SHARED DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS IN SUPPORT OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING

SHARE RIGHTS NYC (PROPOSAL)
Harlem, New York
2019

Open Set with Petra Kempf

Piggybacking Tactic
Share a Resource

SHARE RIGHTS NYC is a proposal for overcoming the usual economic, spatial, and social constraints of small-scale construction in the Manhattan grid. Like air rights, Share Rights seeks to transcend these limitations by transcending the limitations of the grid itself. It is a design mechanism for stitching spaces together within a building and across property lines, as well as an economic mechanism for providing affordable housing. The affiliated goals of social and ecological equity undergird this proposal. Each Share Rights stakeholder has the right to share, and shares the right to have, access to social and ecological amenities as part of a sustainable, affordable community.

As mixed-income housing, Share Rights achieves affordability by imaginatively leveraging existing capital. It finances its affordable units by offering market-rate opportunities for the expansion of adjacent homes and the creation of rental or speculative properties. It is also a community-minded building that offers a ground-floor social commons and a rooftop ecological commons open to its residents as well as to residents of neighboring properties whose homes now extend into the building. Within the neighborhood, the Share Rights building expands beyond the narrow limit of its footprint, stitching the lot it principally occupies into a larger social, spatial, ecological, and financial framework. Within the building itself, it stitches together private living spaces with vital social spaces and amenities to foster a unique sense of community and belonging.