighbours over a large one standing alone, since the large one has already revealed its limit. He notes that a big parcel supports a real building by itself while a chain may never close, and owns to losing that wager at times. Time is his named constraint, since each link is filed separately and in sequence. Finally the piece hands the declaration to property counsel and the title insurer, adjacency to a surveyor and zoning consultant, and special routes to a zoning lawyer, leaving the developer the block map, properly understood.