Why Two Adjacent Parcels Are Worth More Than Their Sum

Picture two slim neighbouring parcels, each holding a modest old building: that is the image Michael Stern uses to open “Why Two Adjacent Parcels Are Worth More Than Their Sum,” an essay he published on Medium on 11 September 2026. Neither alone, in his telling, justifies years of effort. Joined, they change in two respects, and the respect people calculate first matters less. Slivers like these are a nineteenth century inheritance; a Gotham Center history reckons that as the 1800s closed, most structures on the island had fronts of a mere 20 or 25 feet.⁵

What the essay claims

His audience is developers sizing up small city sites, plus designers who inherit them. The familiar gain from combining lots is bulk: zoning assigns each lot a permitted quantity of space, and a merged lot can pool both allotments. ArchDaily’s survey of the air market defines that surplus as unused development rights, movable where zoning allows.¹ The city’s Zoning Handbook lets a zoning lot gather several tax parcels inside a block,⁴ and the Municipal Art Society’s Accidental Skyline maps observe that merged sites then build without hearings or environmental study.³ Stern calls this part routine, and says counting it reveals little about whether anything gets built. The decisive gain, he writes, is plan width.

His reasoning starts with the service spine of a high rise: elevators sized for its height, two stairs kept apart from bottom to top, and every vertical service run gathered into one zone. On a single slim lot those pieces line up one behind another and eat the depth of each floor. With a second lot’s width they can cluster, and the floor starts to behave like a floor.

He restates the argument in engineering terms, which he finds more convincing. A tower standing against wind acts like a cantilever rising from the ground, and its resistance to tipping grows with the breadth of its base. A broader base means a stockier tower, easing the wind engineering, the damping near the top, the uplift at the foundation, and the share of upper floors surrendered to structure. The B1M explains that wind usually strengthens with altitude and that how far a frame flexes governs occupant comfort,² while Practical Engineering notes that stiffening a thin tower means bigger columns and beams that eat usable space.⁶

Where it takes a position

Width, the essay insists, outranks bulk on most tight sites. Bulk can often be gathered elsewhere on a block; width is tied to a particular piece of ground. Stern also nods to 111 West 57th Street, built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall and designed by SHoP Architects.

He also lists cases where joining lots gains nothing: two shallow lots that add width but no depth, a combined plate still too cramped for separated stairs and adequate lifts, and assembly so slow that walking away is wiser. Legal eligibility to combine is for land use attorneys and zoning specialists; the structural effect of a wider plan is for an engineer, consulted early.

Context

The piece sits among his essays on gathering lots (this site’s general entry is Air Rights), and it leans on the difference between a legal boundary, which paperwork can erase for the zoning count, and a physical narrowness, which no document can widen.