***SPAM*** Re: NP: Ad Coelum

[Laura Kelber]

Some of the loveliest blocks in the city are those with row-houses,
brownstones, row-houses and otherwise, residential or commercial of uniform
height. I'd take an entire city of such blocks (though zoning - which has
steadily weakened, due to the real estate lobby - prevents this). The
developers who buy air rights have anything but aesthetics in mind. It's
strictly bang-for-buck, as they erect sky-scraping phalli that are often
mostly-unoccupied investment properties, or, if occupied, renege on their
affordable housing obligations, and/or try to keep the luxury investors
happy with poor doors, etc.

What I hate most about these luxury high-rises is that they're designed
with high maintenance costs in mind. So the ability to re-purpose these
buildings to lower-income housing, should the investment bubble burst, is
virtually zilch. Ditto for the high-rise office buildings, whose developers
seem extremely unaware of the growing trend towards telecommuting from
one's favorite wifi spot.

LK

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> FREE THE AIR SPACE!
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Apr 14, 2017, at 11:11 AM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The concept of air rights in NYC - that a short building can sell it's
> "air space" to a larger building that wants to build higher than it would
> be allowed to - strikes me as illogical and larcenous. All hail the real
> estate developers!
>
> http://www.airrightsny.com/?m=1
>
> Laura
>
> *Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID*
>
>
> Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey y’all,
>
>
>
> I’m working on an essay right now that deals a little with questions of
> property law, specifically this ad coelum doctrine (idea that land
> ownership extends infinitely upward and downward), set against the larger
> notion of the human’s relationship to the sky, the politics of public space
> on an airplane, some other things…
>
>
> If any of you have any particularly interesting/relevant information or
> thoughts to send my way, I’d be interested. Especially things that might
> shed some light on the extent to which this was actually a new idea
> whenever it first gets supposedly uttered (Wikipedia says some people
> credit a 13th century Roman scholar named Accursus), the extent to which
> it represents an evolution in a living person’s public understanding of
> property ownership/rights at the time, the details around its becoming
> understood embraced versus becoming officially codified in rule of law,
> maybe even the evolution of how a human thinks about such things like the
> sky, the ground, etc... (you might get the sense here I’m trying to get a
> sense of the human’s sense of frontiers, the way the human first *sees *a
> space and sees it as colonizable/ownable…)
>
>
>
> One thing I’m trying to understand is the spirit and political context in
> which this first makes its way into the public’s imagination, perhaps maybe
> wondering how it might be understood against/in relation to the
> Renaissance, what currents of change might run through them both and
> into—eventually—modernism, etc.
>
>
>
> Is there something kind of populist about this? At least populist relative
> to whoever was allowed to own land… Or if not populist then does it
> indicate broader humanistic trends? Or is it strictly a legalistic
> framework for solving obvious neighbor disputes?
>
>
>
> Bonus points if anyone has anything particularly interesting or salient to
> do with the mile high club, or aviatory sex in general.
>
>
>
> Thanks and lots of love.
>
>
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