The High Line Transfer Corridor

The High Line Transfer Corridor, the West Chelsea instance of the special district transfers that Michael Stern’s subject of site assemblage includes, answers a question that ordinary zoning cannot: what becomes of the floor area under a structure the city has decided to keep, when the owners of the land beneath it would otherwise be free to demolish it and develop? The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, which honored the city in 2012, describes the position before the plan: a disused rail viaduct about 2.4 kilometers long running through a district of light manufacturing zoning, with property owners beneath it pressing to demolish the structure so that they could build, and a neighborhood that could not grow westward because of the zoning that kept the land in that use.² The answer the city gave in 2005 was to let the floor area leave the viaduct and come down somewhere else.

CityLand’s report on the Council’s vote of June 23, 2005 sets out the device. The rezoned area ran between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues from West 17th to West 30th Streets, with a sliver beyond Tenth Avenue to the midblock, and almost all of its manufacturing zoning was replaced with districts allowing commercial and residential use, except for a pocket kept for the art galleries.¹ The lots under the structure were designated the High Line Transfer Corridor, and their owners were allowed to sell development rights, in place of their power to build on the structure’s footprint, to sites elsewhere in the district away from it; about one million square feet could move, and a buyer could rise from a moderate ratio of 7.5 to a high one of 12.¹ Setbacks beside the structure were written to keep light and air on the future park.¹ This is the mechanism described in general terms under transferable development rights: a sender defined by a public purpose, receivers defined by where the city wanted bulk, and a price set between private owners.

Figure

The 2005 rezoning in four figures

the day the City Council approved the rezoning and the acquisition of the High Line

June 23, 2005

square feet that could be transferred out of the corridor

1 million

the ratio a buyer of corridor rights could reach, from moderate to high density

7.5 to 12

of elevated rail line to become open space

1.45 miles

The corridor is a transfer of the special purpose kind in the sense StreetEasy’s primer gives the phrase: an exchange between a giving site and a taking site with no shared boundary, allowed where the city has written a particular goal for an area, with the Special West Chelsea District beside the High Line as a named example.⁴ 99% Invisible calls these the rarer kind of transfer, permitting limited non adjacent exchanges for particular areas with growth or preservation aims, and the Warshaw Burstein alert counts the High Line among the special mechanisms designed to promote public amenities, as distinct from transfers out of landmarks and theaters or from the ordinary merger.⁶⁵ The Lee Kuan Yew study credits the Department of City Planning with working out the floor area transfer with the community so as to balance three aims at once: preserving the neighborhood’s identity, releasing development potential, and protecting light, air and views around the new open space.²

The text of the rule, Section 98 33 of the Zoning Resolution, is where the question gets its precise answer, and it is mostly about paper. A granting site is a zoning lot, or part of one, in the corridor; a receiver is a zoning lot in any subarea of the district except three that are excluded.³ Before any floor area moves, the owners of both sites must notify City Planning jointly and in writing, attaching the floor area calculations for each site, a copy of an instrument legally sufficient to distribute the bulk, and, where one is needed, a certified copy of the instrument creating a secondary access easement to the High Line.³ Notices of restrictions in a form acceptable to City Planning are then filed with the City Register and indexed against both the granting and the receiving site, and the Department of Buildings may not issue a building permit for the receiving site until City Planning has acknowledged receiving certified copies.³ The quantities are bounded on both ends: a granting site may send no more than the ratio permitted for it as of June 10, 2015, less any floor area that stays, each completed transfer irrevocably reduces what the granting site can ever send again, and a receiver may not exceed the ratio the district’s table allows it to reach by transfer.³

Figure

A corridor transfer, paper by paper

1. 01
   NoticeThe owners of the giving and the taking sites jointly tell the Department of City Planning in writing of the intended move.
2. 02
   CalculationsThe notice carries the floor area arithmetic for both sites and a copy of the instrument that will distribute the floor area.
3. 03
   Notices of restrictionsFiled with the City Register and indexed against both sites, with certified copies sent to City Planning.
4. 04
   Stair easementA volume for a stairway to the High Line is set aside and its instrument recorded under the district's access rules.
5. 05
   Restrictive declarationEach holder of an interest in the granting lot executes a declaration protecting the city's interest in the High Line, recorded with the Register.
6. 06
   ReceiptOnly when City Planning confirms it has received certified copies may the Department of Buildings issue any permit, foundation permits included, for the receiving site.

Two further conditions tie the sale to the park. The section requires, as a condition of any transfer, an easement volume to carry a public stairway up to the High Line, provided under the district’s rules for recording access easements, and it requires a declaration of restrictions executed by each party in interest of the granting lot, as that phrase is defined in Section 12 10, to protect the city’s interest in restoring and reusing the structure as public open space; that declaration too is recorded with the Register, and its receipt by City Planning is a precondition to any permit, foundation or alteration permits included.³ The recording habits of such instruments, and why a buyer searches for them before anything else, are covered in the public record entry. The transfer, in other words, cannot be completed as a private matter between two owners; the city is a third signatory in all but name, because what the granting owner gives up is the right to remove a structure the city wished to keep.

The plan had critics inside the process, and CityLand records them. Community Board 4 disapproved the rezoning, asking that the transfer corridor be eliminated, that builders be required to construct the High Line improvements themselves rather than pay into an improvement fund, and that heights be capped at 280 feet; the borough president approved with conditions, asking that the affordable housing bonus be used before the High Line bonus; and residents asked for a mandatory 30 percent of permanently affordable housing, which the plan did not require.¹ Every commissioner voted yes, one of them regretting that the High Line bonus had to be used first, and the Council’s compromise projected affordable housing at about 27 percent of new and preserved units, with an affordable housing fund to be created once 90 percent of the High Line fund was satisfied.¹

What the corridor built is the answer in brick and glass. The Lee Kuan Yew report counts 43 new buildings in the district in six years, about 1,400 homes and some 700,000 square feet given over to commerce, and records the park opening in phases in 2009, 2011 and September 2014, with more than 20 million visitors in its first years, nearly half of them residents of the city.² It also draws the general lesson that a transfer corridor can serve any city converting an elevated line to a trail, since the device moves the bulk without moving the structure.² The neighboring special district, built over a working rail yard rather than a disused one, is walked through under the Hudson Yards mechanism, and the family of such districts under special districts. The question this entry began with has a short answer in the end: the floor area under a viaduct nobody may build on moves several blocks inland, on a notice filed with the Register, and the buyer pays for it twice, once to the seller and once with a staircase.