The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

At that time, on the East Coast, people began tinkering with a new way of getting permission to put up buildings that were taller than what zoning allowed. Every city has height restrictions. Not every building is as high as it is legally allowed to be, but the building owns the rights to airspace above it, up to the permitted height. In the early 1960s, a Chicago developer first proposed the concept of air rights. Once the precedent was set, air rights became a salable commodity. For instance, if you had a building that was only seven stories high, which was the case with the Goodhue Building, and zoning would have allowed it to be sixty stories high, you could sell its “right” to fifty-three more stories to a neighboring building project that wanted to build higher than its allowance. Air rights withstood court challenges and were becoming a common instrument in urban development. No one, though, had tried it in Los Angeles.