From CityLab
By Rick Stachura
“A proposed luxury development in Manhattan has highlighted the murky status of Jointly Owned Playgrounds. Are they people’s parks or possible development sites?”
The possibilities, if JOPs can be development sites
If JOPs were suddenly imbued with development rights, what would happen? In September 2018, Elizabeth Goldstein, President of the Municipal Art Society, told a hearing of the City Council Committee on Parks and Recreation that the impact would be unprecedented: “If [all the] JOPs across the city of New York were to have air rights today—if by some wave of the magic wand they were to have development rights—they would represent between 20 and 40 million square feet of development rights that aren’t currently on the books, which is the equivalent of 10 Empire State Buildings.”
