February 01, 2005
Some people say not to worry about the air
Remember yesterday, when I said that the $625 million New York Jets subsidy figure "requires lots of assumptions"? One of those is that the Jets would only have to pay for about one-third the actual value of the rail yards where the stadium would be built - $300 million, according to the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority - because the parcel's unused development rights could be sold off to owners of neighboring properties.
(Yes, in New York City if you own a property that hasn't been built up to the legal maximum, you really can sell off "air rights" to your neighbors, so they can build more than zoning laws would otherwise allow. Since the Jets stadium would only count as a bit over 2 million square feet of development - no, I have no idea how the city counts "floor space" of a football stadium" - that would leave another 4 million square feet of air rights to be sold off, raising, according to the MTA, about $600 million.)
There's one small catch to this plan. To sell air rights, the MTA would need a buyer, and as Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez points out today, "the city itself already has plans to sell scads of extra air rights in the adjacent Hudson Yards project to developers." If the air-rights market gets glutted, the MTA could end up having to eat part of the value of the land - and as Gonzalez points out, "for every dollar the MTA fails to get for the real value of the those rail yards, that's one more dollar it will need from subway riders."
Depending on how much of the unused air rights the MTA can recoup, then, we're now up to a public Jets subsidy of somewhere between $625 million and $1.2 billion. At least until tomorrow, when who knows what surprises may await?
