[Hey, it's another new Curbed feature! Every two weeks, our friends at PropertyShark will drop by to share some of the wealth from their data-filled maps of New York City. From air rights to FEMA flood zones, Shark Bites will examine familiar neighborhoods in unfamiliar ways. Away we go...]
This map shows the effect of the 2001 zoning change in Long Island City (which, by the way, is officially called the "Long Island City Mixed-Use District," or LIC-MUD). The dark red areas show lots on which zoning now allows a developer to build additional square footage equal to about four times the square footage of the lot. (So, if you had a 25x100 lot, you could add 4 x 25 x 100 = 10,000 square feet to your existing building.) This map shows two things very clearly:
1) Why there are development opportunities in LIC as opposed to other places. (Why? Because the city massively upzoned it.)
2) People run around reassuring themselves that land is a safe investment "because they aren't making any more of it." Well, the City Council makes more of it in vast swaths—they just stack it.
With Bloomberg having won re-election, we predict that next year large swathes of Brooklyn and Manhattan are going to turn solid red on the PropertyShark Air Rights Map, just like happened in LIC.
· New York City Air Rights Map [PropertyShark]