Opinion: For Seaport Air Rights Transfer

By Douglas Woodward

The recently announced redevelopment of 250 Water Street, which occupies a full block site and has been vacant or used as a parking lot for almost 60 years, makes use of a powerful development tool that enables the activation of the significant community benefits it provides like affordable housing and funding to save the South Street Seaport Museum.

From a land-use perspective, the Howard Hughes Corporation’s proposal revolves around the transfer of unused development rights from Pier 17 and the Tin Building waterfront sites to 250 Water Street. This transfer will help preserve the low-rise character of the waterfront while facilitating a project that would repair the gash in the historic district's urban fabric.

Transfer of Development Rights, or “TDR” mechanisms, are not new to the Seaport. Indeed, the area has had a TDR mechanism in place since 1972, the pioneering example of a transfer framework allowing for the redistribution of floor area within a neighborhood in pursuit of preservation and local land-use objectives. HHC’s proposal will build on that legacy. 

The transfer of development rights to the site is well-grounded in longstanding City policy but has been criticized by a small number of opponents who argue that the proposed benefits could be realized by transferring unused Seaport development rights (now only usable within the Seaport Subdistrict) to other, distant sites in Lower Manhattan, an odd and gimmicky suggestion since there is no geographic or planning “nexus” between outlying sites beyond the Seaport Subdistrict that would receive the rights and the sites from which the transfer would be made. 

TDR is not a device to satisfy NIMBY objectives by sending floor area from one neighborhood to another. To the contrary, it is rooted in neighborhood planning focused on how the redeployment of floor area can serve the neighborhood in which the unused development rights are located. This is why, for instance, Broadway theater development rights can only be transferred to locations within the Theater Subdistrict, and why transfers from landmark buildings in East Midtown can only go to sites within the East Midtown Subdistrict. In each case, transfers are meant to advance land-use planning goals within the vicinity of the sites from which transfers are made. There is simply no planning rationale for sending development rights to far-flung corners of Lower Manhattan outside the Seaport District.

Moreover, even if the opponents’ approach could satisfy planning and legal concerns, their plan has two fatal flaws: it wouldn’t provide affordable housing in the Seaport and it couldn’t provide meaningful support to the museum. 

Lower Manhattan outside the Seaport District is already zoned for high density and existing zoning regulations include mechanisms that allow owners and developers to earn bonus floor area. The need for additional floor area is limited, and the ability of any site to incorporate a significant amount of unused floor area from waterfront sites in the Seaport Subdistrict is highly questionable. Opponents have identified 72 Nassau Street as a potential receiving site for unused Seaport rights, but that site can already achieve 18 FAR under current regulations and has little or no capacity to utilize more.   

Rather than demonstrating the viability of transfers to outlying sites, the 72 Nassau example illustrates that the proposal would result in little more than a sprinkling of Seaport development rights to multiple locations over the course of many years, if not decades, depending on real estate market fluctuations and degree of interest among property owners. This would fail to produce the significant and steady funding needed by the museum to stabilize its operations, reopen, and plan for future expansion. Instead, it would result in, at best, a slow, small, and unpredictable dribble of income that would be wholly insufficient to ensure its survival.

HHC’s proposal, however, would enable a single, large development rights transaction from one Seaport site to another—securing the future of the museum at long last, and allowing for Lower Manhattan’s most significant affordable housing in decades through the construction of an appropriately scaled mixed-use development on a site which has been a blight in the neighborhood for more than half a century.

Douglas Woodward is Adjunct Professor of Urban Planning and Coordinator of Studios and Practice at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University